ANTOINE LAVOISIER, the revolutionary who transformed chemistry, was himself, ironically, a victim of the French Revolution. Though he had urged reforms such as a free press, and taxes on the nobility, the mob remembered him as a one-time tax collector and landowner. He was guillotined in 1794.
Even late in the age, scientists still thought air, water and fire to be indivisible elements and identified chemicals by kitchen names such as liver of sulphur, butter of arsenic and Glauber's salts. Then, touched by the Enlightenment's scientific explosion, the chemists began systematically to weigh, measure and test. Henry Cavendish isolated hydrogen; Joseph Black discovered carbon dioxide. The
Master, Antoine Lavoisier, established the doctrine of oxidation, solving the ancient mystery of fire. By proving that matter cannot be created or destroyed in chemical changes, Lavoisier further laid the groundwork for modern chemistry. No other scientists of the era matched the devotion of the chemists. In an age that believed firmly in trial and error, they were the greatest empiricists of all.
WATER, Lavoisier knew, is compounded of oxygen and hydrogen. To demonstrate this he built the device at the right. The two gases entered the flask through the brass tubes and united chemically when exploded with an electric spark: there was a bang, and drops of water collected on the sides.
KEY AND KITE experiment, devised by Benjamin Franklin in 1752, proved that lightning was similar to static electricity. A kite brought bluish “electric fire" down from a thundercloud, along a wet string to a key and then into a Leyden jar.
LIGHTNING/asciMflfCii the era's theorists. In 1752 a French botanist brought lightning to earth via an iron rod. Soon everyone was experimenting, and the inevitable happened: a scientist in Russia used an ungrounded rod, and was electrocuted.
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