The father of Chemistry

Antoine Lavoisier is one of many scientists who have made vital discoveries for science.
But this does not make him the father of Chemistry. He may have freed the chemists
perception of the world but he he is not the only on to do so. There are many people
associated with the development of chemistry.

Robert Boyle
Robert Boyle (1627-1691) was one of the most influential scientist ever born in Ireland. His
influence on chemistry has been likened to that of Copernicus . Apart from chemistry Boyle
made many other contributions to science.
Boyle demonstrated the necessity of air for combustion, for animal breathing, and for the
transmission of sound.Air he described the inverse relationship between the volume of a
gas and its pressure now known as Boyles Law.
In his book The Sceptical Chymist, Boyle attacked Aristotles and Paracelsuss theories.
He proposed that elements are basically composed of corpuscles of various sorts and
sizes capable of organising themselves into groups and that each group constitutes a
chemical substance. He clearly distinguished between mixtures and compounds and
showed that a compound can have very different properties from those of its constituents.
This prefigured the atomic theory of matter. Boyle declared that the proper object of
chemistry was analysis of composition and, indeed, he coined the term analysis itself. He
was also the first chemist to collect a sample of gas.

Antoine Lavoisier
Antoine Lavoisier is said to be the Father of Chemistry He married the daughter of
another tax farmer, Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, who was not quite 14 at the time.
Madame Lavoisier prepared herself to be her husbands scientific collaborator by learning
English to translate the work of British chemists like Joseph Priestley and by studying art
and engraving to illustrate Antoine-Laurents scientific experiments.
Characteristic of Lavoisiers chemistry was his systematic determination of the weights of
reagents and products involved in chemical reactions, including the gaseous components,
and his underlying belief that matteridentified by weightwould be conserved through
any reaction (the law of conservation of mass). Among his contributions to chemistry
associated with this method were the understanding of combustion and respiration as
caused by chemical reactions with the part of the air (as discovered by Priestley) that he
named oxygen, and his definitive proof by composition and decomposition that water is
made up of oxygen and hydrogen. He considered 33 substances as elementsby his
definition, substances that chemical analyses had failed to break down into simpler
entities. Ironically, considering his opposition to phlogiston (see Priestley), among these

substances was caloric, the unweighable substance of heat, and possibly light, that
caused other substances to expand when it was added to them.

Just by comparing these two chemists we can see that Lavoisier was not the only one to
question the laws of Chemistry and invest in discovering the truth. Boyle was able
determine that all thing were we made out of corpuscles. This fact may have been able to
help Lavoisier in the discovery of the 33 elements that he had noted. Also he will not have
been able to find the hydrogen if Priestly had not done the experiment before. He was
given a lot of help from his wife and if she had not learnt english Lavoisier may not have
had the valuable information that he need to finish his discovery. Also there were plenty of
other chemists around the world who found out pieces of information which allowed
Lavoisier to write his theories.
Therefore I believe that Lavoisier cannot be the only on to be called the Founder of
Chemistry. He may have made big leap in the development of knowledge of the world but
he cannot be held solely responsible for all the things that he said.