Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier

French chemist

• Born: August 26, 1743
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: May 8, 1794
• Place of death: Paris, France

In addition to making important contributions to eighteenth century geology, physics, cartography, and economic reform (particularly in agriculture and manufacturing), Lavoisier, by discrediting the phlogiston theory and proving the law of the conservation of matter, founded modern chemistry. He also discovered and named gases, namely oxygen and nitrogen.

Early Life

Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (ahn-twahn-law-rah lahv-wahz-yay) was born into an eminent bourgeois family. Over the preceding century, his family had risen gradually from humble origins. His father, who had inherited considerable wealth from an uncle as well as his position as attorney to the Paris parliament, was a lawyer. Émilie Punctis, Antoine’s mother, was equally well positioned socially, being the daughter of a parliamentary advocate. The Lavoisiers lived in Paris, and Antoine remained in his parents’ home until he married.

Lavoisier’s schooling, which probably began in 1754, seems principally to have been in Paris’s small but exclusive Collège Mazarin. Guided by tradition, he studied law, receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1763 and his licentiate the following year. Not really engaged by his profession, Lavoisier began scientific studies with four of France’s most eminent scientists: Abbé Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille, an astronomer and mathematician; Bernard de Jussieu, a botanist; Jean-Étienne Guettard, a geologist and mineralogist; and Guillaume Rouelle, a chemist. Each of these men was a cynosure of Parisian intellectual circles who closely interacted with leading figures in Europe’s scientific communities: individuals exceptional in an eighteenth century context for the breadth of their curiosities.

Three such superficially unrelated curiosities marked Lavoisier’s earliest research. First, his inquiries into the properties of minerals, gypsum in particular, led to his invention in 1764 of plaster of Paris, a feat that produced his first published work by the Academy of Sciences. In 1765, he was encouraged by an academy-sponsored prize competition for development of the best night lighting for large towns. He won both the prize and a medal awarded by the king. Concomitantly, pursuing geological and cartological work with France’s premier geologist, Lavoisier collaborated in the production of an official geological atlas of France. Reward was swift: Considered for nomination as an academician in 1766, he was elected in 1768, a vacancy having opened with the death of a renowned chemist, Théodore Baron. Remarkable vigor characterized his academy work, which ranged over hundreds of projects, such as the adulteration of cider, theories of color, and mesmerism.

Life’s Work

Lavoisier’s scientific milieu, as had been true for two millennia, essentially accepted that all natural phenomena were the result of various mutations of earth, air, fire, and water. The general belief was that these “elements” were inexplicable, hence the long-standing interest in alchemy—the transformation of something base into something precious or valuable to the prolongation of life, invariably accompanied by often indecipherable language explaining alchemists’ experimentation. Some alchemical philosophizing had been eroded by several of Lavoisier’s predecessors, such as Robert Boyle, and contemporaries such as Joseph Priestley. Boyle, for example, had demonstrated that combustion (fire) cannot occur in an airless vessel, nor could many other processes, including life. In the mid-1600’s, however, German chemists, notably Johann Joachim Becher and Georg Ernst Stahl, contrived a theory that combustion required no air, only an “oily earth” dubbed phlogiston. Armed with this dictum, followers of the phlogiston theory could also explain numerous other chemical processes.

Anxieties about the purity of the Parisian water supply brought Lavoisier into conflict with such traditional assumptions and methods. No standards existed then to ascertain water’s purity; indeed, common scientific opinions held that evaporating water was transformed into earth. Lavoisier, having reviewed the endeavors of his predecessors, went directly to the fundamentals of the water problem; namely, whether matter was transmutable. After a series of exquisite experiments, he demonstrated that the earth produced in distilling and evaporating water, in fact, came from abrasive actions of water on the glass. Thus, two thousand years of belief in the transmutability of matter was refuted.

Both Lavoisier’s public responsibilities and his science were made less burdensome by his happy marriage in 1771 to Marie Paulze, a woman of wealth and important family connections, but, more significant, a person intellectually drawn to her husband’s work. She not only translated scientific materials for him but also aided him in the niceties of his experiments and made excellent scientific sketches.

Air and fire preoccupied Lavoisier during the late 1760’s and the early 1770’s; that is, he was absorbed by the phlogiston question. During the 1760’s, Priestley experimented with the properties of gases and discovered new ones, such as ammonia and sulfur dioxide. Heating the calx of mercury (a compound resulting from heating a substance below its melting point), Priestley produced a special “air,” one in which candles burned vigorously and mice lived longer than in ordinary air. Yet Priestley, a believer in phlogiston, simply described this as dephlogisticated air.

Lavoisier launched an intricate series of experiments on combustion: Was the destruction of a diamond by heating merely an evaporation, or was it combustion? Was the same true of phosphorus, or of sulfur? By 1774, his answers appeared in his Opuscules physiques et chymiques (Essays, Physical and Chemical, 1776). Burning sulfur or phosphorus, instead of expelling something, actually absorbed air. Further reduction of the calx of lead unleashed air (now known as carbon dioxide) that sustained neither combustion nor life; in sum, reduction of the calx of metals expelled rather than absorbed something. By 1778 and 1779, continuing such investigations, Lavoisier reported that air consisted of two distinct gases: The first, which he named oxygen, sustained life and combustion and made up one-quarter of the volume, and the other, not respirable, made up the other three-quarters of the volume and is now identified as nitrogen. The phlogiston theory had been overthrown, and the foundations of modern chemistry emplaced, with his publication in 1786 of Réflexions sur la phlogistique (Reflections on Phlogiston, 1788). Lavoisier in 1787 then published his Méthode de nomenclature chimique (Method of Chemical Nomenclature, 1788), identifying a table of thirty-one chemical elements, adding heat and light as materials without mass. In full vigor, he proceeded conclusively to expound his oxygen theory, his new chemical nomenclature, and his statement of the law of the conservation of matter with publication in 1789 of a work rivaling any in the history of science: Traité élémentaire de chimie (Elements of Chemistry, in a New Systematic Order, Containing All the Modern Discoveries, 1790).

Genuine goodness and breadth of mind characterized both Lavoisier and his wife. Fine featured, delicate, and keenly intellectual, they look to each other lovingly, but with a hint of amused embarrassment, in a Jacques-Louis David portrait. Both an original experimenter and a superb scientific synthesizer, Lavoisier, aside from his establishment of modern chemistry, made immense contributions as a responsible, innovative public official. Though independently wealthy, Lavoisier had become a tax farmer to ensure his fortune. As a tax farmer, he relieved Jews from payment of the outrageous “cloven-hoof” tax; he sought relief for the poor from unjust taxation and instituted waste-cutting administrative reforms; he tried to protect honest Parisian merchants from smugglers who slipped by the octrois (a local import tax); he reformed the system and improved the quality of France’s gunpowder production and generated a number of studies on the manufacture of saltpeter; like his brilliant successor, Alexis de Tocqueville, he sought the reformation of France’s penal system; and his elaborate calculations of French agricultural conditions entitle him to front rank as a political economist. These are only partial indications of Lavoisier’s genius beyond the bounds of chemistry.

As is so often the case, he died for his mistakes and for misinterpretations of his intentions. During the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, he was imprisoned, charged with counterrevolutionary conspiracy against France, and executed in Paris on May 8, 1794. One French notable remarked to another in respect of Lavoisier: “Only a moment to cut off a head and a hundred years may not give us another like it.” The remark, like Lavoisier’s achievements, remains a tribute to eighteenth century French culture.

Significance

Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, though a man of many talents that would have qualified him for eminence in half a dozen scientific disciplines or fields of public service, was the founder of modern chemistry not only in an abstract or theoretical dimension but also in immediately practical ways. His intellections and experimentation banished the phlogiston theory that had led and entranced many fine minds for centuries. In the tradition of Carolus Linnaeus, he sought only the facts, then classified them as they were verifiable through critical experimentation; he identified thirty-six chemical elements, not the least oxygen, and defined their characteristics and roles. He wrote the first precise texts, from which subsequent chemistry sprang, destined to be of incalculable benefit to humankind. Some of his work was entirely original; some was derivative; and, inevitably for great minds, some was magnificently synthetic. His official services to France ran a gamut that was encyclopedic and generally pragmatic, practical, and useful. He was preeminently the son of what then was Europe’s greatest nation-state as well as its greatest center of mischief, intellection, and high culture.

Bibliography

Donovan, Arthur. Antoine Lavoisier: Science, Administration, and Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993. A biography examining both Lavoisier’s scientific discoveries and his work as a public administrator before and during the French Revolution.

French, Sidney J. Torch and Crucible: The Life and Death of Antoine Lavoisier. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1931. A readable and adequate survey of Lavoisier’s life. The general context within which Lavoisier worked and the specifics of his experiments are not fully treated. There are a small number of illustrations and only a modest bibliography, which, through no fault of the author, needs updating.

Hall, Alfred R. The Scientific Revolution, 1500-1800: The Formation of the Modern Scientific Attitude. 2d ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1966. This now classic work, written for general readers, does an outstanding job of placing Lavoisier and his work in context. The study is amply footnoted and has three appendices, along with brief but excellent bibliographical notes at the end of each chapter.

Holmes, Frederic Lawrence. Antoine Lavoisier, the Next Crucial Year, or The Sources of His Quantitative Method in Chemistry. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Recounts Lavoisier’s daily laboratory work during several months in 1773, when he was studying his oxygen theory of combustion. Holmes argues these experiments were the first step toward Lavoisier’s eventual development of quantitative experimental methods.

McKie, Douglas. Antoine Lavoisier: Scientist, Economist, Social Reformer. New York: Henry Schuman, 1952. The most expert and best-written coverage of Lavoisier’s life and work, this book is essential reading. It covers, with the simplicity that only a skilled scholar can manage, an amazing array of Lavoisier’s activities. Includes many helpful illustrations, a select but good bibliography, and a minimal index.

Poirier, Jean-Pierre. Lavoisier, Chemist, Biologist, Economist. Translated by Rebecca Balinski. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Biography of Lavoisier describing his many activities, ranging from his scientific discoveries to his work in politics and economics.

Westfall, Richard S. The Construction of Modern Science: Mechanisms and Mechanics. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1971. This scholarly work is chiefly about seventeenth century science, but chapter 11 is essential background for an understanding of Lavoisier. While authoritative, this work is for university undergraduates. Contains many illuminating illustrations, a fine critical bibliography, and a solid double-columned index.