Antoine Lavoisier revolutionized chemistry in the late 18th century by dispelling older theories and introducing new ideas based on careful experimentation. Key events included:
- In 1772, Lavoisier read an essay showing metals increased in weight during combustion, suggesting they "fixed" air during the process. He verified this by decomposing litharge and collecting an enormous volume of air.
- In 1774, Priestley heated mercury oxide and collected a new "dephlogisticated air" that supported combustion better than normal air. This challenged the prevailing phlogiston theory.
- Lavoisier concluded phlogiston was a vague, undefined principle that did not fit experimental evidence. He rid
Antoine Lavoisier revolutionized chemistry in the late 18th century by dispelling older theories and introducing new ideas based on careful experimentation. Key events included:
- In 1772, Lavoisier read an essay showing metals increased in weight during combustion, suggesting they "fixed" air during the process. He verified this by decomposing litharge and collecting an enormous volume of air.
- In 1774, Priestley heated mercury oxide and collected a new "dephlogisticated air" that supported combustion better than normal air. This challenged the prevailing phlogiston theory.
- Lavoisier concluded phlogiston was a vague, undefined principle that did not fit experimental evidence. He rid
Antoine Lavoisier revolutionized chemistry in the late 18th century by dispelling older theories and introducing new ideas based on careful experimentation. Key events included:
- In 1772, Lavoisier read an essay showing metals increased in weight during combustion, suggesting they "fixed" air during the process. He verified this by decomposing litharge and collecting an enormous volume of air.
- In 1774, Priestley heated mercury oxide and collected a new "dephlogisticated air" that supported combustion better than normal air. This challenged the prevailing phlogiston theory.
- Lavoisier concluded phlogiston was a vague, undefined principle that did not fit experimental evidence. He rid
Unlike astronomy and mechanics, whose subject matter had been transformed in the 16th and 17th centuries by Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and others, chemistry retained older patterns of thought well into the 18th century. For example, many chemists still did not think of chemical changes as due to interactions of a limited number of elements, or as involving rearrangements of groups of atoms. Certain substances could burn, or were acidic in taste, was explained by supposing that they contained a burning or acid principle. These ideas together with a good deal of observational and experimental evidence to support them, were codified at the beginning of the 18th century in an influential theory of matter published by the German chemist Georg Stahl (1660-1734). 2. chemistry a three-dimensional It was notbecame until 1727, when the Englishsubject. clergyman Stephan Hales (1677-1761) showed that large volumes of air could be released from the pores of solids and liquids, that
3. The Stimulus of Guyton
In the spring of 1772 Lavoisier read an essay
on phlogiston by a Dijon lawyer and part time chemist, Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau (1737-1816), where Guyton showed in an experiment that all his tested metals increased in weight when they were roasted in air. Most members of French Academy, including Lavoisier, thought that Guytons experiment was absurd and Lavoisier immediately saw a more likely explanation that, somehow, air was being fixed during the process of combustion and that this air caused the increase in weight. It followed that the fixed air should be released when the calces of metals were decomposed. Lavoisier was able to verify this in October 1772 by using a large burning lens belonging to the Academy. When litharge (an oxide of lead) was roasted with charcoal an enormous volume
4. Discovery of Dephlogisticated air or oxygen
Two things led Lavoisier to change his mind about phlogiston. Firstly by Pierre Bayen (1725-1798) , a French pharmacist, to the fact that, when heated, the calx (oxide) of mercury decomposes directly to the metal mercury without the addition of charcoal. This made it difficult to see phlogiston theory be right. The mercury calx had also come to the attention of Joseph Priestley. In August 1774 Priestley heated the calx in an enclosed vessel and collected a new Dephlogisticated air which he eventually found supported combustion far better than ordinary air did.
5. The new chemistry
Lavoisier was now in a position to bring
about a revolution in chemistry by ridding it of phlogiston and by introducing a new theory of composition. He concluded: All these reflections confirm what I have advanced, what I set out to prove [in 1773] and what I am going to repeat again. Chemists have made phlogiston a vague principle, which is not strictly defined and consequently fits all the explanations demanded of it. Sometimes it has weight and sometimes it has not; sometimes it passes through the pores of vessels, sometimes they are impenetrable to it. It explains at once causticity, transparency and opacity, color and the absence of colors. It is a veritable Proteus that changes its form every instant!