January 8, 2014 • 25 mins
Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier was a chemist, biologist, geologist, physiologist, and economist. But at the end of the day, he's most often referred to as the father of modern chemistry. He also was smack dab in the middle of the French Revolution.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And the
really interesting thing about the subject of today's podcast is
how many labels he gets. So if you look up
(00:23):
any biography on him, the Andrew will absolutely include some
combination of the words chemist, biologist, geologist, physiologist, economists. He
even held a law degree, though he never practiced law.
But at the end of the day, this particular figure
is most often referred to as a father of modern chemistry.
Uh and we referred to this person, who is Antoinevoisier
(00:45):
before during our episode on Sophie Blanchard and the Ballooning Craze.
But he definitely deserves his own podcast because he was
instrumental in transitioning the field of chemistry from one that
was still back in al chemical thinking and the combination
of science, ants and magic and sort of experimenting in
that arena, to a much more serious and systematic way
(01:06):
to analyze and understand the world around us. And while
he made incredible contributions to science, his life also took
some really important political turns. Amid the turmoil of the
French Revolution. So he had a lot of influence in
very many different and seemingly disparate places throughout his life. Yeah. Well,
(01:27):
and I was startled to learn how many of the
basic things that I learned in science class came straight
from him. Yeah. He was really impactful on our modern lives,
whether we realize it or not. Yes. He was born
Antoine Laurent Lavassier on August forty three, and he was
born pretty well into privilege. His father, Jean Antoine Lavassier,
(01:52):
was a wealthy Parisian lawyer, and his mother was from
a well to do family. When he was five, his
mother passed away and left him a huge inheritance. Yeah.
And while his father had originally been from a town
roughly fifty miles northeast of Paris, and TOI, Laurent was
really born in a Parisian although he did often summer
(02:12):
in his father's hometown, which was villiers Cot, and the
absence of his mother, the Voisier's aunt, Constance became a
significant caregiver and influence on his life. The two of
them are said to have been extremely close, and he
attended the College Deacon. You'll sometimes see this referred to
as the College, and while there he studied astronomy, mathematics, botany, geology, mineralogy, logic, chemistry,
(02:39):
and other disciplines under some of the most respected thinkers
of the day. He eventually focused his education on pursuing
a law degree, primarily to please his family by following
in his father's footsteps. He finished his law studies in
seventeen sixty three, and then he was licensed to practice
a year later. But he never really had a passion
for law and he never practice. Instead, he went right
(03:01):
back to his love of science, primarily chemistry and geology,
and he published a paper in seventeen sixty five addressing
the problem of improving Parisian street lights. UH. Some of
his other earliest work, which he submitted to the Academy
of Sciences, was an analysis of gypsum and plaster of Paris,
and this early early work that he was doing is
(03:22):
still considered important work regarding the composition of cement. So
already we've established that he he his impact is still
felt very significantly today. Yeah. In seventeen sixty eight, while
he was still only twenty five, Lavoisier was inducted into
the Elite Academy of Sciences. This was a big year
for Lavoisier because he also bought an interest in La
(03:45):
firm General and La firm General was a private company
that's the translates to farm General uh, and they actually
collected taxes for the French sovereign. So they would go
out and do the tax collecting and make a profit
of it as they handed off the taxes to the government.
And so while his buy into this group solidified his
(04:07):
fiscal standing and it was really helping him, you know,
fund his life and his experimentation, it made him part
of an organization that was not exactly popular with those
not born into privilege, especially when you consider the political
climate in France at the time. Yeah, as is often
the case with really predominant scientific thinkers, he had a
(04:27):
personality that you might call distinctive. And Arthur Donovan's book
Antoine Lavassier, Science, Administration and Revolution, The Legendary Scientist, is
described as being something of an obsessive Yeah. And to
illustrate this, Donovan tell stories about things Lavoisi did when
he was very young and sort of starting out in
his uh scientific um experimentation, and he talks about him
(04:52):
at nineteen doing this experiment where he wanted to investigate
the effects of diet on human health, and as part
of this experiment, he adopted a plan of consuming nothing
but milk. I like milk, but only milk is a
little far. In a similar episode to study illumination, as
part of work he was doing about street lamps, he
(05:14):
proposed this plan to shut himself up in a dark
room for six weeks straight so that he could make
himself intensely sensitive to different levels of light. There's no
evidence about whether he actually followed through on that one,
so yes, it's clear that, like many groundbreakers throughout history,
Lavoisier really did have this propensity for approaching problems and
(05:34):
ideas with really extreme methodologies. On December sixteen, seventeen seventy one,
a few years after his induction into the Academy of Sciences,
Lavoisier married Marie Anne Pierrette Paul's, who was only thirteen
at the time. While such a young bride is an
unsettling concept, particularly to modern ears, Marie Anne was really
(05:56):
a very, very smart woman, and she became an important
collaborator to Lovoisier. By all accounts, it was quite a
happy marriage and certainly, I think more of an equal
set up than many marriages at the time. Marie Anne
actually learned English just so that she could translate scientific
texts for her husband, and she also educated herself in
(06:17):
art and engraving so she could illustrate his scientific papers.
And she assisted in him him in his experiments throughout
the year, and she often took notes while he was
working um and he really depended on those notes as
like the basis for his writings. So she was really
important and they really did seem to have um a
really good um marriage where they were collaborating all the time.
(06:41):
In seventeen seventy five, he got an appointment to the
Royal Gunpowder and Saltpeter Administration, often referred to as just
the Gunpowder Administration. This branch of the government had been
established by Louis the sixteenth after he ascended the throne
in seventeen seventy four and came to realize that France
didn't really have in any kind of self sufficient sourcing
(07:02):
for gunpowder, and so Lavoisier had been appointed because he
was a chemist, and he moved into the Paris Arsenal
and he set up a lab that was so well
appointed that. Throughout the years, I mean he had this
lab for a couple of decades, many of Europe's finest
chemists and great thinkers were attracted to it, so it
kind of became this interesting little enclave where people could
go and experiment and think and trade ideas. Working in
(07:26):
this then state of the art lab, Lavoisier was able
to to advance the production of gunpowder to a point
where he was making much better quality product at a
very rapid pace. And he was able to refine the
composition of gunpowder by analyzing and regulating the purity of
its ingredients, those primary ingredients being sulfur, charcoal, and potassium
(07:46):
nitrate a K saltpeter. And he also refined the granulation process.
But before we get into some other pretty big chemistry
breakthroughs that happened in Lavoisi's lab, let's take a moment
and talk about our sponsor. So back to the world
of Lavoisier. He spent several hours every day and one
full day every week in the lab, and he said
(08:07):
to have treasured that one full day of research, which
I can completely identify with His wife is quoted as
saying it was for him a day of happiness, some
friends who shared his views, and some young men proud
to be admitted to the honor of collaborating and his experiments.
Assembled in the morning in the laboratory. There they lunched,
(08:28):
There they debated. It was there that you could have
heard this man with his precise mind, his clear intelligence,
his high genius, the loftiness of his philosophical principles illuminating
his conversation. Yes, so she again, it's kind of a
nice um representation of their relationship that she really spoke
very highly of him. Uh. And she clearly admired his
(08:49):
his work, in his mind and the way he worked.
And it's just nice that he had this magical day
every week that he felt like with his best day
and through his rigorous experimentation there. One of the big
things that happened is that Lavoisier became convinced that mass
is neither created nor destroyed during ordinary chemical reactions. Uh.
This is big stuff. The massive substances produced by a
(09:13):
chemical reaction is equal to the mass of the reactants involved.
And I will not pretend to have a particularly gifted
chemistry mind, but most people will recognize this as what
was eventually put forth by Lavoisier as the law of
conservation of mass hugely important basic chemistry concept. Thank you Lavoisier. Yeah.
(09:36):
Those concepts also led him to further examination of the
work of English natural philosopher Joseph Priestley. Marie Anne had
translated a whole lot of Priestly's work for Lavoisier, and
Priestly had in seventeen seventy four heated red mercury oxide
to obtain a colorless gas which would cause a candle
that was lighted in it to burn with quote a
(09:59):
remark be vigorous flame, according to Priestly, and he referred
to this colorless gas as deflogisticated air. At the time,
the prevailing belief in chemistry was that a substance called
flogistine was a volatile part of all combustible substances, and
then it was released as flame during combustion. Uh Flogistin
(10:19):
gets its name from the Greek word for burn. Priestley
thought that his pure air enhanced respiration and caused the
more vigorous and longer lasting burn of candles because it
was free of fistin. He traveled to Paris to meet
with Lavossier and disgust these findings but Lavoisier felt that
the flogistin theory, which had been around for more than
(10:41):
a hundred years at this point, was fundamentally flawed, and
this was a very significant shake up in the scientific
community at the time. This is on par with someone
today claiming that potassium is an illusion. I mean it's
It was really like, completely broke apart the fundamental base
of how they approached chemistry. And when Lavoisier delved more
(11:02):
deeply into analysis of combustion, he was able to identify
the same gas that Priestly had, which Priestly was calling
his deef logisticated air. Uh. Lavoisi eventually named it oxygen,
and by weighing and analyzing the components of combustions, he
came to the conclusion that flogion was, as he had
suspected already, not a thing, because it's just the math
(11:25):
did not add up with his conservation of mass ideas right.
He had come to the conclusion that air actually consisted
of two components, one that combined with metal and supported respiration,
and one that did not support either of these things.
In seventeen seventy seven, he officially put forth a new
theory of combustion that left Flogiston completely off the table.
(11:48):
And it's also during this time in his famous lab
that Lovoisier built on the work of other scientists to
isolate and name hydrogen, and that's the thing that got
him mentioned in our ballooning episode. And seventeen eighty three
he was still embroiled in a constant, rigorous debate in
the scientific community over this anti flogist instance. He became
(12:09):
really adamant that it was time to lead chemistry back
to a stricter way of thinking, and he campaigned for
a systematic analysis of chemistry and science that distinguished true
fact from assumption. His goal was quote to rid chemistry
of every kind of impediment that delays its advance. So
scientific method being established extremely important, as we have discussed
(12:34):
in several episodes. In seventeen seven UH, in collaboration with
Louis Bernard Guiton de Morveaux, Claude, Louis Bertroyer, Antoine, Francois
aquas Uh, he set forth this proposed method de nomenal
chimik and this is basically the early periodic table, and
at this point it only consisted of thirty three elements
(12:56):
which were grouped as gases, metals, non metals, and earth's
and this was pretty groundbreaking, Like basically he was saying,
if you can break a thing down to a point
where you can't break it down any further, that's an element,
and it's going on this list. That's the thing that
we basically take for granted now in chemistry class. Uh.
And then in seventeen eighty nine, so two years later,
(13:17):
still working with a lot of these same collaborators, Lavoisier
published the Trite Element the Simi, which is basically the
elementary Treatise of chemistry, and it's basically the textbook that
really set the stage and transitioned us to modern chemistry officially.
It included the periodic table, it included the law of
conservation of mass, as well as many other concepts, and
(13:39):
Lavoisier anticipated that it was really going to take quite
some time for these new ideas to be accepted. But
interestingly enough, it was really just a couple of years
before the ideas that he and his colleagues had worked
on were just sort of an accepted part of common
scientific practices. And I think it's probably because he was
so strict in his scientific method it it was all
(14:02):
really well laid out, and there wasn't a lot of like,
well we think it's like we tested this, and tested
this and tested this. Even though he was always really
busy in his lab, Lavoisier also worked as a civil servant.
In seven he was chosen as a member of the
Assembly of Orleans, and in this position he began to
drop a plan for improving community socio economic issues, and
(14:25):
this included the establishment of workhouses, canals, insurance societies, and
savings banks. He was also asked to advise on issues
such as sewers, the water supply, and developing a unified
system of weights and measures also known now as the
metric system. Yeah, he really Again, the checklist of things
(14:45):
he contributed to our modern lives starts to get a
little um mind blowing, because everything that he touched we
still are doing. Uh. But as the revelation stirred up
around him, he really did seem to be genuinely interested
in bettering the situation of the lower classes. And this
is something that's been debated throughout the years just to
whether or not he was kind of a foolish, well
(15:07):
off person or if he really was in touch with
these ideas and and really had a keen understanding of
what was going on. He said to have donated money
of his own to the towns of Blois and Ramonte
for the purchase of grains during the famine. But unfortunately
he had already made a pretty significant enemy uh in
(15:27):
revolutionary Jean when he had belittle Mara's work in the sciences.
I think people don't always remember that Mara worked in
science as well as his uh sort of revolutionary status. Mara,
in reference to his interactions with the Academy of Science,
referred at one point to quote the class of geometers
(15:50):
and astronomers which has formed a terrible cabal against me.
The Vossier was among those he felt had a bias
against him, And yeah, he kind of did seem to
think that Marat was as Charlatan. Yeah, he didn't have
high praise for him at all. So there there is
merit to that idea. Uh. In seventeen ninety, Lavoisier is
quoted as saying the state of public affairs in France
(16:13):
has temporarily retarded the progress of science and distracted scientists
from the work that is most precious to them. That
he seemed to be kind of irritated by all of
the things that were going on, and wished they could
just go back to their labs and work on improving
the world and analyzing it. In January of seventeen ninety one,
Jean Paul Morat began to loudly and publicly attack Lavoisier,
(16:36):
and a pamphlet he wrote, I denounce you to the
corea Paus, the leader of the chorus of the Charlatan's
master Lavoisier, son of a land grabber, apprentice chemist, pupil
of the Genevan stock jobber, Necker, a farmer, General commissioner
for gunpowder and salt, Peter, director of the Discount Bank,
Secretary to the King, member of the Academy of Science,
(16:58):
intimate of Volvier, unfaithful administrator of the Paris Food Commission,
and the greatest schemer of our times? Would you believe
that this little gentleman, who enjoys an income of forty
thou livres and who's only claimed to public recognition is
that he imprisoned Paris by cutting off the fresh air
with a wall that cost the poor people thirty three
(17:20):
million livre. Is that he moved gunpowder from the arsenal
into the bast deal on the night of July twelfth,
and is engaged in a devilish intrigue to get himself
elected as administrator of the Department of Paris. Yeah. So
basically Murra is saying, like, oh, you claimed to be,
you know, trying to do all of this civil work. Yeah, yeah, yeah, really,
(17:41):
you just want more power and more money. Your hands
are in everything that's super suspicious. During what what came
to be known as the Reign of Terror, arrest warrants
were issued for all the stakeholders in the firm General Um.
Lavoisier was, of course, among those sought for arrest. An
Allegations against this group of men included embezzlement of government
(18:02):
funds and cutting the tobacco with other substances in order
to increase toll duty profits. On May eighth, seventeen ninety four,
a revolutionary tribunal tried Lavoisier and found him guilty in
the conspiracy against the people of France. The famed chemist
was sent to the guillotine that very day, as was
(18:22):
his father in law, Jacques Paul's, leaving Marie Anne without
a father or a husband. Yeah. He had always had
some business interests with her father. Uh, And some historians
have pointed to the fact that Jean Parmarra had been
assassinated ten months prior to Lavoisier's beheading as evidence that
Maurras should really not be blamed for Lavoisier's death. But
(18:44):
there are others that would counter that his anti Lavoisier
rhetoric really took a toll on the man's public image.
And this was certainly a time when smear campaigns and
bad press, particularly in France, were coloring the reputations of
people for very long periods of time. For example, well,
let the meat cake came out of a cartoon that
was running at the time, and how long have people
(19:05):
still believed that ranch when it said that eighteen months
after his beheading Lavoisier was exonerated. Yeah, Once things had
calmed down a little bit and there was a more
in depth analysis of everything that had happened, it became
clear that really he was not this evil weasel that
(19:26):
they had made him out to be. Unfortunately, if they
had thought of that eighteen months prior, think of all
the other chemistry stuff, we would have uh. However, on
June eighth, the American Chemical Society and that society Falsese
Dihimi dedicated an international historical chemical landmark to Lavoisier in Paris.
(19:48):
As an additional note, Lavoisier has also had a rather
lasting impression on American science and industry via the DuPont family.
Pierre Samuel DuPont was one of Lavoisier's close friends, and
after the Revolution, during which DuPont had been arrested and
barely managed to escape the guillotine, Pierre Samuel decided to
travel to the United States and start a new life
(20:10):
using gunpowder manufacturing, a knowledge that he had learned from Lavoisier.
DuPont and his son opened up a powder works in
Delaware in eighteen o two, and it eventually became the
huge corporation we know it as today. Yeah, and his
son actually wanted to name it after Lavoisier initially. Oh wow. Yeah. So,
for better or for worse, on all of these points,
(20:33):
he's really in the thick of our modern chemistry knowledge
and happenings even now. So yeah, thank him for having
to learn the periodic table that except many people probably
didn't enjoy learning that. I will just say thank for
the awesomeness that is the periodic table. You don't like
memorizing things, we need it, Yeah, it's important. Do you
(20:54):
have some listener mail for us? I do, and I'm
reading an excerpted version because it's a little bit long,
so I apologize for not including everything. But this is
from our listener, Kathleen Uh and it is in relation
to our bright of Frankenstein episodes, and she says, I
wanted to share a little story I had concerning the
history of the Frankenstein franchise. A few years ago. I
(21:15):
had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing Sarah Carlaw, the
only child of Boris car Law. She came to my
university to give a speech about her father, and as
I was the only one on this newspaper staff who
knew who Boris Karloff was by name, I got the assignment,
which I was super excited to do. I had a
long interview with miss Carloff and she told me that
although Frankenstein is always depicted as green, he was supposed
(21:36):
to be gray. The makeup artist used green paint on Carloff,
but they did this to get a better gray color.
Since the film is in black and white. It also
makes more sense that a body made out of dead
corpses would be gray instead of green. She showed me
the only known footage of Boris in the Green Makeup
on color film that was filmed by her mother on set,
which shows Boris out of character sticking his tongue out
(21:57):
at the camera. It was incredibly charming to see Rankenstein
do such a childish thing. Miss Carlos said that her
father never minded being typecast as a horror actor or
villain because he was so thankful to have a job.
He was half Indians, so his skin tone enhanced by
makeup and his dark voice were perfectly utilized in villain parts.
Karloff was disappointed to not be able to be in
the film Arsenic and Old Lace with Carrie Grant, but
(22:20):
as he had a contract for the play on Broadway,
he was unable to take part in the film, even
though there is a joke written about him in the script.
Karlov is also known for the voice of the narrator
of The Grinch, and Miss Karloff said that he took
that role for his grandchildren. She also went into detail
about how Boris Karloff was one of the founders of
the Screen Actors Guild and his card number was something
(22:41):
like six. She discussed how famous actors would come to
her house, or how her father would go to their houses,
and as they organized to unionized the film business, she
said that they would have to park their cars a
long way from the houses and then walk just in
casey were being watched by studio bosses. I always love
those wonderful yeah. Uh. And then Kathleen mentions that she
(23:02):
would like us to do more topics on Sweden, which
I would like to do as well, uh, and talks
about some other things she would love for us to cover,
so hopefully look at some of those. Um. I have
seen this beautiful picture of Karloff in the full makeup
drinking tea and he's totally pinky out like fancy pants
drinking it. It's the cutest thing I've ever seen. Uh. Yeah,
(23:25):
it's uh, and it is funny. I always kind of
laugh when you see Frankenstein's monster painted green because it
is kind of weird. That's not what happens to of courses.
They don't unless they grow some kind of fungus so much. Uh.
If you would like to write to us and share
cool anecdotes, which I always love, uh, you may do
(23:48):
so at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. You can
also connect with us on Facebook at facebook dot com,
splash history class stuff on Twitter at miss in history
at missed in history dot Tudler dot m, and you
can visit us on pinterest. We are off a bit away, uh,
if you'd like to learn a little bit more about
something we talked about today, not two ideas. One as
(24:09):
you can go to our website and do a search
for oxygen and one of the articles will be what
if I pumped pure oxygen into my car engine instead
of using the air in the atmosphere. And the other
is that if you types or guillotine you get the
article do you really stay conscious after being decapitated? And
there was at one point kind of an apocryphal rumor
story about Lavoisier making a deal with somebody else that, uh,
(24:33):
if he could still if he was still conscious after
decapitation for a moment, he would wink um. That's been
largely discounted, but it's a fun story just the same.
And if anybody would try something like that, it's the
same man that wanted to drink nothing but milk is
a nineteen year old definitely, So if you would like
to look up either of those things or almost anything else,
(24:54):
you can think of. You can do that at our website,
which is how Stuff Works dot Com. The more I
missed thousands of other topics because it has to works
dot com. E
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And the
really interesting thing about the subject of today's podcast is
how many labels he gets. So if you look up
(00:23):
any biography on him, the Andrew will absolutely include some
combination of the words chemist, biologist, geologist, physiologist, economists. He
even held a law degree, though he never practiced law.
But at the end of the day, this particular figure
is most often referred to as a father of modern chemistry.
Uh and we referred to this person, who is Antoinevoisier
(00:45):
before during our episode on Sophie Blanchard and the Ballooning Craze.
But he definitely deserves his own podcast because he was
instrumental in transitioning the field of chemistry from one that
was still back in al chemical thinking and the combination
of science, ants and magic and sort of experimenting in
that arena, to a much more serious and systematic way
(01:06):
to analyze and understand the world around us. And while
he made incredible contributions to science, his life also took
some really important political turns. Amid the turmoil of the
French Revolution. So he had a lot of influence in
very many different and seemingly disparate places throughout his life. Yeah. Well,
(01:27):
and I was startled to learn how many of the
basic things that I learned in science class came straight
from him. Yeah. He was really impactful on our modern lives,
whether we realize it or not. Yes. He was born
Antoine Laurent Lavassier on August forty three, and he was
born pretty well into privilege. His father, Jean Antoine Lavassier,
(01:52):
was a wealthy Parisian lawyer, and his mother was from
a well to do family. When he was five, his
mother passed away and left him a huge inheritance. Yeah.
And while his father had originally been from a town
roughly fifty miles northeast of Paris, and TOI, Laurent was
really born in a Parisian although he did often summer
(02:12):
in his father's hometown, which was villiers Cot, and the
absence of his mother, the Voisier's aunt, Constance became a
significant caregiver and influence on his life. The two of
them are said to have been extremely close, and he
attended the College Deacon. You'll sometimes see this referred to
as the College, and while there he studied astronomy, mathematics, botany, geology, mineralogy, logic, chemistry,
(02:39):
and other disciplines under some of the most respected thinkers
of the day. He eventually focused his education on pursuing
a law degree, primarily to please his family by following
in his father's footsteps. He finished his law studies in
seventeen sixty three, and then he was licensed to practice
a year later. But he never really had a passion
for law and he never practice. Instead, he went right
(03:01):
back to his love of science, primarily chemistry and geology,
and he published a paper in seventeen sixty five addressing
the problem of improving Parisian street lights. UH. Some of
his other earliest work, which he submitted to the Academy
of Sciences, was an analysis of gypsum and plaster of Paris,
and this early early work that he was doing is
(03:22):
still considered important work regarding the composition of cement. So
already we've established that he he his impact is still
felt very significantly today. Yeah. In seventeen sixty eight, while
he was still only twenty five, Lavoisier was inducted into
the Elite Academy of Sciences. This was a big year
for Lavoisier because he also bought an interest in La
(03:45):
firm General and La firm General was a private company
that's the translates to farm General uh, and they actually
collected taxes for the French sovereign. So they would go
out and do the tax collecting and make a profit
of it as they handed off the taxes to the government.
And so while his buy into this group solidified his
(04:07):
fiscal standing and it was really helping him, you know,
fund his life and his experimentation, it made him part
of an organization that was not exactly popular with those
not born into privilege, especially when you consider the political
climate in France at the time. Yeah, as is often
the case with really predominant scientific thinkers, he had a
(04:27):
personality that you might call distinctive. And Arthur Donovan's book
Antoine Lavassier, Science, Administration and Revolution, The Legendary Scientist, is
described as being something of an obsessive Yeah. And to
illustrate this, Donovan tell stories about things Lavoisi did when
he was very young and sort of starting out in
his uh scientific um experimentation, and he talks about him
(04:52):
at nineteen doing this experiment where he wanted to investigate
the effects of diet on human health, and as part
of this experiment, he adopted a plan of consuming nothing
but milk. I like milk, but only milk is a
little far. In a similar episode to study illumination, as
part of work he was doing about street lamps, he
(05:14):
proposed this plan to shut himself up in a dark
room for six weeks straight so that he could make
himself intensely sensitive to different levels of light. There's no
evidence about whether he actually followed through on that one,
so yes, it's clear that, like many groundbreakers throughout history,
Lavoisier really did have this propensity for approaching problems and
(05:34):
ideas with really extreme methodologies. On December sixteen, seventeen seventy one,
a few years after his induction into the Academy of Sciences,
Lavoisier married Marie Anne Pierrette Paul's, who was only thirteen
at the time. While such a young bride is an
unsettling concept, particularly to modern ears, Marie Anne was really
(05:56):
a very, very smart woman, and she became an important
collaborator to Lovoisier. By all accounts, it was quite a
happy marriage and certainly, I think more of an equal
set up than many marriages at the time. Marie Anne
actually learned English just so that she could translate scientific
texts for her husband, and she also educated herself in
(06:17):
art and engraving so she could illustrate his scientific papers.
And she assisted in him him in his experiments throughout
the year, and she often took notes while he was
working um and he really depended on those notes as
like the basis for his writings. So she was really
important and they really did seem to have um a
really good um marriage where they were collaborating all the time.
(06:41):
In seventeen seventy five, he got an appointment to the
Royal Gunpowder and Saltpeter Administration, often referred to as just
the Gunpowder Administration. This branch of the government had been
established by Louis the sixteenth after he ascended the throne
in seventeen seventy four and came to realize that France
didn't really have in any kind of self sufficient sourcing
(07:02):
for gunpowder, and so Lavoisier had been appointed because he
was a chemist, and he moved into the Paris Arsenal
and he set up a lab that was so well
appointed that. Throughout the years, I mean he had this
lab for a couple of decades, many of Europe's finest
chemists and great thinkers were attracted to it, so it
kind of became this interesting little enclave where people could
go and experiment and think and trade ideas. Working in
(07:26):
this then state of the art lab, Lavoisier was able
to to advance the production of gunpowder to a point
where he was making much better quality product at a
very rapid pace. And he was able to refine the
composition of gunpowder by analyzing and regulating the purity of
its ingredients, those primary ingredients being sulfur, charcoal, and potassium
(07:46):
nitrate a K saltpeter. And he also refined the granulation process.
But before we get into some other pretty big chemistry
breakthroughs that happened in Lavoisi's lab, let's take a moment
and talk about our sponsor. So back to the world
of Lavoisier. He spent several hours every day and one
full day every week in the lab, and he said
(08:07):
to have treasured that one full day of research, which
I can completely identify with His wife is quoted as
saying it was for him a day of happiness, some
friends who shared his views, and some young men proud
to be admitted to the honor of collaborating and his experiments.
Assembled in the morning in the laboratory. There they lunched,
(08:28):
There they debated. It was there that you could have
heard this man with his precise mind, his clear intelligence,
his high genius, the loftiness of his philosophical principles illuminating
his conversation. Yes, so she again, it's kind of a
nice um representation of their relationship that she really spoke
very highly of him. Uh. And she clearly admired his
(08:49):
his work, in his mind and the way he worked.
And it's just nice that he had this magical day
every week that he felt like with his best day
and through his rigorous experimentation there. One of the big
things that happened is that Lavoisier became convinced that mass
is neither created nor destroyed during ordinary chemical reactions. Uh.
This is big stuff. The massive substances produced by a
(09:13):
chemical reaction is equal to the mass of the reactants involved.
And I will not pretend to have a particularly gifted
chemistry mind, but most people will recognize this as what
was eventually put forth by Lavoisier as the law of
conservation of mass hugely important basic chemistry concept. Thank you Lavoisier. Yeah.
(09:36):
Those concepts also led him to further examination of the
work of English natural philosopher Joseph Priestley. Marie Anne had
translated a whole lot of Priestly's work for Lavoisier, and
Priestly had in seventeen seventy four heated red mercury oxide
to obtain a colorless gas which would cause a candle
that was lighted in it to burn with quote a
(09:59):
remark be vigorous flame, according to Priestly, and he referred
to this colorless gas as deflogisticated air. At the time,
the prevailing belief in chemistry was that a substance called
flogistine was a volatile part of all combustible substances, and
then it was released as flame during combustion. Uh Flogistin
(10:19):
gets its name from the Greek word for burn. Priestley
thought that his pure air enhanced respiration and caused the
more vigorous and longer lasting burn of candles because it
was free of fistin. He traveled to Paris to meet
with Lavossier and disgust these findings but Lavoisier felt that
the flogistin theory, which had been around for more than
(10:41):
a hundred years at this point, was fundamentally flawed, and
this was a very significant shake up in the scientific
community at the time. This is on par with someone
today claiming that potassium is an illusion. I mean it's
It was really like, completely broke apart the fundamental base
of how they approached chemistry. And when Lavoisier delved more
(11:02):
deeply into analysis of combustion, he was able to identify
the same gas that Priestly had, which Priestly was calling
his deef logisticated air. Uh. Lavoisi eventually named it oxygen,
and by weighing and analyzing the components of combustions, he
came to the conclusion that flogion was, as he had
suspected already, not a thing, because it's just the math
(11:25):
did not add up with his conservation of mass ideas right.
He had come to the conclusion that air actually consisted
of two components, one that combined with metal and supported respiration,
and one that did not support either of these things.
In seventeen seventy seven, he officially put forth a new
theory of combustion that left Flogiston completely off the table.
(11:48):
And it's also during this time in his famous lab
that Lovoisier built on the work of other scientists to
isolate and name hydrogen, and that's the thing that got
him mentioned in our ballooning episode. And seventeen eighty three
he was still embroiled in a constant, rigorous debate in
the scientific community over this anti flogist instance. He became
(12:09):
really adamant that it was time to lead chemistry back
to a stricter way of thinking, and he campaigned for
a systematic analysis of chemistry and science that distinguished true
fact from assumption. His goal was quote to rid chemistry
of every kind of impediment that delays its advance. So
scientific method being established extremely important, as we have discussed
(12:34):
in several episodes. In seventeen seven UH, in collaboration with
Louis Bernard Guiton de Morveaux, Claude, Louis Bertroyer, Antoine, Francois
aquas Uh, he set forth this proposed method de nomenal
chimik and this is basically the early periodic table, and
at this point it only consisted of thirty three elements
(12:56):
which were grouped as gases, metals, non metals, and earth's
and this was pretty groundbreaking, Like basically he was saying,
if you can break a thing down to a point
where you can't break it down any further, that's an element,
and it's going on this list. That's the thing that
we basically take for granted now in chemistry class. Uh.
And then in seventeen eighty nine, so two years later,
(13:17):
still working with a lot of these same collaborators, Lavoisier
published the Trite Element the Simi, which is basically the
elementary Treatise of chemistry, and it's basically the textbook that
really set the stage and transitioned us to modern chemistry officially.
It included the periodic table, it included the law of
conservation of mass, as well as many other concepts, and
(13:39):
Lavoisier anticipated that it was really going to take quite
some time for these new ideas to be accepted. But
interestingly enough, it was really just a couple of years
before the ideas that he and his colleagues had worked
on were just sort of an accepted part of common
scientific practices. And I think it's probably because he was
so strict in his scientific method it it was all
(14:02):
really well laid out, and there wasn't a lot of like,
well we think it's like we tested this, and tested
this and tested this. Even though he was always really
busy in his lab, Lavoisier also worked as a civil servant.
In seven he was chosen as a member of the
Assembly of Orleans, and in this position he began to
drop a plan for improving community socio economic issues, and
(14:25):
this included the establishment of workhouses, canals, insurance societies, and
savings banks. He was also asked to advise on issues
such as sewers, the water supply, and developing a unified
system of weights and measures also known now as the
metric system. Yeah, he really Again, the checklist of things
(14:45):
he contributed to our modern lives starts to get a
little um mind blowing, because everything that he touched we
still are doing. Uh. But as the revelation stirred up
around him, he really did seem to be genuinely interested
in bettering the situation of the lower classes. And this
is something that's been debated throughout the years just to
whether or not he was kind of a foolish, well
(15:07):
off person or if he really was in touch with
these ideas and and really had a keen understanding of
what was going on. He said to have donated money
of his own to the towns of Blois and Ramonte
for the purchase of grains during the famine. But unfortunately
he had already made a pretty significant enemy uh in
(15:27):
revolutionary Jean when he had belittle Mara's work in the sciences.
I think people don't always remember that Mara worked in
science as well as his uh sort of revolutionary status. Mara,
in reference to his interactions with the Academy of Science,
referred at one point to quote the class of geometers
(15:50):
and astronomers which has formed a terrible cabal against me.
The Vossier was among those he felt had a bias
against him, And yeah, he kind of did seem to
think that Marat was as Charlatan. Yeah, he didn't have
high praise for him at all. So there there is
merit to that idea. Uh. In seventeen ninety, Lavoisier is
quoted as saying the state of public affairs in France
(16:13):
has temporarily retarded the progress of science and distracted scientists
from the work that is most precious to them. That
he seemed to be kind of irritated by all of
the things that were going on, and wished they could
just go back to their labs and work on improving
the world and analyzing it. In January of seventeen ninety one,
Jean Paul Morat began to loudly and publicly attack Lavoisier,
(16:36):
and a pamphlet he wrote, I denounce you to the
corea Paus, the leader of the chorus of the Charlatan's
master Lavoisier, son of a land grabber, apprentice chemist, pupil
of the Genevan stock jobber, Necker, a farmer, General commissioner
for gunpowder and salt, Peter, director of the Discount Bank,
Secretary to the King, member of the Academy of Science,
(16:58):
intimate of Volvier, unfaithful administrator of the Paris Food Commission,
and the greatest schemer of our times? Would you believe
that this little gentleman, who enjoys an income of forty
thou livres and who's only claimed to public recognition is
that he imprisoned Paris by cutting off the fresh air
with a wall that cost the poor people thirty three
(17:20):
million livre. Is that he moved gunpowder from the arsenal
into the bast deal on the night of July twelfth,
and is engaged in a devilish intrigue to get himself
elected as administrator of the Department of Paris. Yeah. So
basically Murra is saying, like, oh, you claimed to be,
you know, trying to do all of this civil work. Yeah, yeah, yeah, really,
(17:41):
you just want more power and more money. Your hands
are in everything that's super suspicious. During what what came
to be known as the Reign of Terror, arrest warrants
were issued for all the stakeholders in the firm General Um.
Lavoisier was, of course, among those sought for arrest. An
Allegations against this group of men included embezzlement of government
(18:02):
funds and cutting the tobacco with other substances in order
to increase toll duty profits. On May eighth, seventeen ninety four,
a revolutionary tribunal tried Lavoisier and found him guilty in
the conspiracy against the people of France. The famed chemist
was sent to the guillotine that very day, as was
(18:22):
his father in law, Jacques Paul's, leaving Marie Anne without
a father or a husband. Yeah. He had always had
some business interests with her father. Uh, And some historians
have pointed to the fact that Jean Parmarra had been
assassinated ten months prior to Lavoisier's beheading as evidence that
Maurras should really not be blamed for Lavoisier's death. But
(18:44):
there are others that would counter that his anti Lavoisier
rhetoric really took a toll on the man's public image.
And this was certainly a time when smear campaigns and
bad press, particularly in France, were coloring the reputations of
people for very long periods of time. For example, well,
let the meat cake came out of a cartoon that
was running at the time, and how long have people
(19:05):
still believed that ranch when it said that eighteen months
after his beheading Lavoisier was exonerated. Yeah, Once things had
calmed down a little bit and there was a more
in depth analysis of everything that had happened, it became
clear that really he was not this evil weasel that
(19:26):
they had made him out to be. Unfortunately, if they
had thought of that eighteen months prior, think of all
the other chemistry stuff, we would have uh. However, on
June eighth, the American Chemical Society and that society Falsese
Dihimi dedicated an international historical chemical landmark to Lavoisier in Paris.
(19:48):
As an additional note, Lavoisier has also had a rather
lasting impression on American science and industry via the DuPont family.
Pierre Samuel DuPont was one of Lavoisier's close friends, and
after the Revolution, during which DuPont had been arrested and
barely managed to escape the guillotine, Pierre Samuel decided to
travel to the United States and start a new life
(20:10):
using gunpowder manufacturing, a knowledge that he had learned from Lavoisier.
DuPont and his son opened up a powder works in
Delaware in eighteen o two, and it eventually became the
huge corporation we know it as today. Yeah, and his
son actually wanted to name it after Lavoisier initially. Oh wow. Yeah. So,
for better or for worse, on all of these points,
(20:33):
he's really in the thick of our modern chemistry knowledge
and happenings even now. So yeah, thank him for having
to learn the periodic table that except many people probably
didn't enjoy learning that. I will just say thank for
the awesomeness that is the periodic table. You don't like
memorizing things, we need it, Yeah, it's important. Do you
(20:54):
have some listener mail for us? I do, and I'm
reading an excerpted version because it's a little bit long,
so I apologize for not including everything. But this is
from our listener, Kathleen Uh and it is in relation
to our bright of Frankenstein episodes, and she says, I
wanted to share a little story I had concerning the
history of the Frankenstein franchise. A few years ago. I
(21:15):
had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing Sarah Carlaw, the
only child of Boris car Law. She came to my
university to give a speech about her father, and as
I was the only one on this newspaper staff who
knew who Boris Karloff was by name, I got the assignment,
which I was super excited to do. I had a
long interview with miss Carloff and she told me that
although Frankenstein is always depicted as green, he was supposed
(21:36):
to be gray. The makeup artist used green paint on Carloff,
but they did this to get a better gray color.
Since the film is in black and white. It also
makes more sense that a body made out of dead
corpses would be gray instead of green. She showed me
the only known footage of Boris in the Green Makeup
on color film that was filmed by her mother on set,
which shows Boris out of character sticking his tongue out
(21:57):
at the camera. It was incredibly charming to see Rankenstein
do such a childish thing. Miss Carlos said that her
father never minded being typecast as a horror actor or
villain because he was so thankful to have a job.
He was half Indians, so his skin tone enhanced by
makeup and his dark voice were perfectly utilized in villain parts.
Karloff was disappointed to not be able to be in
the film Arsenic and Old Lace with Carrie Grant, but
(22:20):
as he had a contract for the play on Broadway,
he was unable to take part in the film, even
though there is a joke written about him in the script.
Karlov is also known for the voice of the narrator
of The Grinch, and Miss Karloff said that he took
that role for his grandchildren. She also went into detail
about how Boris Karloff was one of the founders of
the Screen Actors Guild and his card number was something
(22:41):
like six. She discussed how famous actors would come to
her house, or how her father would go to their houses,
and as they organized to unionized the film business, she
said that they would have to park their cars a
long way from the houses and then walk just in
casey were being watched by studio bosses. I always love
those wonderful yeah. Uh. And then Kathleen mentions that she
(23:02):
would like us to do more topics on Sweden, which
I would like to do as well, uh, and talks
about some other things she would love for us to cover,
so hopefully look at some of those. Um. I have
seen this beautiful picture of Karloff in the full makeup
drinking tea and he's totally pinky out like fancy pants
drinking it. It's the cutest thing I've ever seen. Uh. Yeah,
(23:25):
it's uh, and it is funny. I always kind of
laugh when you see Frankenstein's monster painted green because it
is kind of weird. That's not what happens to of courses.
They don't unless they grow some kind of fungus so much. Uh.
If you would like to write to us and share
cool anecdotes, which I always love, uh, you may do
(23:48):
so at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. You can
also connect with us on Facebook at facebook dot com,
splash history class stuff on Twitter at miss in history
at missed in history dot Tudler dot m, and you
can visit us on pinterest. We are off a bit away, uh,
if you'd like to learn a little bit more about
something we talked about today, not two ideas. One as
(24:09):
you can go to our website and do a search
for oxygen and one of the articles will be what
if I pumped pure oxygen into my car engine instead
of using the air in the atmosphere. And the other
is that if you types or guillotine you get the
article do you really stay conscious after being decapitated? And
there was at one point kind of an apocryphal rumor
story about Lavoisier making a deal with somebody else that, uh,
(24:33):
if he could still if he was still conscious after
decapitation for a moment, he would wink um. That's been
largely discounted, but it's a fun story just the same.
And if anybody would try something like that, it's the
same man that wanted to drink nothing but milk is
a nineteen year old definitely, So if you would like
to look up either of those things or almost anything else,
(24:54):
you can think of. You can do that at our website,
which is how Stuff Works dot Com. The more I
missed thousands of other topics because it has to works
dot com. E
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