Science
1743 to 1794, Paris, France
The chemical revolution - oxygen against phlogiston, the balance as law, and a new language that turned alchemy into a quantitative science of conserved, measurable matter.
Start learning Antoine →How Lavoisier overturned the reigning theory of combustion. Burning was thought to release a fire-stuff, phlogiston ; but metals grow heavier when they burn, and Lavoisier’s balance showed that burning is not a lo…
Lavoisier’s foundational principle: in every operation of art or nature, nothing is created - an equal quantity of matter exists before and after, and chemistry becomes an exact bookkeeping in which the accounts m…
Lavoisier’s claim, drawn from the philosopher Condillac, that a science is made of facts, ideas, and words , and cannot be improved in one without the others. In 1787 he and three colleagues rebuilt the whole voca…
In the Traité élémentaire de chimie (1789), Lavoisier defined an element operationally - as the last point that analysis can reach - and published a table of simple substances. His honest errors (co…
With Laplace and the ice calorimeter, Lavoisier showed that breathing is a slow burning - a living animal consumes oxygen and gives off heat and carbonic acid, exactly as a candle does. Chemistry entered physiology, and…
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