1700-1800+LG


 * __Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier__**



Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier was born August 26, 17 in Paris, and lived a short life and died at the age of 51 on May 8, 1794. Lavoisier originally got his degree in law in compliance with his fathers wishes but was more interested in bigger and better things, science. In 1768, at the age of 25, was appointed as a member of the Academy of Science, one of Frances most prestigious scientific society of its time. In 1775 he was appointed head of the Royal Gunpowder and Saltpeter Administration. Here he set up a small laboratory that attracted other young enthusiastic chemists to come work during the "chemical revolution". With he partners, he worked on increasing the potency of gunpowder by learning how to separate out contaminates in the saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur as well as developing better ways to process the different parts of gunpowder.

In his development of better gunpowder, he learned other things we would call "basic" counterparts of chemistry. He learned that weight would be conserved through out a chemical reaction. He also learned how oxygen can play a major role in determining the weights and reagents within a reaction. He also proved his theories through the decomposition and composition that water is made up of Oxygen and Hydrogen. Previously water was thought to contain one Oxygen and one Hydrogen. Lavoisier found that you produced double the amount of Hydrogen than Oxygen when decomposing water. In 1789, Lavoisier published the textbook //Traité Élémentaire de chimie//


 * __Joseph Black__**



Joseph Black was born in Bordeaux, France on April 16, 1728 to a Scottish family and died December 6, 1799. Black was a professor of medicine at the University of Glasgow. At his time working at Glasgow, he worked very closely with James Watt experimenting with steam.

Black is most famous for not a discovery, but an invention. (pictured below) He was the first to create the analytical balance in 1750 that we still use today. This was a major leap in the accuracy of finding the mass of an objects. The sample was placed on one side, and connected via a lightweight bar over a sharp wedge fulcrum, an area set for standardized weights is placed on the other until the two masses "balance" each other out.

Black is also famous for his discovery in 1761 of latent and specific heat. In his experiments, he found heat is applied to ice, the ice does get warmer, it simply produces more water. Like ice, when water is heated, the waters temperature will no exceed 212 degrees, but more steam is produced.

Black was also the first to discover carbon dioxide. He called this gas "fixed air" and got it by applying heat or acid to limestone. In his experiments he found that it did not support fire nor animal life. Through further experimentation, he found it was the byproduct of respiration




 * __ Jacques Charles __**



Charles was a French born ( November 12, 1746 - April 7, 1823) chemist, mathematician, and avid balloonist. Although he is probably most remembered for his work with hydrogen and balloons by the French people, within the scientific community, he is most known for his work with the laws of volumes now known as Charles' law. Charles gave an equation to the expansion of an a gas due to heat before and after it was heated. The formula is V1/T1 = V2/T2. This simple equation means that given a certain volume and temperate, when heated the volume with rise in proportion to the temperature and the two values will be equal signifying equality.