1700--1800


 * //Joseph Black (1728-1799)//**

Country of Origin: France

Year of Discovery: 1754 Black was of Scottish descent and born in France in 1728. He was taught English by his mother along with his twelve other brothers and sisters. He left home early to study Latin and Greek and later went onto Glasgow University where he began studying art. With the push of his father, he started to study medicine and became a professor of chemistry in Edinburgh.

Joseph Black developed the analytical balance as well as the theory of latent heat. He heated chalk and saw that the mass of the water and the chalk remained the same. Although he was a leader in the filed of chemistry, he helped with the idea that matter could not be created nor destroyed. In his time, he did experiments surounding the concept of latent heat of fusion by studying the melting and freezing of water. Black, during his time, was involved with the study of heat capacity as well as the early steps surrounding thermodynamics. Through his experiments on thermodynamics, he was able to help James Watt improve and better the functions of steam engines. One of his most famous discoveries was the finding of Carbon Dioxide, which he called "fixed-air" at the time.




 * //Joseph Priestly (1733-1804)//**

Country of Origin: England

Year of Discovery: 1772

Joseph Priestly was born to a Calvinist family in England and was the oldest of six children. After his mother passed away and his father remarried, he was sent away to live with his aunt. His aunt saw that he was a very intelligent young man and worked hard to make sure he got a good education. He later became very ill and almost died but he survived through it. He was left with a stutter after this illness but he started off his career in ministry. He taught theories that were not accepted and caused him to flee to America to escape execution. He was a supported of both the French and American Revolutions.

Joseph Priestly discovered and isolated oxygen and soon realized that air could be measured by breathability. Air could be polluted but cleaned through different processes in nature. He formed his theory of combustion and saw the importance of oxygen in this process. With these discoveries came the idea that air was in fact not an element. Most importantly, through his experiments, Priestly determined that electrical forces were similar to gravitational forces.

Priestly...



Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794)

Country of Origin: Paris, France

Year of Discovery: 1778 Lavoisier was born to a wealthy French family in 1743 and went to school to follow his father footsteps in the study of law. Instead of being a lawyer, however, he studied geology under his mentor, Jean Guettard. He was later elected into the Royal Academy of Science and he was a supporter of change during the French Revolution. It is likely that he was greatly influenced by the French Revolutionwhich surrounded him throughout his major years as a scientist. He was for social as well as tax change but because he collected tax for the government, he was executed during the Reign of Terror.

Lavoisier repeated many of Priestley’s experiments and studied the different types of air. Most important was his law of conservation of mass. Basically what this stated was that matter could not be created nor destroyed. Instead, it could be rearranged but it could not just appear or disappear. According to Lavoister, the only thing that would change in a chemical reaction is the reactants form. Lavoister is also famous for his work surounding chemical nomenclature, otherwise known as the naming of compounds.



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**//Charles Augustin Coulomb (1736-1806)//** Country of Origin: France Year of Discovery: 1780

Coulomb came from a family of wealth and a family heavily involved in the legal profession. His family moved to Paris where he attended Collège Mazarin, studying the classics, philosophy, astronomy and chemistry. While still in school, his father lost the majority of his wealth with poor financial decisions but Coulomb did not give up on studying. He soon joined the Society of Sciences and graduated from his school in 1761. As he became more and more involved with chemistry, he developed a unit today called the coulomb and became an important figure with the atomic history with “Coulomb’s Law.” Coulomb’s Law states that “the force between two electrical charges is proportional to the product of the charges and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.” This law has to do with the force that surrounds two charged particles and the way they act towards another. A coulomb (C) is the standard unit of charge in the metric system. With this new unit, electrical forces could now be written in a mathematical equation allowing future scientists to better understand how the atoms and charges worked.

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 * Coulomb...