NEWS SCAN.com -- NewsScan Honorary Subscriber: Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier
A chemist, philosopher, and economist, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) took an active part in the events leading to the French Revolution, and drew up plans and reports advocating many reforms, including the establishment of the metric system of weights and measures.
The son of a wealthy Parisian lawyer, Lavoisier completed a law degree in accordance with family wishes, but his real interest was in science, which he pursued with passion while leading a full public life. On the basis of his earliest scientific work, mostly in geology, he was elected in 1768 at the age of 25 to the Academy of Sciences, France's most elite scientific society. In the same year he bought into the Ferme Générale, the private corporation that collected taxes for the Crown on a profit-and-loss basis. A few years later he married the daughter of another tax farmer, Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, who was not quite fourteen at the time. Madame Lavoisier prepared herself to be her husband's scientific collaborator by learning English to translate the work of British chemists and by studying art and engraving to illustrate her husband's scientific experiments.
In 1775 Lavoisier was appointed a commissioner of the Royal Gunpowder and Saltpeter Administration and took up residence in the Paris Arsenal. There he equipped a fine laboratory, which attracted young chemists from all over Europe to join him in the "Chemical Revolution" then in progress.
So great a change ensued in experimental chemistry, and in theory and nomenclature, and such a mass of facts was coordinated and explained by Lavoisier that he has been justly called "the father of modern chemistry."
He was the first to provide a definitive explanation of the formation of acids and salts, to enunciate the principle of conservation as set forth by chemical equations, to develop quantitative analysis, gas analysis, and calorimetry, and to create a consistent system of chemical nomenclature.
He made deep researches in organic chemistry, and studied the metabolism of organic compounds. He often repeated the experiments of other chemists such as Priestley and Cavendish, sometimes elaborating on their results without crediting their original work. Despite his eminence and his services to science and France, Lavoisier came under attack as a former farmer-general of taxes and was guillotined in 1794. A noted mathematician, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, remarked of this event, "It took them only an instant to cut off that head, and a hundred years may not produce another like it."
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