Who is Antoine Lavoisier?
Antoine Lavoisier was born into a wealthy family in 1743 in Paris, the capital of today’s France. Lavoisier, who lost her mother at a young age, raised Lavoisier with great interest and support from her father. Antoine Lavoisier, who was interested in science in a short time, quickly proved his age on this subject at the age of twenty. He participated in a project competition on the illumination of the streets of Paris at a young age and won the first place with his project. His studies on Chemistry, which would become his main major when he was 25, made him an academic member at a young age. With this success, Lavoisier, who started to work in a government commission in a short time, contributed to the projects related to the creation of the Metric system and the geological mapping of France, although he was a young scientist.
Antoine Lavoisier’s contributions to the science of chemistry
Besides his studies in science, Antoine Lavoisier was not a person who turned his eyes to the political problems of the country he lived in. Lavoisier, who came out in the world of science at a young age in pairs, is known for his Flogiston theory. According to this theory, the event occurring during the combustion of a substance was associated with a gas. It was Lavoisier who found the truth that that gas was the breathing oxygen. Many similar discoveries of Lavoisier, who made great contributions to the transformation of alchemical science into the science of chemistry, the reflex of looking at Chemistry from a logical point of view, has been an important personality in gaining the power of Chemistry science today.
Proposing Antoine Lavoisier’s ‘Law of Conservation of Mass’
Antoine Lavoisier also opened the way to the law of conservation of mass in his scientific studies, in which the existence of oxygen was revealed. In fact, the destruction of Fligston’s theory was a revolution in science in that it also revealed that the science of chemistry would dominate the Modern World. Lavoisier was quick to announce this discovery to the world. Antoine Lavoisier, the Law of the Conservation of Mass, known as his own name, can put forward the fact that nothing is created from nothing in all the functions of nature, that matter remains the same in all experimental transformations, and that elements preserve their quantitative and qualitative properties in all their compounds, as an axiom we know today. He created Chemistry.
Law of Conservation of Mass and the Trial of Lavoisier
Lavoisier’s discovery changed many balances at that time. Lavoisier’s rapid prominence had blurred the balances in politically complicated France. After the French Revolution, the revolutionary regime had a strict understanding. For this reason, many people were decided to be executed. In fact, because of the painfulness of such forms of execution, Doctor Guillotin suggested the use of the instrument known as the guillotine today, so that people do not suffer before death. In 1794, Antoine Lavoisier was charged with 2 articles by the Revolutionary Court.
- Its relationship with the anti-revolutionary aristocracy (this article was considered one of the biggest crimes in France after the revolution)
- It was a crime of corruption in tax collection. (Lavoisier spent some of the taxes he collected on laboratory expenses)
Antoine Lavoisier’s last experiment
In the case held at the Revolutionary Court, Lavoisier was sentenced to death. Lavoisier asked permission from the court to finish his scientific studies, but received the reply from the court judge that “the Republic does not need scholars or chemists, the manifestation of justice cannot be delayed.”
Having been executed, Lavoisier spoke to Mathematician Langrange and offered to do a scientific study while he was going to be executed with the guillotine. It has been alleged that Lavoisier was decapitated with a guillotine and that he blinked twice after his head was removed from his body. This was the last contribution of Antoine Lavoisier, who made great efforts in the name of science, to science. It is also noted that Lavoisier read a book even while going to the guillotine and put a bookmark in the place where he stayed in the book he read while he was being executed.
