Who is considered the father of modern chemistry?

Answer 1

Antoine Lavoisier is considered the father of modern chemistry. Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier the father of modern chemistry, was a French noble prominent in the histories of chemistry and Biology. He stated the first version of the law of conservation of mass, recognized and named oxygen (1778) and hydrogen (1783), abolished the phlogiston theory, helped construct the metric system, wrote the first extensive list of elements, and helped to reform chemical nomenclature. He discovered that, although matter may change its form or shape, its mass always remains the same. Thus, for instance, if water is heated to steam, if salt is dissolved in water or if a piece of wood is burned to ashes, the total mass remains unchanged. He was also an investor and administrator of the "Ferme Générale" a private tax collection company; chairman of the board of the Discount Bank (later the Banque de France); and a powerful member of a number of other aristocratic administrative councils. All of these political and economic activities enabled him to fund his scientific research. At the height of the French Revolution he was accused by Marat of selling watered-down tobacco, and of other crimes, and was beheaded.

Lavoisier also demonstrated the role of oxygen in the rusting of metal, as well as oxygen's role in animal and plant respiration. Working with Pierre-Simon Laplace, Lavoisier conducted experiments that showed that respiration was essentially a slow combustion of organic material using inhaled oxygen. Lavoisier's explanation of combustion disproved the phlogiston theory, which postulated that materials released a substance called phlogiston when they burned.

Lavoisier also discovered that Henry Cavendish's "inflammable air", which Lavoisier had termed hydrogen (Greek for "water-former"), combined with oxygen to produce a dew which, as Joseph Priestley had reported, appeared to be water. Lavoisier's work was partly based on the research of Priestley. However, he tried to take credit for Priestley's discoveries. This tendency to use the results of others without acknowledgment, then draw conclusions of his own, is said to be characteristic of Lavoisier. In "Sur la combustion en général" ("On Combustion in general," 1777) and "Considérations Générales sur la Nature des Acides" ("General Considerations on the Nature of Acids," 1778), he demonstrated that the "air" responsible for combustion was also the source of acidity. In 1779, he named this part of the air "oxygen" (Greek for "becoming sharp" because he claimed that the sharp taste of acids came from oxygen), and the other "azote" (Greek for "no life"). In "Réflexions sur le Phlogistique"("Reflections on Phlogiston," 1783), Lavoisier showed the phlogiston theory to be inconsistent.