Antoine Lavoisier

1. Chemistry before Lavoisier

Unlike astronomy and mechanics, whose subject
matter had been transformed in the 16th and 17th
centuries by Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and others,
chemistry retained older patterns of thought well into
the 18th century. For example, many chemists still did
not think of chemical changes as due to interactions
of a limited number of elements, or as involving
rearrangements of groups of atoms. Certain
substances could burn, or were acidic in taste, was
explained by supposing that they contained a
burning or acid principle.
These ideas together with a good deal of
observational and experimental evidence to support
them, were codified at the beginning of the 18th
century in an influential theory of matter published
by the German chemist Georg Stahl (1660-1734).
2. chemistry
a three-dimensional
It was notbecame
until 1727,
when the Englishsubject.
clergyman
Stephan Hales (1677-1761) showed that large volumes
of air could be released from the pores of solids and
liquids, that

3. The Stimulus of Guyton

In the spring of 1772 Lavoisier read an essay

on phlogiston by a Dijon lawyer and part time
chemist, Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau
(1737-1816), where Guyton showed in an
experiment that all his tested metals increased
in weight when they were roasted in air. Most
members of French Academy, including
Lavoisier, thought that Guytons experiment
was absurd and Lavoisier immediately saw a
more likely explanation that, somehow, air was
being fixed during the process of combustion
and that this air caused the increase in weight.
It followed that the fixed air should be
released when the calces of metals were
decomposed.
Lavoisier was able to verify this in October
1772 by using a large burning lens belonging to
the Academy. When litharge (an oxide of lead)
was roasted with charcoal an enormous volume

4. Discovery of Dephlogisticated air or oxygen

Two things led Lavoisier to change
his mind about phlogiston. Firstly
by Pierre Bayen (1725-1798) , a
French pharmacist, to the fact that,
when heated, the calx (oxide) of
mercury decomposes directly to the
metal mercury without the addition
of charcoal. This made it difficult
to see phlogiston theory be right.
The mercury calx had also come to
the attention of Joseph Priestley. In
August 1774 Priestley heated the
calx in an enclosed vessel and
collected a new Dephlogisticated
air which he eventually found
supported combustion far better
than ordinary air did.

5. The new chemistry

Lavoisier was now in a position to bring

about a revolution in chemistry by ridding it
of phlogiston and by introducing a new
theory of composition. He concluded:
All these reflections confirm what I have
advanced, what I set out to prove [in 1773]
and what I am going to repeat again.
Chemists have made phlogiston a vague
principle, which is not strictly defined and
consequently fits all the explanations
demanded of it. Sometimes it has weight
and sometimes it has not; sometimes it
passes through the pores of vessels,
sometimes they are impenetrable to it. It
explains at once causticity, transparency and
opacity, color and the absence of colors. It
is a veritable Proteus that changes its form
every instant!