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Updated: June 16, 2025
That of Torricelli and Paschal of the actual and measurable weight of the atmosphere, which was the beginning for us of the science of physics, and that of Lavoisier who suspected, and Priestly who demonstrated, oxygen and destroyed the last vestiges of the theory of alchemy.
Lavoisier thought of these reactions as the tearing asunder, by mercury, of nitric acid into definite quantities of its three components, themselves distinct substances, nitrous air, water, and oxygen; and the combination of the mercury with a certain measurable quantity of one of these components, namely, oxygen, followed by the union of this compound of mercury and oxygen with what remained of the components of nitric acid.
His first work of importance was a paper on the practical illumination of the streets of Paris, for which a prize had been offered by M. de Sartine, the chief of police. This prize was not awarded to Lavoisier, but his suggestions were of such importance that the king directed that a gold medal be bestowed upon the young author at the public sitting of the Academy in April, 1776.
Priestley, M. Lavoisier, and other philosophers, it appears, that the basis of atmospherical air, called oxygene, is received by the blood through the membranes of the lungs; and that by this addition the colour of the blood is changed from a dark to a light red.
One might also mention the great Lavoisier, Magellan the Jesuit philosopher, and a dozen other scientific, ecclesiastical, and political celebrities. The Memoir, however, is almost as remarkable for what it does not tell concerning these people as for what it does. Priestley was not anecdotal. And he is only a little less reticent about himself than he is about others.
The foundation for such a theory was finally laid, as we shall see presently, by the work of Black, Priestley, Cavendish, and Lavoisier, in the eighteenth century, but the phlogiston theory cannot be said to have finally succumbed until the opening years of the nineteenth century.
I knew only that the French had thrown off the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV. and XV., had put the King and Queen to death, guillotined many persons, one of whom was Lavoisier, and had ultimately fallen under the despotism of Bonaparte. From this time, as was natural, the subject took an immense hold of my feelings.
What has the average academically-trained man to offer? He has an assortment of second-hand ideas borrowed from Plato and Socrates, from Ovid and Virgil and Horace; he can echo Voltaire, Goethe, Kant, Shakespeare, Dante; he can dish up Aristotle, Pythagoras, Bacon, Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday and Darwin.
Without going back to early and isolated attempts like those of Daniel Bernoulli, who, in his hydrodynamics, propounded the basis of the kinetic theory of gases, or the researches of Boyle on friction, we may recall, to show how it was propounded in former times, a rather forgotten page of the Mémoire sur la Chaleur, published in 1780 by Lavoisier and Laplace: "Other physicists," they wrote, after setting out the theory of caloric, "think that heat is nothing but the result of the insensible vibrations of matter.... In the system we are now examining, heat is the vis viva resulting from the insensible movements of the molecules of a body; it is the sum of the products of the mass of each molecule by the square of its velocity.... We shall not decide between the two preceding hypotheses; several phenomena seem to support the last mentioned for instance, that of the heat produced by the friction of two solid bodies.
Both in Protestant and Catholic countries instruction in chemistry and physics was discouraged by Church authorities, and in England the theologians strenuously opposed the Royal Society and the Association for the Advancement of Science. Francis Bacon and Boyle were denounced by the clergy, and Lavoisier was sent to the scaffold by the Parisian mob.
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