Biography Inventor

Recount Text : Biography Inventor

Antoine Lavoisier, in full Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, (born august 26, 1743, Paris, France—died May 8, 1794, Paris), prominent French chemist and leading figure in the 18th-century chemical revolution who developed an experimentally based theory of the chemical reactivity of oxygen and coauthored the modern system for naming chemical substances. Having also served as a leading financier and public administrator before the french revolution, he was executed with other financiers during the revolutionary terror.

After being elected a junior member of the academy of sciences, Lavoisier began searching for a field of research in which he could distinguish himself. Chemists had long recognized that burning, like breathing, required air, and they also knew that iron rusts only upon exposure to air. Noting that burning gives off light and heat, that warm-blooded animals breathe, and that ores are turned into metals in a furnace, they concluded that fire was the key causal element behind these chemical reactions. The Enlightenment German chemist georg ernst stahl provided a well-regarded explanation of these phenomena. Stahl hypothesized that a common “fiery substance” he called phlogiston was released during combustion, respiration, and calcination, and that it was absorbed when these processes were reversed. Although plausible, this theory raised a number of problems for those who wished to explain chemical reactions in terms of substances that could be isolated and measured. In the early stages of his research Lavoisier regarded the phlogiston theory as a useful hypotesis, but he sought ways either to solidify its firm experimental foundation or to replace it with an experimentally sound theory of combustion. In the end his theory of oxygenation replaced the phlogiston hypothesis, but it took Lavoisier many years and considerable help from others to reach this goal.