Lavoisier Sentence Examples
Lavoisier adequately recognized and acknowledged how much he owed to the researches of others; to himself is due the co-ordination of these researches, and the welding of his results into a doctrine to which the phlogistic theory ultimately succumbed.
Lavoisier was the first investigator to study fermentation from a quantitative standpoint.
He also contemplated a thorough-going reform of the ferme generale, but contented himself, as a beginning, with imposing certain conditions on the leases as they were renewed - such as a more efficient personnel, and the abolition for the future of the abuse of the croupes (the name given to a class of pensions), a reform which Terray had shirked on finding how many persons in high places were interested in them, and annulling certain leases, such as those of the manufacture of gunpowder and the administration of the messageries, the former of which was handed over to a company with the scientist Lavoisier as one of its advisers, and the latter superseded by a quicker and more comfortable service of diligences which were nicknamed" turgotines."He also prepared a regular budget.
His next and most important publication was his famous paper "On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances" (in two parts, 1876 and 1878), which, it has been said, founded a new department of chemical science that is becoming comparable in importance to that created by Lavoisier.
At one time, indeed, he found Lavoisier's views so specious that he was much inclined to accept them, but he overcame this wavering, and so late as 1800 he wrote to the Rev. Theophilus Lindsey (1723-1808), "I have well considered all that my opponents have advanced and feel perfectly confident of the ground I stand upon....
Lavoisier may be justly regarded as the founder of modern or quantitative chemistry.
The theory advocated by Lavoisier came to displace the phlogistic conception; but at first its acceptance was slow.
By his insistence upon the use of the balance as a quantitative check upon the masses involved in all chemical reactions, Lavoisier was enabled to establish by his own investigations and the results achieved by others the principle now known as the " conservation of mass."
Lavoisier appears to have assumed that the composition of every chemical compound was constant, and the same opinion was the basis of much experimental inquiry at the hands of Joseph Louis Proust during 1801 to 1809, who vigorously combated the doctrine of Claude Louis Berthollet (Essai de statique chimique, 1803), viz.
The growth of chemical literature since the publication of Lavoisier's famous Traite de chimie in 1789, and of Berzelius' Lehrbuch der Chemie in 1808-1818, has been enormous.
AdvertisementOf great importance is the chemical identity of the diamond, graphite and charcoal, a fact demonstrated in part by Lavoisier in 1773, Smithson Tennant in 1796, and by Sir George Steuart-Mackenzie (1780-1848), who showed that equal weights.
Theoretical speculations were revived by Lavoisier, who, having explained the nature of combustion and determined methods for analysing compounds, concluded that vegetable substances ordinarily contained carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, while animal substances generally contained, in addition to these elements, nitrogen, and sometimes phosphorus and sulphur.
Berzelius, in 1813 and 1814, by improved methods of analysis, established that the Daltonian laws of combination held in both the inorganic and organic kingdoms; and he adopted the view of Lavoisier that organic compounds were oxides of compound radicals, and therefore necessarily contained at least three elements - carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.
Anton Laurent Lavoisier, however, must be considered as the first great exponent of this branch of chemistry.
Until 1804 he lived at the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street, London, or at a house which he rented at Brompton, and he then established himself in Paris, marrying (his first wife having died in 1792) as his second wife the wealthy widow of Lavoisier, the celebrated chemist.
AdvertisementLavoisier, and prepared to resume his former situation in Berlin.
Lavoisier he made an important series of experiments on specific heat (1782-1784), in the course of which the "ice calorimeter" was invented; and they contributed jointly to the Memoirs of the Academy (1781) a paper on the development of electricity by evaporation.
Darwin's work shows, however, the tendency to connect medicine with physical science, which was an immediate consequence of the scientific discoveries of the end of the 18th century, when Priestley and Cavendish in England exercised the same influence as Lavoisier in France.
It was the concepts derived from the experimental methods of Harvey, Lavoisier, Liebig, Claude Bernard, Helmholtz, Darwin, Pasteur, Lister and others which, directly or indirectly, trained the eyes of clinicians to observe more closely and accurately; and not of clinicians only, but also of pathologists, such as Matthew Baillie, Cruveilhier, Rokitansky, Bright, Virchowto name but a few of those who, with (as must be admitted) new facilities for necropsies, began to pile upon us discoveries in morbid anatomy and histology.
Taking magnesia alba, which he distinguished from limestone with which it had previously been confused, he showed that on being heated it lost weight owing to the escape of this fixed air (named carbonic acid by Lavoisier in 1781), and that the weight was regained when the calcined product was made to reabsorb the fixed air with which it had parted.
AdvertisementThis principle more or less prevailed until it was overthrown by Lavoisier's doctrine that oxygen was the acid-producing element; Lavoisier being led to this conclusion by the almost general observation that acids were produced when non-metallic elements were burnt.
The existence of acids not containing oxygen was, in itself, sufficient to overthrow this idea, but, although Berthollet had shown, in 1789, that sulphuretted hydrogen (or hydrosulphuric acid) contained no oxygen, Lavoisier's theory held its own until the researches of Davy, Gay-Lussac and Thenard on hydrochloric acid and chlorine, and of Gay-Lussac on hydrocyanic acid, established beyond all cavil that oxygen was not essential to acidic properties.
He returned to Paris before the end of the year, was well received by his family, and mixed in the cultivated circle which frequented the salon of his mother, among them Lebrun-Pindare, Lavoisier, Lesueur, Dorat, Parmy, and a little later the painter David.
Macquer and Lavoisier showed that when gold is strongly heated, fumes arise which gild a piece of silver held in them.
Since the earliest quantitative analyses of sea-water were made by Lavoisier in 1772, Bergman in 177 4, Vogel in 1813 and Marcet in 1819 the view has been held that the salts are present in sea-water in the form in which they are deposited when the water is evaporated.
AdvertisementCavendish, Priestley, Lavoisier and others contributed to this result.
He published Entwicklungsgeschichte der Chemie von Lavoisier bis zur Gegenwart (1868) and other works on chemistry, collaborated in a Handworterbuch der Chemie (13 vols., 1882-96), and wrote a volume of reminiscences, Lebenserinnerungen (1912).
Lavoisier (1781-1788) first proved it to be an oxide of carbon by burning carbon in the oxygen obtained from the decomposition of mercuric oxide.
He was one of the earliest converts to the views of Lavoisier, which he helped to promulgate by his voluminous writings, but though his name appears on a large number of chemical and also physiological and pathological memoirs, either alone or with others, he was rather a teacher and an organizer than an original investigator.
By his conduct as a member of the Convention he has been acclused of contributing to the death of Lavoisier.
Lavoisier showed that air was necessary to the formation of vinegar from alcohol.
In effect, therefore, Mayow - who also gives a remarkably correct anatomical description of the mechanism of respiration - preceded Priestley and Lavoisier by a century in recognizing the existence of oxygen, under the guise of his spiritus nitro-aereus, as a separate entity distinct from the general mass of the air; he perceived the part it plays in combustion and in increasing the weight of the calces of metals as compared with metals themselves; and, rejecting the common notions of his time that the use of breathing is to cool the heart, or assist the passage of the blood from the right to the left side of the heart, or merely to agitate it, he saw in inspiration a mechanism for introducing oxygen into the body, where it is consumed for the production of heat and muscular activity, and even vaguely conceived of expiration as an excretory process.
Starting from Lavoisier's discoveries, he held that life is metabolism, a perpetual circulation.
Aristotle had imputed to all living beings a soul, though to plants only in the sense of a vegetative, not a sensitive, activity, and in Moleschott's time many scientific men still accepted some sort of vital principle, not exactly soul, yet over and above bodily forces in organisms. Moleschott, like Lotze, not only resisted the whole hypothesis of a vital principle, but also, on the basis of Lavoisier's discovery that respiration is combustion, argued that the heat so produced is the only force developed in the organism, and that matter therefore rules man.
In 1904 he was the first British subject to receive the Lavoisier medal of the French Academy of Sciences, and in 1906 he was the first to be awarded the Matteucci medal of the Italian Society of Sciences.
Lavoisier making many experiments with the object of finding an acid among the products of combustion.
In 179r, when Lavoisier was in the middle of all this official activity, the suppression of the farmers-general marked the beginning of troubles which brought about his death.
The attempt was unsuccessful, but in August of the same year Lavoisier had to leave his house and laboratory at the Arsenal, and in November the Academy was forbidden until further orders to fill up the vacancies in its numbers.
In November it ordered the arrest of the ex-farmers-general, and on the advice of the committee of public instruction, of which Guyton de Morveau and Fourcroy were members, the names of Lavoisier and others were struck off from the commission of weights and measures.
Within a week Lavoisier and 27 others were condemned to death.
A petition in his favour addressed to Coffinhal, the president of the tribunal, is said to have been met with the reply La Republique n'a pas besoin de savants, and on the 8th of the month Lavoisier and his companions were guillotined at the Place de la Revolution.
Lavoisier's name is indissolubly associated with the overthrow of the phlogistic doctrine that had dominated the development of chemistry for over a century, and with the establishment of the foundations upon which the modern science reposes.
Considerations of weight had long prevented Lavoisier from accepting this doctrine, but he was now able to explain the process fully, showing that the hydrogen evolved did not come from the metal itself, but was one product of the decomposition of the water of the dilute acid, the other product, oxygen, combining with the metal to form an oxide which in turn united with the acid.
Up to about this time Lavoisier's work, mainly quantitative in character, had appealed most strongly to physicists, but it now began to win conviction from chemists also.
The simple nature of the alkalies Lavoisier considered so doubtful that he did not class them as elements, which he conceived as substances which could not be further decomposed by any known process of analysis - les molecules simples et indivisibles qui composent les corps.
In addition to his purely chemical work, Lavoisier, mostly in conjunction with Laplace, devoted considerable attention to physical problems, especially those connected with heat.
Regarding heat (matiere de feu or fluide igne) as a peculiar kind of imponderable matter, Lavoisier held that the three states of aggregation - solid, liquid and gas - were modes of matter, each depending on the amount of matiere de feu with which the ponderable substances concerned were interpenetrated and combined; and this view enabled him correctly to anticipate that gases would be reduced to liquids and solids by the influence of cold and pressure.
The earlier forms of ice-calorimeter, those of Black, and of Laplace and Lavoisier, were useless for work of precision, on account of the impossibility of accurately estimating the quantity of water left adhering to the ice in each case.
The proof that prussic acid contains hydrogen but no oxygen was a most important support to the hydrogen-acid theory, and completed the downfall of Lavoisier's oxygen theory;, while the isolation of cyanogen was of equal importance for the subsequent era of compound radicles in organic chemistry.
In 1785 he declared himself an adherent of the Lavoisierian school, though he did not accept Lavoisier's view of oxygen as the only and universal acidifying principle, and he took part in the reform in chemical nomenclature carried out by Lavoisier and his associates in 1787.
Beginning with metaphysics and ethics and passing on to mathematics, he turned to chemistry at the end of 17 9 7, and within a few months of reading Nicholson's and Lavoisier's treatises on that science had produced a new theory of light and heat.
Historically, Lavoisier's discovery of oxygen and its role in combustion dramatically replaced earlier explanations using phlogiston.
Rather before the commencement of the 19th century the work of Lavoisier had rendered it very probable that chemical changes are not accompanied by any change in weight, and this principle of the conservation of matter was becoming universally accepted; chemists were also acquiring considerable skill in chemical analysis, that is, in the determination of the nature and relative amounts of the elements contained in compounds.
He was also the author of Science et philosophie (1886), which contains a well-known letter to Renan on "La Science ideale et la science positive," of La Revolution chimique, Lavoisier (1890), of Science et morale (1897), and of numerous articles in La Grande Encyclopedie, which he helped to establish.
Their quantitative experiments were, however, too rough to permit of accurate generalization; and although Lavoisier and Laplace stated the principle that the same amount of heat must be supplied to decompose a compound as would be produced on its formation, the statement was not based on exact experiment, and only received experimental confirmation much later.
With that nobleman he travelled on the Continent; the month of October 1774 he spent in Paris, and meeting Lavoisier and his friends, gave them an account of the experiment by which on the previous ist of August he had prepared "dephlogisticated air" (oxygen).
We have seen how his classification of substances into elements and compounds, and the definitions which he assigned to these species, have similarly been retained; and how Lavoisier established the law of the "conservation of mass," overthrew the prevailing phlogistic theory, and became the founder of modern chemistry by the overwhelming importance which he gave to the use of the balance.
Quantitative chemistry had been all but neglected before the time of Lavoisier, for although a few chemists such as Tachenius, Bergman and others had realized the advantages which would accrue from a knowledge of the composition of N N N bodies by weight, and had laid down the lines upon which such determinations should proceed, the experimental difficulties in making accurate observations were enormous, and little progress could be made until the procedure was more accurately determined.
The detection of carbon and hydrogen in organic compounds by the formation of carbon dioxide and water when they are burned was first correctly understood by Lavoisier, and as he had determined the carbon and hydrogen content of these two substances he was able to devise methods by which carbon and hydrogen in organic compounds could be estimated.
Priestley and Lavoisier, at the close of the 18th century, made possible the scientific study of plant-nutrition, though Jan Ingenhousz in 1779 discovered that plants incessantly give out carbonic acid gas, but that the green leaves and shoots only exhale oxygen in sunlight or clear daylight, thereby indicating the distinction between assimilation of carbonic acid gas (photosynthesis) and respiration.
The spread of Lavoisier's doctrines was greatly facilitated by the defined and logical form in which he presented them in his Traite elementaire de chimie (presente dans un ordre nouveau et d'apres les decouvertes modernes) (1789).
The former experiment had been performed by Scheele and Priestley, who had named the gas " phlogisticated air "; Lavoisier subsequently named it oxygen, regarding it as the " acid producer " (OE, sour).