Antoine Lavoisier
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Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, also Antoine Lavoisier after the French Revolution, was a French nobleman and chemist who was central to the 18th-century chemical revolution and who had a large influenc
Detail from Portrait of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his Wife by Jacques-Louis David
The Collège des Quatre-Nations in Paris
Lavoisier conducting an experiment on respiration in the 1770s
Portrait of Lavoisier explaining to his wife the result of his experiments on air by Ernest Board
Phlogiston theory
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The phlogiston theory, a superseded scientific theory, postulated the existence of a fire-like element dubbed phlogiston contained within combustible bodies and released during combustion. The name co
Antoine Lavoisier
…the science from a qualitative to a quantitative one. Lavoisier is noted for his discovery of the role oxygen plays in combustion, opposing the prior phlogiston theory of combustion. He named oxygen (1778), recognizing it as an element, and also recognized hydrogen as an element (1783). By using more precise measurements than…
The alchemist and physician J. J. Becher proposed the phlogiston theory.
Georg Ernst Stahl