Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier was born on Aug. 26, 1743. He grew up the oldest child in his family in Paris, France, and a product of the bourgeoisie lifestyle. His father was a well-off attorney who followed the family tradition of practicing law. Antoine's mother died when he was just a boy, but his aunt came to help raise him and his younger siblings. Between 1754 and 1761, he was educated at the College Mazarin where he studied mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, and botany. From there, he was pushed into the field of law, and earned his degree. However, this career didn't interest him a great deal. He was more fascinated with sciences, especially, geology. Coming from his background, he had already gained entrance into the leading intellectual circles of the day and had been exposed to a great variety of scientific pursuits by the time he started his scientific career. A good friend of the family, Jean-Étienne Guettard, was a brilliant geologist and botanist, as well as being one of Lavoisier's main influences to join the study of science. Another great teacher of his was Guillaume Francois Rouelle, his chemistry teacher. Both of these men were members of the Academie Royale des Sciences, or Royal Academy of Science.
The same year, he entered the Ferme Generale, a private firm that collected certain taxes for the government. After being barred from his laboratory, he fled his home but was caught and arrested a few months later. A remarkable feature of the phlogiston theory was that it correctly recognized that the rusting of iron and the calcination of all metals are processes essentially similar to combustion. Together, in 1787, the scientists worked together to compose a new naming system for these compounds. Lavoisier realized this gas was precisely the same as the part of the air which reacts with substances during combustion. One of his most valuable pieces of equipment was a chemical balance that could weigh objects with great precision. The major classes of chemical entities (acids, metals, salts, alkali metals, alkaline earth metals) were easily distinguished, but there gap when it came to the knowledge of gasses. Lavoisier also listed all substances thought to be elements at that timeWith the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, in which the French peasants rose up against the aristocracy, Lavoisier's position as an administrator in the government's tax collection agency automatically made him a target of hatred. The key to his theory was his belief that fire, then regarded as a weak fluid, could somehow form a compound with matter. For this purpose, chemists had deliberately tried to keep their discoveries secret from common people, so they gave new substances absurd names, such as butter of arsenic or sugar of lead, that were meaningless to most people. There were very few standards that were set. This substance was referred to as the phlogiston. In 1768, Lavoisier was elected to the Royal Academy of Science. Stating that phlogiston is required if an object is to burn, he renamed Priestley's gas "oxygen," from the Greek for "begetter of acids," and argued that air also contains a second gas, which does not support combustion. Then, in 1771, Lavoisier married Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, who was barely fourteen years old, but a beautiful and intelligent girl.
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