Père de la chimie

(father of chemistry)

I. ABSTRACT

Chemistry was transformed by

careful experimenter Antoine-Laurent
Lavoisier. Among many other things, he
helped systematize chemical
nomenclature, discovered that
combustion and respiration are generated
by chemical interactions with what he
called "oxygen," and developed the rule
of conservation of mass.
II. Introduction

Antoine Lavoisier, in full Antoine-Laurent

Lavoisier, (born August 26, 1743, Paris, France—
died May 8, 1794, Paris), prominent French chemist
and leading figure in the 18th-century chemical
revolution. Lavoisier was the first child and only son
of a wealthy bourgeois family living in Paris. As a
youth he exhibited an unusual studiousness and
concern for the public good. After being introduced
to the humanities and sciences at the prestigious
Collège Mazarin, he studied law. Since the Paris law
faculty made few demands on its students, Lavoisier
was able to spend much of his three years as a law
student attending public and private lectures on
chemistry and physics and working under the tutelage
of leading naturalists. Upon completing his legal
studies, Lavoisier, like his father and his maternal
grandfather before him, was admitted to the elite
Order of Barristers, whose members presented cases
before the High Court (Parlement) of Paris. But
rather than practice law, Lavoisier began pursuing
scientific research that in 1768 gained him admission
into France’s foremost natural philosophy society, the
Academy of Sciences in Paris.

The chemist Lavoisier studied as a student was not a

subject particularly noted for conceptual clarity or
theoretical rigor. Although chemical writings contained
considerable information about the substances chemists
studied, little agreement existed upon the precise
composition of chemical elements. Chemists like
Lavoisier focused their attention upon analyzing “mixts”
(i.e., compounds), such as the salts formed when acids
combine with alkalis. They hoped that by first identifying
the properties of simple substances they would then be
able to construct theories to explain the properties of
compounds. Lavoisier became interested in a particular
set of problems that involved air: the linked phenomena
of combustion, respiration, and what 18th-century
chemists called calcination (the change of metals to a
powder [calx], such as that obtained by the rusting of
iron).
III. DISCUSSION

One of his contribution is the Conservation

of mass, the assertion that mass is conserved in
chemical reactions was an assumption of
Enlightenment investigators rather than a
discovery revealed by their experiments.
Lavoisier believed that matter was neither
created nor destroyed in chemical reactions, and
in his experiments he sought to demonstrate that
this belief was not violated. Still he had
difficulty proving that his view was universally
valid. His insistence that chemists accepted this
assumption as a law was part of his larger
program for raising chemistry to the
investigative standards and causal explanation
found in contemporary experimental physics.
While other chemists were also looking for
conservation principles capable of explaining
chemical reactions, Lavoisier was particularly
intent on collecting and weighing all the
substances involved in the reactions he studied.
His success in the many elaborate experiments
he conducted was in large part due to his
independent wealth, which enabled him to have
expensive apparatus built to his design, and to
his ability to recruit and direct talented research
associates. The fact that French chemistry
students are still taught the conservation of mass
as “Lavoisier’s law” is indicative of his success
in making this principle a foundation of modern
chemistry.
 Three years after joining the General Farm,
Lavoisier married Marie Anne Paulze, the 14-
year-old daughter of a member of the Farm with
whom he worked. Although not educated in
science, Marie Anne was a spirited and
intelligent young woman who created a place for
herself in a world of science that provided few
opportunities for women. As Marie Anne and
Lavoisier had no children, Marie Anne was able
to devote her attentions to helping her husband in
his research, and she soon became widely
regarded as a valuable laboratory assistant and
hostess. She mastered English, which Lavoisier
never did, and translated chemical works for
him. She employed her drawing talent to record
the research conducted in the laboratory and to
prepare engravings of apparatus for publications.
Three years after the wedding a correspondent
sent his regards to Lavoisier’s “philosophical
wife,” and shortly thereafter she was being
tutored in chemistry by one of Lavoisier’s
collaborators. In the laboratory she often
recorded results that the experimenters dictated
to her, and when Lavoisier announced his new
theories she played an active role in campaigning
for their acceptance.

Lavoisier also took on administrative duties

within the Academy of Sciences and in other
government agencies during the final years of the
monarchy and the early years of the French
Revolution. From 1775 to 1792 he served as a
director of the French Gunpowder
Administration and succeeded in making France
 self-sufficient in this critical military material.
He also conducted extensive experiments on
agricultural production, advised the government
on financial affairs and banking, and served on a
commission whose efforts to unify weights and
measures led to the adoption of the metric
system. Lavoisier has rightly gained renown for
his scientific achievements, but his efforts on
behalf of France should also be remembered.

The oxygen theory of combustion resulted from

a demanding and sustained campaign to construct an
experimentally grounded chemical theory of
combustion, respiration, and calcination. The theory
that emerged was in many respects a mirror image of
the phlogiston theory, but gaining evidence to
support the new theory involved more than merely
demonstrating the errors and inadequacies of the
previous theory. Lavoisier’s research in the early
1770s focused upon weight gains and losses in
calcination. It was known that when metals slowly
changed into powders (calxes), as was observed in
the rusting of iron, the calx actually weighed more
than the original metal, whereas when the calx was
“reduced” to a metal, a loss of weight occurred. The
phlogiston theory did not account for these weight
changes, for fire itself could not be isolated and
weighed.

Along the way, he encountered related

phenomena that had to be explained. Mineral
acids, for instance, were made by roasting a
mineral such as sulfur in fire and then mixing the
resultant calx with water. Lavoisier had initially
conjectured that the sulfur combined with air in
the fire and that the air was the cause of acidity.
However, it was not at all obvious just what kind
of air made sulfur acidic. The problem was
further complicated by the concurrent discovery
of new kinds of airs within the atmosphere.
British pneumatic chemists made most of these
discoveries, with Joseph Priestley leading the
effort. And it was Priestley, despite his
unrelenting adherence to the phlogiston theory,
who ultimately helped Lavoisier unravel the
mystery of oxygen. Priestley isolated oxygen in
August 1774 after recognizing several properties
that distinguished it from atmospheric air. In
Paris at the same time, Lavoisier and his
colleagues were experimenting with a set of
reactions identical to those that Priestley was
studying, but they failed to notice the novel
properties of the air they collected. Priestley
visited Paris later that year and at a dinner held
in his honor at the Academy of Sciences
informed his French colleagues about the
properties of this new air. Lavoisier, who was
familiar with Priestley’s research and held him in
high regard, hurried back to his laboratory,
repeated the experiment, and found that it
produced precisely the kind of air he needed to
complete his theory. He called the gas that was
produced oxygen, the generator of acids.
Isolating oxygen allowed him to explain both the
quantitative and qualitative changes that
occurred in combustion, respiration, and
calcination.
 In the canonical history of chemistry,
Lavoisier is celebrated as the leader of the 18th-
century chemical revolution and consequently
one of the founders of modern chemistry.
Lavoisier was indeed an indefatigable and
skillful investigator; however, his experiments
emphasized quantification and demonstration
rather than yielding critical discoveries. Such an
emphasis suited his determination to elevate
chemistry to the level of a rigorous science.
Unlike Priestley, he was not a person whom
someone of modest self-esteem was likely to
find attractive. Wealthy, high-minded, and
enormously ambitious, Lavoisier was rationality
and purposefulness personified. While his
scientific achievements are indisputably of the
first rank, his defining achievement was what
might be called legislating for science. Lavoisier
was fortunate in having made his contributions
to the chemical revolution before the disruptions
of political revolution. By 1785 his new theory
of combustion was gaining support, and the
campaign to reconstruct chemistry according to
its precepts began. One tactic to enhance the
wide acceptance of his new theory was to
propose a related method of naming chemical
substances. In 1787 Lavoisier and three
prominent colleagues published a new
nomenclature of chemistry, and it was soon
widely accepted, thanks largely to Lavoisier’s
eminence and the cultural authority of Paris and
the Academy of Sciences. Its fundamentals
remain the method of chemical nomenclature in
use today. Two years later Lavoisier published a
programmatic Traité élémentaire de chimie
(Elementary Treatise on Chemistry) that
described the precise methods chemists should
employ when investigating, organizing, and
explaining their subjects. It was a worthy
culmination of a determined and largely
successful program to reinvent chemistry as a
modern science.

The French Revolution and Lavoisier’s

execution. When the French Revolution began in
1789, Lavoisier, like many other philosophically
minded administrators, saw it as an opportunity
to rationalize and improve the nation’s politics
and economy. Such optimism was soon
tempered, however, by upheavals that put the
very existence of the state at risk. Lavoisier,
perhaps overvaluing the authority of science and
the power of reason, continued to advise
Revolutionary governments on finance and other
matters, and neither he nor his wife fled abroad
when popular anger turned against those who
had exercised power and enjoyed social
privileges in the old regime. As the Revolution
became increasingly radical and those in
command were driven to ruling by terror,
Lavoisier continued to argue that the Academy
of Sciences should be saved because its members
were loyal and indispensable servants of the
state. This rear-guard action was unsuccessful,
and he soon found himself imprisoned along
with other members of the General Farm. The
Republic was being purged of its royalist past. In
May 1794 Lavoisier, his father-in-law, and 26
other Tax Farmers were guillotined.
Acknowledging Lavoisier’s scientific stature, his
contemporary, Joseph-Louis Lagrange,
commented, “It took them only an instant to cut
off that head, and a hundred years may not
produce another like it.”
IV. REFLECTION

Lavoisier is a truly excellent chemist, and I

like the way he is able to discern his own desires
and adhere to them. The manner in which he
persistently works toward achieving his goals
and never gives up on things that he truly
believes to be true. He is not scared to take
chances and attempt new things. Similar to how
he made the significant discovery of mass
conservation, which is crucial to understanding
and producing chemical processes. For instance,
when wood burns, the mass of the soot, ashes,
and gases equals the mass of the gases. If
scientists know the quantities and identities of
reactants for a particular reaction, they can
forecast the amounts of products that will be
generated, which has helped us up until now. In
addition, he actively participated in government
organizations. He is one of the chemists who
solves the oxygen puzzle. Since oxygen is used
by the body to "burn" food molecules, it is
crucial for respiration. When an animal breathes
in, it takes in oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide.
Nearly 21% of the total gases in air are oxygen,
with physiologically inert nitrogen making up
the majority of the other gases. The discovery of
this element has made us more conscious of the
significance of oxygen in our lives. However,
when he attempted to join the French
Revolution, he was put to death because of this
rear-guard action was futile, and he soon found
himself imprisoned alongside other General
Farm members. But even that is what happened
to him; he is one of the chemists who made
important discoveries, Imagine how much he
would still have to learn, try with, and
investigate if he were able to stand up for what
he believes in and were given the chance to live.
This is especially true considering how cautious
and methodical he is when learning new things.
Chemistry aids in understanding the
environment; a basic understanding of the
subject aids in reading and comprehending
product labels. Antoine Lavoisier has a
tremendous impact on chemistry.
I absolutely admire him for all the things he
discovered and continued to fight for, including
those that still serve us now.
V. References

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Antoine-
Lavoisier (By Arthur L. Donovan)
https://www.famousscientists.org/antoine-
lavoisier/
https://www.sciencehistory.org/historical-
profile/antoine-laurent-lavoisier
https://www.dictionary.com
https://www.sciencedirect.com
https://www.sciencehistory.org/historical-
profile/antoine-laurent-lavoisier
VI. Vocabulary
Parlement - the Supreme Court under the ancient
régime in France. It developed out of the Curia Regis
(King's Court), in which the early kings of the
Capetian dynasty (987–1328) periodically convened
their principal vassals and prelates to deliberate with
them on feudal and political matters.
Mixts- Mixts was replaced in 18th century by
composition or compounds (Bensaude-Vincent and
Simon, 2012)
Calx- is a substance formed from an ore or mineral
that has been heated. Calx, especially of a metal, is
now known as an oxide.
 “Dans la nature rien ne se crée, rien ne se perd,
tout change.”

In nature nothing is created, nothing is lost,

everything changes.”
― Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier

“Life is a chemical process.”

― Antoine Lavoisier

SUBMITTED BY,
-April Angela S. Monteroso

SUBMITTED TO,
-ANGELICA T. OPE ÑA