SYMHC Classics: The Explosive Career of Antoine Lavoisier

Today we're revisiting the life of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, who 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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Today we're gonna talk about explosives, or really
an eighteenth century scientist known for his work with explosives,
which was Antoine Lavoisier and often called the father of
modern chemistry. Lavoisier's life was notable for his work actually
across a variety of scientific disciplines. He didn't only focus
on making things blow up. Uh and he you know,

(00:24):
did all of this right in the middle of the
French Revolution, which makes his life sort of notable. Welcome
to Stuff you missed in history class from housetop Works
dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly

(00:45):
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 any biography
on him, the andro will absolutely include some combination of
the words chemist, to biologist, geologist, physiologist, economist. He even
held a law degree, though he never practiced law. But

(01:06):
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 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

(01:27):
was still back in alchemical thinking, in the combination of
science and magic and sort of experimenting in that arena,
to a much more serious and systematic way 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.

(01:50):
So he had a lot of influence in very many
different and seemingly disparate places throughout his life. Yeah. Well,
and I was startled to learn how many of the
basic things that I learned in science class came straight
from him. He was really impactful on our modern lives,

(02:10):
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,
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,

(02:34):
and while his father had originally been from a town
roughly fifty miles northeast of Paris, and tir Laurent was
really born in a Parisian although he did often summer
in his father's hometown, which was Villiers Cotli and the
absence of his mother, Lavoisier's aunt, Constance became a significant
caregiver and influence on his life. The two of them

(02:54):
are said to have been extremely close, and he attended
the College to Catherline. You'll sometimes see this referred to
as the College Mazeona, and while there he studied astronomy, mathematics, botany, geology, mineralogy, logic, chemistry,
and other disciplines under some of the most respected thinkers
of the day. He eventually focused his education on pursuing

(03:17):
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 practiced. Instead, he went right
back to his love of science, primarily chemistry and geology,

(03:37):
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
still considered important work regarding the composition of cement. So
already we've established that he he his impact is still

(04:01):
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
firon General. And La firm General was a private company
that's the translates to farm General uh, and they actually

(04:25):
collected taxes for the French sovereign. So they would go
out and do the tax collecting and make a profit
off of it as they handed off the taxes to
the government. And so while his buy into this group
solidified his 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

(04:46):
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 personality that you might call this stay inctive.
And Arthur Donovan's book Antoine Lavossier, Science, Administration and Revolution,
the Legendary Scientist, is described as being something of an

(05:09):
obsessive Yeah. To illustrate this, Donovan tell stories about things
Lavoisia did when he was very young and sort of
starting out in his scientific um experimentation. And he talks
about him 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

(05:31):
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 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

(05:54):
no evidence about whether he actually followed through on that one,
so yes, it's clear that, like many soroundbreakers throughout history,
Lavoisier really did have this propensity for approaching problems and
ideas with really extreme methodologies. On December sixteenth, seventeen seventy one,
a few years after his induction into the Academy of Sciences,

(06:15):
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
a very very smart woman and she became an important
collaborator to Lavoisier. By all accounts, it was quite a
happy marriage and certainly I think more of an equal

(06:38):
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
art and engraving so she could illustrate his scientific papers.
And she assisted in him in his experiments throughout the year,
and she often took notes while he was working UM

(06:58):
and he really depended on those oats 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. In
seventeen seventy five, he got an appointment to the Royal
Gunpowder and Salt Peter Administration, often referred to as just

(07:20):
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
for gunpowder. And so Lavoisier had been appointed because he
was a chemist, and he moved into the Paris Arsenal

(07:40):
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
this then state of the art lab, Lavoisier was able
to to advance the production of gunpowder to a point

(08:03):
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
nitrate AK Saltpeter, and he also refined the granulation process.
But before we get into some other pretty big chemistry

(08:25):
breakthroughs that happened in Lavois's lab, let's take a moment
and talk about our sponsor. So back to the world
of Lavoissier. He spent several hours every day, in one
full day every week in the lab, and he's said

(08:45):
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 it did to the honor of collaborating. His
experiments assembled in the morning, and the laboratory there they lunched,

(09:06):
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

(09:27):
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 was his best day.
And through his rigorous experimentation there. Uh, 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

(09:51):
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.

(10:15):
This concept 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
Priestley 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

(10:37):
remarkably vigorous flame according to Priestley, and he referred to
this colorless gas as deflogisticated air. At the time, the
prevailing belief in chemistry was that a substance called phlogistine
was a volatile part of all combustible substances, and that
it was released as flame during combustion. UH. Flogistin gets

(10:58):
its name from the Greek word for burn. Priestly thought
that his pure air enhanced respiration and caused the more
vigorous and longer lasting burn of candles because it was
free of flogiston. We traveled to Paris to meet with
Lavosier and disgust these findings. But Lavoisier felt that the
flogist in theory, which had been around for more than

(11:19):
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 approach chemistry. And when Lavoisier delved more

(11:40):
deeply into analysis of combustion, he was able to identify
the same gas that Priestly had, which Priestly was calling
his def logisticated air UH. Lavoisier eventually named it oxygen,
and by weighing and analyzing the components of combustions, he
came to the conclusion that flogiston was, as he had
suspected already, not a thing, because it's just the math

(12:03):
did not add up with his conservation of maths 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 flogistin completely off the table.

(12:26):
And it's also during this time in his famous lab
that Lovoisier built on the work of other scientists to
isolate a name hydrogen. And that's the thing that got
him mentioned in our ballooning episode. In seventeen eighty three,
he was still embroiled in a constant, rigorous debate in
a scientific community over this anti flogist in stance. He
became really adamant that it was time to lead chemistry

(12:49):
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've discussed

(13:12):
in several episodes. In sev seven, in collaboration with Louis
Bernard Guiton de Morveaux, Claude, Louis Bertroi, Atoine, Francois fuquax Uh,
he set forth this proposed method in Nomen Simik, and
this is basically the early periodic table, and at this

(13:32):
point it only consisted of thirty three elements 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

(13:53):
then in seventeen eighty nine, so two years later, still
working with a lot of these same collaborators, Lavoisier published
the Ite Elementarre Demi, which is basically the Elementary Treatise
of chemistry, and it's basically the text book that really
set the stage and transitioned us to modern chemistry. Officially,
it included the periodic table. It included the law of

(14:14):
conservation of mass, as well as many other concepts, and
Lavoisie 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

(14:36):
so strict in his scientific method that it was all
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. Right. 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

(14:58):
drop a plan for improving community socio economic issues, and
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

(15:23):
he contributed to our modern lives starts to get a
little um mind blowing, because everything that he touched weets
still are doing. But as the revelation stirred up around him,
he really did seem to be genuinely interested in bettering

(15:43):
the situation of the lower classes. And this is something
that's been debated throughout the years as to whether or
not he was kind of a foolish, well 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

(16:04):
purchase of grains during the famine. But unfortunately he had
already made a pretty significant enemy uh in 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,

(16:26):
in reference to his interactions with the Academy of Science,
referred at one point to quote the class of geometers
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

(16:47):
high praise for him at all, So there there is
merit to that idea. Uh. In seventy Lovoisier is quoted
as saying, the state of public affairs in France has
temporarily retarded the progress of science and distracted scientists from
the work that is most precious to them. The key
seemed to be kind of irritated by all of the
things that were going on and wished they could just

(17:08):
go back to their labs and work on improving the
world and analyzing it. In January of seventee, Jean Paul
Marat began to loudly and publicly attack Lavoisier, and a
pamphlet he wrote, I'd denounce you to the Coria Paus,
the leader of the chorus of the Charlatan's master. Lavoisier,
son of a land grabber, apprentice chemist, pupil of the

(17:31):
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, intimate of Voulivier,
unfaithful administrator of the Paris Food Commission, and the greatest
schemer of our times. Would you believe that this little

(17:52):
gentleman who enjoys an income of forty thou livres and
whose only claim to public recognition is that he imprisoned
Paris by utting off the fresh air with a wall
that cost the poor people thirty three million livre, is
that he moved gunpowder from the arsenal into the bast
deal on the night of July twelfth and thirteen, is

(18:12):
engaged in a devilish intrigue to get himself elected as
administrator of the Department of Paris. Yeah. So basically Mura
is saying like, oh, you claimed to be, you know,
trying to do all of this civil work. Yeah yeah, yeah, really,
you just want more power and more money. Your hands
are in everything that's super suspicious, and during what what
came to be known as the Reign of Terror, arrest

(18:34):
warrants were issued for all the stakeholders in the firm
General Um. Lavoisier was of course among those sought for arrest,
and allegations against this group of men included embezzlement, of
government 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

(18:58):
guilty and they can spiracy against the people of France.
The famed chemist was sent to the guillotine that very day,
as was 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

(19:19):
had been assassinated ten months prior to Lavoisier's beheading as
evidence that Maras should really not be blamed for Lavoisier's death.
But 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

(19:40):
people for very long periods of time. For example, let
the meat cake came out of a cartoon that was
running at the time, and how long have people 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

(20:04):
depth analysis of everything that had happened, it became clear
that really he was not this evil weasel that 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 Deshimi, dedicated

(20:27):
an international Historical chemical Landmark to Lavoisier in Paris. 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

(20:50):
travel to the United States and start a new life
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 Lavoisia initially. Oh wow. Yeah.

(21:13):
So for Petter or for worse on all of these points,
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

(21:34):
memorizing things, we need it. Yeah, it's important. Thank you
so much for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since
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(21:56):
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