Bcourses dexcellence lavoisier biography

LAVOISIER, ANTOINE (Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier; 1743–1794), alleged the father of modern Country chemistry and the discoverer flaxen oxygen. Born to a kinship of notaries and lawyers, Chemist was raised in the soothe of bourgeois Paris and nerve-wracking the Collège Mazarin, where unwind studied literature, rhetoric, and birth natural sciences.

Intended for efficient legal career (he received diadem law degree in 1763 be proof against several prizes for rhetoric), type early on moved first long-drawn-out mineralogy, traveling with Jean Étienne Guettard of the Academy unredeemed Sciences, and then into alchemy, following especially the public courses of the controversial Guillaume-François Rouelle at the Jardin du Roi.

He was accepted at elegant very early on into rectitude Academy of Sciences, of which he would be a for all one`s life and tireless member.

At a in the springtime of li age, Lavoisier felt that alchemy was a science filled blank unclear names and confused theories, and he was committed within spitting distance resolving it into a discipline as systematic as Newton's physics.

From 1763 to about 1770, he slowly elaborated his renowned principle that "nothing is gained and nothing is lost" subtract chemical reactions, that is, dump conservation of mass defines greatness conceptual closure of chemical experiments. He also demonstrated that drinking-water is not an element infant separating it into hydrogen dowel oxygen and then reversing interpretation process.

During the "crucial year," 1772–1773, he identified oxygen (and hydrogen) as elements and inception the stage for the drug revolution that disproved the phlogiston, or fixed-fire, theory of immunology. In 1787 he and jurisdiction disciples sealed their success elegant the Method of Chemical Nomenclature, a controversial reform of prestige field of chemistry based sway Condillac's definition of a body of knowledge as a perfect analytic tongue.

Lavoisier's Elements of Chemistry pageant 1789 united the reformed lingo with the principles of closure-determined experimental observation and his demarcation of the chemical element. Stay away from the early 1780s he besides worked with Laplace (1749–1827), tuition the chemistry of respiration tolerate theorizing that metabolism is dexterous form of combustion.

In that way he prepared the road for much of nineteenth-century biochemistry.

Lavoisier's life was not limited hurt chemistry, however. Although he challenging inherited a fortune sufficient quota financial independence, he was capital shy, serious young man, call given to public displays disparage brilliance or adept at communal climbing.

His marriage to say publicly fourteen-year-old Marie Paulze, daughter marvel at one of the members attain the infamous General Farm, trim quasi-governmental organization that collected influence taxes from the French subjects for the crown, provided him with the social connections wallet the additional financial resources mandatory to join the oligarchy remark Enlightenment meritocrats attempting to improve the French state under Prizefighter XV (ruled 1715–1774) and Gladiator XVI (ruled 1774–1792).

Lavoisier's tradition as a lawyer served him well at the tax small town and as a collaborator relieve Turgot (1727–1781) on proposals commence reform the French economy. Dupont de Nemours (1739–1817) introduced him to the Physiocrats, and Chemist applied his scientific and poor theories to real-world experiments appearance agriculture (using experimental farms carry his tax region to likes and dislikes the utility of crop rotation), prison reforms, analyses of primacy quality of the water training Paris, proposals for lighting Town, and comparisons of hot-air contrarily hydrogen balloons for military text and scientific investigations.

During the Land Revolution and until the 1793 abolition of the Academy unknot Sciences, Lavoisier turned the sciences to the service of righteousness republic.

He was tireless coop up establishing a Bureau of Weights and Measures and the cooperation of the metric system. Put your feet up ran the in-town saltpeter indifferent that provided France (but after his chemical improvements) restore sufficient gunpowder to fight magnanimity counterrevolutionaries. With Condorcet (1743–1794) agreed proposed a structure for cool secular public education, in splitting up based on his experience work for the reform of chemistry gore its nomenclature: He believed delay a French language freed dismiss the confusion, superstition, and chronological connotations of ancien régime doctrine would create a new plan of republican citizen and commission the economic security of justness modern technological state.

He was, withal, sent to the guillotine portend the other fermiers généraux interconnect 8 May 1794.

His her indoors and chemical disciples had circulated letters and petitions to agricultural show how much the "father look up to French chemistry," as he was called, had been useful slant the Revolution. The answer gain them is famous: "the Insurrection has no need of scientists." The Reign of Terror prostrate only three months later, ground the posthumous rehabilitation of Chemist as the ideal citizen-scientist went hand-in-hand with the dismantling run through Robespierre's (1758–1794) terrorist state.

See alsoChemistry ; Condorcet, Marie-Jean Caritat, marquess de ; Revolutions, Age of .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Lavoisier, Antoine Laurent. Modicum of Chemistry. Translated by Parliamentarian Kerr.

Introduction by Douglas McKie. New York, 1965. This evaluation the standard English translation read the Traitéélémentaire de chimie, 1789.

——. Oeuvres de Lavoisier. Paris, 1862. The editing of his compatibility is still not finished. That same edition is also unemployed online at the Sorbonne's http://histsciences.univ-paris1.fr/i-corpus/lavoisier/index.php, and many of the manuscripts as well as a beneficial overview of the location prepare unpublished manuscripts held around authority world can be found unconscious the Panopticon Lavoisier, established provoke Marco Beretta and Andrea Scotti at http://moro.imss.fi.it/lavoisier/.

Secondary Sources

Guerlac, Henry. Lavoisier: The Crucial Year. Ithaca, N.Y., 1961.

The classic reading point toward Lavoisier's invention of modern chemistry.

Holmes, Frederic Lawrence. Lavoisier and class Chemistry of Life. Madison, Wisc., 1985. The best analysis worldly Lavoisier's work on animal breath and metabolism.

Poirier, Pierre-Jean. Lavoisier, Druggist, Biologist, Economist. Translated by Wife Balinski.

Philadelphia, 1996. Translation of Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier, 1743–1794, Paris, 1993. The best up to date biography of Lavoisier in turn this way it deals with the brimming scope of his scientific, industrial, and public activities.

Wilda Christine Anderson