(1743-1794)
"
The Father of Modern Chemistry"
Antoine Lavoisier had a privileged childhood and attended the College Mazarin in France. While in school, Lavoisier became increasingly interested in the physical sciences and mathematics. In 1766, the French Academy of Scientists awarded him a gold medal for devising a city street lighting plan. After becoming a member of the academy, Lavoisier, established agricultural experiment stations, trying to improve farming methods in France in 1768.
Lavoisier then became the French chemist who gave the first accurate, scientific explanation of the mysteries of fire, thus disproving the phlogiston theory. In 1777, he performed a series of experiments and found that burning is a result of the rapid union of the burning material and oxygen.
Lavoisier is most famous for proving the law of conservation of mass (or matter). The law states that matter cannot be created nor destroyed, but can only be changed from one form to another. Lavoisier showed that even though a candle appears to be destroyed when it is burned, there is just as much mass or weight present as before it was burned. The substances have only changed form. Lavoisier applied his idea to combustion within the human body and showed the energy source to be the slow burning of food.
These ideas led Lavoisier to write the first chemical equation where the mass of materials before a chemical change (reactants) must be equal to the mass of products after it. Along with other French chemists, he worked out the current system of chemical names. Lavoisier also wrote Elements of Chemistry (1789), the first modern textbook of chemistry.
For most of Lavoisier's life, he was a member of the financial company that collected taxes for the government of Louis XVI. The leader of the French Revolution regarded this group as aristrocrats. Lavoisier and other members of the company were put to death on the guillotine by the revolutionists in 1794. His widow was subsequently courted by, then wedded to Count Rumford, an Anglo-American physicist.
See: Phlogiston.