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Antoine Lavoisier: Chemistry
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Antoine Lavoisier reinvented chemistry, overthrowing the long-established principles of alchemy and inventing an entirely new terminology, one still in use by chemists. Madison Smartt Bell's enthralling narrative reads like a race to the finish line, as the very circumstances that enabled Lavoisier to secure his reputation as the father of modern chemistry--a considerable fortune and social connections with the likes of Benjamin Franklin--... caused his glory to be cut short by the French Revolution. 8 illustrations.
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Lavoisier collaborated with three French colleagues—Guyton de Morveau, Claude Louis Berthollet, and Antoine François de Fourcroy—to produce their Méthode de Nomenclature Chimique (Method of Chemical Nomenclature, 1787). Previously used “trivial” names, such as “oil of vitriol” and “Epsom salts”, were replaced by systematic ones, so that the names of compounds reflected their constituents. Thus “red mercury calx” became “oxide of mercury”. Lavoisier won new converts with his textbook, Traité Élémentaire de Chimie, (Elementary Treatise on Chemistry, 1789), in which he drew up a list of simple substances, or elements, which were essentially the building blocks of the new chemistry. They included metals, such as iron and lead, and non-metals, such as sulphur and carbon. Finally, he collaborated with several other chemists to launch a journal based on the new chemistry, which he called Annales de Chimie (Annals of Chemistry, 1789).
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Antoine Laurent Lavoisier attended the College Mazarin from 1754 to 1761, studying chemistry, botany, astronomy, and mathematics. His first chemical publication appeared in 1764. In 1767 he worked on a geological survey of Alsace and Lorraine. He was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1768. In 1771, he married 13-year-old Marie-Anne Pierette Paulze, who translated from English for him and illustrated his books. Beginning in 1775 he served on the Royal Gunpowerder Administration, where his work led to improvements in the production of gunpowder and the use of agricultural chemistry by designing a new method for preparing saltpeter.
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Lavoisier was born on August 26, 1743, in Paris, the son of a prosperous lawyer. When he was five, his mother died and he was looked after by a maiden aunt. He attended an outstanding school, the Collège Mazarin, where he acquired a sound classical and literary training. One year was devoted to mathematics and science, but chemistry only came later, when he attended a course given by Guillaume François Rouelle at the Jardin du Roi. Although he had an early interest in science, this provided few career opportunities, so he studied law, gaining his licentiate in 1764. He ... purchased a share in the Company of General Farmers, responsible for collecting several indirect taxes.
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Lavoisier showed an early inclination for quantitative measurements and soon began applying his interest in chemistry to the analysis of geological samples, especially gypsum. Because of his flair for careful analyses and his prodigious output, he was elected to the Academy of Sciences at the age of 25. At the same time, Lavoisier used part of the fortune he had inherited from his mother to buy a share in the Ferme Générale, a private group that collected various taxes for the government. This fateful decision would later cost him his life at the height of his intellectual powers.
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Lavoisier's Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Treatise of Elementary Chemistry, 1789, translated into English by Scotsman Robert Kerr) is considered to be the first modern chemistry textbook. It 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. This text clarified the concept of an element as a substance that could not be broken down by any known method of chemical analysis, and presented Lavoisier's theory of the formation of chemical compounds from elements.
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