Visuals for Lavoisier / The Chemical Revolution
Reading Guide || Web Excursions || Hub 

Outline

  • Introduction: 18th Century Chemistry, from Newton to Pneumatics
  • Who was Lavoisier? What problems did Lavoisier address (and why)?
    =====
  • Intro/Review
  • Discussion: 1775 memoir on combustion
  • Discussion: 1783 memoir on water
  • Discussion: When was oxygen discovered?
  • Epilog

      Legacy of the "Scientific Revolution"
    1. interpreting nature: Burnet's natural history
    2. experiment: Boyle's air pump
    3. systematic investigation: Gilbert's magnetic terella
    4. measuring
    5. institutions: French Academy of Science
    6. system for reporting results
    7. new ideas: natural laws
    8. scale of patronage & enterprise

      Two Lineages of Chemical Ideas

    9. Isaac Newton
    10. Newton's Opticks
    11. Etienne Francois Geoffroy and Newtonian concept of affinities
    12. Geoffroy's affinity table
    13. later table, with lab
    14. industries supporting chemists
    15. Paracelsus, Johann Becher and Georg Ernst Stahl
    16. phlogiston
    17. reduction of ores to metals by smelting with charcoal's phlogiston
    18. metals and their calxes
    19. release of phlogiston: combustion, calcination, rusting, tarnishing, corrosion
    20. plants
    21. discovery & burning of phosphorous

      Pneumatics

    22. Stephen Hales
    23. Joseph Black
    24. Joseph Priestley & his "pyrmont" water
    25. Henry Cavendish
    26. Karl Wilhelm Scheele
    27. Priestley's pneumatic trough

      Lavoisier & his Puzzles

    28. Antoine Lavoisier
    29. Rouelle and his lectures
    30. Guettard's mineralogical surveys
    31. ferme-generale system
    32. French Academie des Sciences
    33. Marie Anne Paulze (Mme. Lavoisier)
    34. Lavoisier's projects for the Academie
    35. suspect water in Parisian canal
    36. weighing the reaction
    37. Lavoisier's scales
    38. Lavoisier's 1772 concept of composition of air
    39. Guyton de Morveau
    40. burning phosphorous to phosphoric acid
    41. burning phosphorous and sulfur
    42. Lavoisier's 1772 concept of calcination and combustion
    43. Lavoisier
    44. Lavoisier's instruments
    45. Lavoisier's 1774 concept of combustion
    46. calx of mercury yielding mercury
    47. Priestley's lab
    48. Lavoisier heating calx of mercury [drawing by Marie Anne Paulze]
    49. burning inflammable air
    50. Lavoisier's apparatus for burning "inflammable air"
    51. Lavoisier's lab (during later studies on respiration)

      Intro 2

    52. Chemical Institute, Vienna
    53. close-up
    54. the Lavoisiers
    55. their lab

      Epilog

    56. decomposing water
    57. gasometer
    58. gasometer and Newcomen engine
    59. discovery of oxygen
    60. scales, again
    61. John Dalton & his table of elements
    62. calorimeter
    63. guinea pig
    64. Etienne Condillac
    65. 1787 new nomenclature
    66. Adet's symbols
    67. Lavoisier memorial, 1807
    68. storming the Bastille
    69. Lavoisier arrested
    70. Priestley's house mobbed
    71. his new house in America & his defense of phlogiston
    72. DuPont
     

    • Return to HSCI 1815 Hub