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Below are sections of the page "Chemical Revolution," copied and pasted to my sandbox to give me adequate time and space to edit this page to my liking.

"Other factors included new experimental techniques and the discovery of 'fixed air' (carbon dioxide) by Joseph Black in the middle of the 18th century. This discovery was particularly important because it empirically proved that 'air' did not consist of only one substance and because it established 'gas' as an important experimental substance. Nearer the end of the 18th century, the experiments by Henry Cavendish and Joseph Priestleyfurther proved that air is not an element and is instead composed of several different gases. Lavoisier also translated the names of chemical substance into a new nomenclatural language more appealing to scientists of the nineteenth century. Such changes took place in an atmosphere in which the industrial revolutionincreased public interest in learning and practicing chemistry. When describing the task of reinventing chemical nomenclature, Lavoisier attempted to harness the new centrality of chemistry by making the rather hyperbolic claim that:[6]

“ We must clean house thoroughly, for they have made use of an enigmatical language peculiar to themselves, which in general presents one meaning for the adepts and another meaning for the vulgar, and at the same time contains nothing that is rationally intelligible either for the one or for the other. ”

The latter stages of the revolution was fuelled by the 1789 publication of Lavoisier's Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry). Beginning with this publication and others to follow, Lavoisier synthesised the work of others and coined the term "oxygen". He also explained the theory of combustion, and challenged the phlogiston theory with his views on caloric. The Traité incorporates notions of a "new chemistry" and describes the experiments and reasoning that led to his conclusions. Like Newton's Principia, which was the high point of the Scientific Revolution, Lavoisier's Traité can be seen as the culmination of the Chemical Revolution.

Lavoisier's work was not immediately accepted and it took several decades*** for it gain momentum.[7] This transition was aided by the work of Jöns Jakob Berzelius, who came up with a simplified shorthand to describe chemical compounds based on John Dalton's theory of atomic weights"

citations associated with this text:

6. Jaffe, B. (1976). Crucibles: The Story of Chemistry from Alchemy to Nuclear Fission (4th ed.). New York: Dover Publications. ISBN 978-0-486-23342-0.

7. Eddy, Matthew Daniel (2008). The Language of Mineralogy: John Walker, Chemistry and the Edinburgh Medical School 1750-1800. Ashgate.

This page requires more sources and a new section detailing the work of Antoine Lavoisier.

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Below are sections of the page "Antoine Lavoisier," copied and pasted to my sandbox to give me adequate time and space to edit this page to my liking.

Joseph Priestley

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Joseph Priestley, an English chemist known for isolating oxygen, which he termed "dephlogisticated air."

In the spring of 1774 Lavoisier carried out experiments on the calcination of tin and lead in sealed vessels which conclusively confirmed that the increase in weight of metals in combustion was due to combination with air. But the question remained about whether it was combination with common atmospheric air or with only a part of atmospheric air. In October the English chemist Joseph Priestley visited Paris, where he met Lavoisier and told him of the air which he had produced by heating thered calx of mercury with a burning glass and which had supported combustion with extreme vigor. Priestley at this time was unsure of the nature of this gas, but he felt that it was an especially pure form of common air. Lavoisier carried out his own researches on this peculiar substance. The result was his famous memoir On the Nature of the Principle Which Combines with Metals during Their Calcination and Increases Their Weight, read to the Academy on 26 April 1775 (commonly referred to as the Easter Memoir). In the original memoir Lavoisier showed that the mercury calx was a true metallic calx in that it could be reduced with charcoal, giving off Black's fixed air in the process.[11] When reduced without charcoal, it gave off an air which supported respiration and combustion in an enhanced way. He concluded that this was just a pure form of common air, and that it was the air itself "undivided, without alteration, without decomposition" which combined with metals on calcination.

After returning from Paris, Priestley took up once again his investigation of the air from mercury calx. His results now showed that this air was not just an especially pure form of common air but was "five or six times better than common air, for the purpose of respiration, inflammation, and ... every other use of common air." He called the air dephlogisticated air, as he thought it was common air deprived of its phlogiston. Since it was therefore in a state to absorb a much greater quantity of phlogiston given off by burning bodies and respiring animals, the greatly enhanced combustion of substances and the greater ease of breathing in this air were explained.

11.  in French and Memoir on Combustion in General (English translation)

This page is in dire need of more citations (three consecutive sections do not contain any citations), reorganization of the page, and addition to the material.

Contributions to Chemistry

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Oxygen theory of combustion

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During late 1772 Lavoisier turned his attention to the phenomenon of combustion, the topic on which he was to make his most significant contribution to science. He reported the results of his first experiments on combustion in a note to the Academy on 20 October, in which he reported that when phosphorus burned, it combined with a large quantity of air to produce acid spirit of phosphorus, and that the phosphorus increased in weight on burning. In a second sealed note deposited with the Academy a few weeks later (1 November) Lavoisier extended his observations and conclusions to the burning of sulfur and went on to add that "what is observed in the combustion of sulfur and phosphorus may well take place in the case of all substances that gain in weight by combustion and calcination: and I am persuaded that the increase in weight of metallic calces is due to the same cause."

Notable Works

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Easter memoir

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The "official" version of Lavoisier's Easter Memoir appeared in 1778. In the intervening period Lavoisier had ample time to repeat some of Priestley's latest experiments and perform some new ones of his own. In addition to studying Priestley's dephlogisticated air, he studied more thoroughly the residual air after metals had been calcined. He showed that this residual air supported neither combustion nor respiration and that approximately five volumes of this air added to one volume of the dephlogisticated air gave common atmospheric air. Common air was then a mixture of two distinct chemical species with quite different properties. Thus when the revised version of the Easter Memoir was published in 1778, Lavoisier no longer stated that the principle which combined with metals on calcination was just common air but "nothing else than the healthiest and purest part of the air" or the "eminently respirable part of the air." In the following year Lavoisier coined the name oxygen for this constituent of the air, from the Greek words meaning "acid former."[11] and "Considérations générales sur la nature des acides" ("General Considerations on the Nature of Acids," 1778),[12] He was struck by the fact that the combustion products of such nonmetals as sulfur, phosphorus, charcoal, and nitrogen were acidic. He held that all acids contained oxygen and that oxygen was therefore the acidifying principle.

Elementary Treatise of Chemistry

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Lavoisier employed new nomenclature in his Traité élémentaire de chimie (Elementary Treatise on Chemistry), published in 1789. This work represents the synthesis of Lavoisier's contribution to chemistry and can be considered the first modern textbook on the subject. The core of the work was the oxygen theory, and the work became a most effective vehicle for the transmission of the new doctrines. It presented a unified view of new theories of chemistry, contained a clear statement of the law of conservation of mass, and denied the existence of phlogiston. This text clarified the concept of an element as a substance that could not be broken down by any known method of chemical analysis, and presented Lavoisier's theory of the formation of chemical compounds from elements. It remains a classic in the history of science. While many leading chemists of the time refused to accept Lavoisier's new ideas, demand for Traité élémentaire as a textbook in Edinburgh was sufficient to merit translation into English within about a year of its French publication.[14] In any event, the Traité élémentaire was sufficiently sound to convince the next generation.

Joseph Black's "fixed air"

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During 1773 Lavoisier determined to review thoroughly the literature on air, particularly "fixed air," and to repeat many of the experiments of other workers in the field. He published an account of this review in 1774 in a book entitled Opuscules physiques et chimiques (Physical and Chemical Essays). In the course of this review he made his first full study of the work of Joseph Black, the Scottish chemist who had carried out a series of classic quantitative experiments on the mild and caustic alkalies. Black had shown that the difference between a mild alkali, for example, chalk (CaCO3), and the caustic form, for example, quicklime (CaO), lay in the fact that the former contained "fixed air," not common air fixed in the chalk, but a distinct chemical species, now understood to be carbon dioxide (CO2), which was a constituent of the atmosphere. Lavoisier recognized that Black's fixed air was identical with the air evolved when metal calces were reduced with the charcoal and even suggested that the air which combined with metals on calcination and increased the weight might be Black's fixed air, that is, CO2.

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Both sections that will be edited for this project (Antoine Lavoisier and Chemical Revolution, specifically as they pertain to each other), are severally under-cited. A section will be added to the Chemical Revolution page detailing Lavoisier's influence on the event. This will incorporate some of the text from the article as is, as well as adding original text. The Lavoisier page will be reorganized (the page does not have a good flow and there are much too many sub headings under Biography). More citations will be added to the text that will be moved around. Finally, original text will be added as to Lavoisier's influence on the chemical revolution.

Additional sources used to update this page:

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