Antoine Lavoisier Research Paper

Antoine Lavoisier was born August 26,1743 in Paris, France. Lavoisier was born into a privileged family whose wealth came from a butchery company. Antoine Lavoisier revolutionized chemistry. He named the elements carbon, hydrogen and oxygen; discovered combustion and respiration; established that water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen; discovered that sulfur is an element; and helped the transformation of chemistry from an approximate science to a calculable science.

Antoine’s mother worked for the Paris Parliament as a lawyer. His mother died at the age of five, and she left him a substantial amount of money. Between the ages of eleven and eighteen, Antoine was educated at College des Quatre Nations, a college of the University of

They had inconsistent theories about burning. One of the inconsistent theories, phlogistion, was an undetectable substance which sometimes had a negative mass! We understand combustion occurs when substances react with oxygen at high temperatures. Most commonly, the adiabatic combustion temperatures for coals are around 2,200 degrees Celsius, or 3,992 degrees Fahrenheit. If oxygen’s discovery by Joseph Priestley still lay two years into the future, then how did Lavoisier name the element? In 1772 Lavoisier discovered that when phosphorus or sulfur are burned in the air, the products are acidic. These products also have a heavier mass than the original phosphorus or sulfur, implying that the elements combined with something in the air to produce acids. But what could they possibly combine with? Joseph Priestley visited Paris in 1774. He told Lavoisier about the gas produced when he decomposed the compound we now call Mercury Oxide. This gas allowed combustion to occur more powerfully than normal air did. Priestley thought this gas was a more pure version of air. Priestley believed its unusual properties were caused by the absence of phlogistion. He called it dephlogisticated air. Consequently, Lavoisier did not believe in dephlogisticated anything, because he did not believe in phlogiston. Lavoisier correctly identified sulfur as an element in 1777. He carried out extensive experiments involving this

While this may seem like a simple finding, in those days theories such as phlogiston were considered true, which made this an extraordinary discovery. After conducting his experiment with a number of different substance, and using the work with carbon in 1772, Lavoisier announced a new fundamental law of nature: the law of conservation of mass. This law concluded that matter is conserved in chemical reactions, or, the total mass of a chemical reaction’s products is identical to the total mass of the starting materials. The theory that Lavoisier was the first scientist to state the principle of mass conservation is simply incorrect. In 1630 Jean Rey had formulated a similar law; in 1755 Joseph Black assumed the law was true in his work discovering Magnesium; and in 1760 Mikhail Lomonosov had published a statement of the law. The law only became firmly established after Lavoisier independently discovered it.

Lavoisier suspected that combustion and respiration are chemically the same. With the help of Pierre-Simon Laplace, the pair measured the amount of carbon dioxide and heat given off by a guinea pig as it breathed. They compared this to the amount of heat produced when carbon was burned. Their results allowed Lavoisier to conclude that respiration is in fact a form of combustion. Heat given off by mammals during