Lavoisier

back = Antoine Lavoisier 1743-1794  =

 Antoine- Laurent Lavoisier was born on August 26, 1743 and is the son of a wealthy family in Paris. He is a French nobleman and he studied a broad range of academics and was supposed to follow in his father's footsteps and become a lawyer. He got his license to practice law in 1764, but he never practiced, and then went into the science field to practice Geology. He was also a concerned citizen and a first-rate scientist. He established free schools, the use of fire hydrants and he designed street lamps. Due to improving the street lamps, he was chosen by the Royal Academy of Science in 1768. In this same year, he also joined the Farmers' General (Ferme Generale), which was a company that collected taxes. He did this so that he could fund his scientific projects. In 1771, he married Marie-Anne Peiretter Paulze, who was the daughter of a co-owner in the Farmers' General. She helped him with his scienctific experiments, and translated everything to English, which he could not do. In 1775, he was appointed Commissioner of the Royal Gunpowder and Saltpeter Administration, which allowed him to build a laboratory for him to do his experiments. Lavoisier was a key player in the French Revolution; he proposed tax reforms and new strategies to help the economy. Soon after, radical journalists make false pretenses against him. Then in November of 1793 Lavoisier and others of the Farmers' General were arrested and placed in prison. The trial barely lasted a day, and all of them were senteced to execution for conspiracy against the people of France. Lavoisier asked for time to finish his scientific projects but the judge just said, "The Republic has no need for scientists." He was executed on May 8, 1794. But then soon after, the government was making statues in his honor. He was a key player in the developement of modern chemistry, and is known as the "Father of Modern Chemistry". He was quick to see the importance of the things that he found. He was the one who stated the first version of the //law of conservation of mass// as a soultion to the //Phlogiston Theory.// He never discovered any new substances, he just made improvements to others' methods. He took others experiments and explained them in more depth. He invented a balance scale which was good to about .0005 grams. Also, he was one of the few chemists who took their time and took careful measurements of reactants and products. Lavoisier took a model of an element, which is made up of one component, further and identified a compound, a material with two elements. Lavoisier found that the gas that Joseph Priestley isolated to cause candles to burn brighter and charcoal to burn hotter, couldn't be broken down to simpler substances which made it an element. This element was used to give produce acidic solutions so he gave it the name //oxygen// which means "acid former". Then in 1766, Henry Cavendish isolated a gas that could be ignited to create water and heat, and Lavoisier gave it the name //hydrogen//, because it means "water former" in Greek. He was the first to realize that this gas was an element and that substances can exist in three states of matter; solid, liquid and gas, but he thought that the changes resulted by combining fire with the matter. Also, he recognized that the hydrogen was reacting with the oxygen, which made it a compound not an element like Aristotle had said. Lavoisier and oher scientists created the //Method of Chemical Nomenclature// that classified the differences between elements. In 1789 he published a book by the name of "Traite elementaire de chemie", which named about 33 elements that are still in use today. =Sources=