CIR Rm.5: Antoine Lavoisier

Antoine Lavoisier

History

Born: 26 August 1743; Paris, France
Died: 8 May 1794 (aged 50); Paris, France
He was known as the “father of modern chemistry” He was a French nobleman prominent in the histories of chemistry,life,and biology
Born to a wealthy family in Paris, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier inherited a large fortune at the age of five with the passing of his mother.
He attended the Collège Mazarin in 1754 to 1761, studying chemistry, botany, astronomy, and mathematics.
At the age of 25, he was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences, France's most elite scientific society, for an essay on street lighting, and in recognition for his earlier research.
In 1769, he worked on the first geological map of France.
He also married a young, beautiful 13-year-old girl named Marie-Anne, who translated from English for him and illustrated his books.

Discoveries

He burnt phosphorus and sulfur in air, and proved that the products weighed more than he original. Nevertheless, the weight gained was lost from the air. Thus he established the Law of Conservation of Mass.
In Considérations Générales sur la Nature des Acides (1778), he demonstrated that the "air" responsible for combustion was also the source of acidity. The next year, he named this portion oxygen (Greek for acid-former), and the other azote (Greek for no life). He also discovered that the inflammable air of Cavendish which he termed hydrogen (Greek for water-former), combined with oxygen to produce a dew, as Priestley had reported, which appeared to be water.
In Reflexions sur le Phlogistique (1783), Lavoisier showed the phlogiston theory to be inconsistent. In Methods of Chemical Nomenclature (1787), he invented the system of chemical nomenclature still largely in use today, including names such as sulfuric acid, sulfates, and sulfites. His Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elementary Treatise of Chemistry, 1789) was the first modern chemical textbook, and presented a unified view of new theories of chemistry, contained a clear statement of the Law of Conservation of Mass, and denied the existence of phlogiston.

PHOTOS