61 Facts About Antoine Lavoisier

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, Antoine Lavoisier after the French Revolution, was a French nobleman and chemist who was central to the 18th-century chemical revolution and who had a large influence on both the history of chemistry and the history of biology.

Antoine Lavoisier is most noted for his discovery of the role oxygen plays in combustion.

Antoine Lavoisier recognized and named oxygen and hydrogen, and opposed phlogiston theory.

Antoine Lavoisier helped construct the metric system, wrote the first extensive list of elements, and helped to reform chemical nomenclature.

Antoine Lavoisier was a powerful member of a number of aristocratic councils, and an administrator of the Ferme generale.

Antoine Lavoisier began his schooling at the College des Quatre-Nations, University of Paris in Paris in 1754 at the age of 11.

Antoine Lavoisier entered the school of law, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1763 and a licentiate in 1764.

Antoine Lavoisier received a law degree and was admitted to the bar, but never practiced as a lawyer.

Antoine Lavoisier's education was filled with the ideals of the French Enlightenment of the time, and he was fascinated by Pierre Macquer's dictionary of chemistry.

In 1768 Antoine Lavoisier received a provisional appointment to the Academy of Sciences.

Antoine Lavoisier took part in investigations in 1780 on the hygiene in prisons and had made suggestions to improve living conditions, suggestions which were largely ignored.

Once a part of the Academy, Antoine Lavoisier held his own competitions to push the direction of research towards bettering the public and his own work.

Antoine Lavoisier had a vision of public education having roots in "scientific sociability" and philanthropy.

Antoine Lavoisier gained a vast majority of his income through buying stock in the General Farm, which allowed him to work on science full-time, live comfortably, and allowed him to contribute financially to better the community.

Antoine Lavoisier founded two organizations, Lycee and Musee des Arts et Metiers, which were created to serve as educational tools for the public.

At the age of 26, around the time he was elected to the Academy of Sciences, Antoine Lavoisier bought a share in the Ferme generale, a tax farming financial company which advanced the estimated tax revenue to the royal government in return for the right to collect the taxes.

On behalf of the Ferme generale Antoine Lavoisier commissioned the building of a wall around Paris so that customs duties could be collected from those transporting goods into and out of the city.

Antoine Lavoisier consolidated his social and economic position when, in 1771 at age 28, he married Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, the 13-year-old daughter of a senior member of the Ferme generale.

Madame Lavoisier edited and published Antoine's memoirs and hosted parties at which eminent scientists discussed ideas and problems related to chemistry.

Antoine Lavoisier did present one important memoir to the Academy of Sciences during this period, on the supposed conversion of water into earth by evaporation.

Antoine Lavoisier attempted to introduce reforms in the French monetary and taxation system to help the peasants.

Antoine Lavoisier was energetic and rigorous in implementing this, and the systems he introduced were deeply unpopular with the tobacco retailers across the country.

Antoine Lavoisier urged the establishment of a Royal Commission on Agriculture.

Antoine Lavoisier then served as its Secretary and spent considerable sums of his own money in order to improve the agricultural yields in the Sologne, an area where farmland was of poor quality.

In 1788 Antoine Lavoisier presented a report to the Commission detailing ten years of efforts on his experimental farm to introduce new crops and types of livestock.

Antoine Lavoisier's conclusion was that despite the possibilities of agricultural reforms, the tax system left tenant farmers with so little that it was unrealistic to expect them to change their traditional practices.

Antoine Lavoisier, whose organizing skills were outstanding, frequently landed the task of writing up such official reports.

Antoine Lavoisier was one of the 27 Farmers General who, by order of the Convention, were all to be detained.

Antoine Lavoisier claimed he had not operated on this commission for many years, having instead devoted himself to science.

Antoine Lavoisier intervened on behalf of a number of foreign-born scientists including mathematician Joseph Louis Lagrange, helping to exempt them from a mandate stripping all foreigners of possessions and freedom.

In 1792 Antoine Lavoisier was forced to resign from his post on the Gunpowder Commission and to move from his house and laboratory at the Royal Arsenal.

Antoine Lavoisier drafted their defense, refuting the financial accusations, reminding the court of how they had maintained a consistently high quality of tobacco.

Antoine Lavoisier published an account of this review in 1774 in a book entitled Opuscules physiques et chimiques.

Antoine Lavoisier recognized that Black's fixed air was identical with the air evolved when metal calces were reduced with charcoal and even suggested that the air which combined with metals on calcination and increased the weight might be Black's fixed air, that is, CO2.

Antoine Lavoisier carried out his own research on this peculiar substance.

Antoine Lavoisier concluded that this was just a pure form of common air and that it was the air itself "undivided, without alteration, without decomposition" which combined with metals on calcination.

Antoine Lavoisier called the air dephlogisticated air, as he thought it was common air deprived of its phlogiston.

Antoine Lavoisier's researches included some of the first truly quantitative chemical experiments.

Antoine Lavoisier carefully weighed the reactants and products of a chemical reaction in a sealed glass vessel so that no gases could escape, which was a crucial step in the advancement of chemistry.

Antoine Lavoisier is commonly cited as a central contributor to the chemical revolution.

Antoine Lavoisier encountered much opposition in trying to change the field, especially from British phlogistic scientists.

Rather than reporting factual evidence, opposition claimed Antoine Lavoisier was misinterpreting the implications of his research.

Antoine Lavoisier showed that this residual air supported neither combustion nor respiration and that approximately five volumes of this air added to one volume of the dephlogisticated air gave common atmospheric air.

Antoine Lavoisier was struck by the fact that the combustion products of such nonmetals as sulfur, phosphorus, charcoal, and nitrogen were acidic.

Antoine Lavoisier held that all acids contained oxygen and that oxygen was therefore the acidifying principle.

That year Antoine Lavoisier began a series of experiments on the composition of water which were to prove an important capstone to his combustion theory and win many converts to it.

Many investigators had been experimenting with the combination of Henry Cavendish's inflammable air, which Antoine Lavoisier termed hydrogen, with "dephlogisticated air" by electrically sparking mixtures of the gases.

In cooperation with Laplace, Antoine Lavoisier synthesized water by burning jets of hydrogen and oxygen in a bell jar over mercury.

Antoine Lavoisier labored to provide definitive proof of the composition of water, attempting to use this in support of his theory.

Opposition responded to this further experimentation by stating that Antoine Lavoisier continued to draw the incorrect conclusions and that his experiment demonstrated the displacement of phlogiston from iron by the combination of water with the metal.

Antoine Lavoisier developed a new apparatus which used a pneumatic trough, a set of balances, a thermometer, and a barometer, all calibrated carefully.

Antoine Lavoisier employed the new nomenclature in his Traite elementaire de chimie, published in 1789.

Antoine Lavoisier was almost obliged, therefore, to extend his new theory of combustion to include the area of respiration physiology.

Antoine Lavoisier stated, "la respiration est donc une combustion," that is, respiratory gas exchange is a combustion, like that of a candle burning.

Antoine Lavoisier established the consistent use of the chemical balance, used oxygen to overthrow the phlogiston theory, and developed a new system of chemical nomenclature which held that oxygen was an essential constituent of all acids.

Antoine Lavoisier did early research in physical chemistry and thermodynamics in joint experiments with Laplace.

Antoine Lavoisier contributed to early ideas on composition and chemical changes by stating the radical theory, believing that radicals, which function as a single group in a chemical process, combine with oxygen in reactions.

Antoine Lavoisier introduced the possibility of allotropy in chemical elements when he discovered that diamond is a crystalline form of carbon.

Antoine Lavoisier was responsible for the construction of the gasometer, an expensive instrument he used at his demonstrations.

Antoine Lavoisier was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1775.

Antoine Lavoisier's work was recognized as an International Historic Chemical Landmark by the American Chemical Society, Academie des sciences de L'institut de France and the Societe Chimique de France in 1999.