Book Description

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (Antoine Lavoisier after the French Revolution; August 26, 1743 - May 8, 1794) was a French nobleman and chemist who was central to the 18th-century chemical revolution and who had a large influence on both the history of chemistry and the history of biology. He is widely considered in popular literature as the "father of modern chemistry." The 1789 publication of Elements of Chemistry (Trait� �l�mentaire de chimie) became the first modern textbook on chemistry and represented Lavoisier's major contribution to the field. Within this work, Lavoisier introduced a new nomenclature, proposed an oxygen theory that dismantled the theory of phlogiston, presented a clear statement of the law of conservation of mass, clarified the concept of an element as a substance that could not be broken down by any known physical process, and described the method whereby compounds are formed from elements.