The Chemical revolution

The Chemical revolution

The chemical revolution, also called the first chemical revolution, was the early modern reformulation of chemistry that culminated in the law of conservation of mass and the oxygen theory of combustion. During the 19th and 20th century, this transformation was credited to the work of the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier (the "father of modern chemistry").

However, recent work on the history of early modern chemistry considers the chemical revolution to consist of gradual changes in chemical theory and practice that emerged over a period of two centuries.

The Irish alchemist, Robert Boyle, laid the foundations for the Chemical Revolution, with his mechanical corpuscular philosophy. 

In 1756,Joseph Black heated lime stone and produced an air which he called fixed air. It did not support burning. Joseph Black demonstrated experimentally that the air fixed in certain reactions is chemically different from common air. Black wanted to know why slaked quicklime (hydrated calcium oxide) was neutralized when exposed to the atmosphere. He found that it absorbed only one component of the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, which he called “fixed air.” Black’s work marked the beginning of investigative efforts devoted to identifying chemically distinct airs, an area of research that grew rapidly during the latter half of the century.

This discovery was particularly important because it empirically proved that 'air' did not consist of only one substance and because it established 'gas' as an important experimental substance. Nearer the end of the 18th century, the experiments by Henry Cavendish and Joseph Priestley further proved that air is not an element and is instead composed of several different gases.

Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, a meticulous experimenter, revolutionized chemistry. He established the law of conservation of mass, determined that combustion and respiration are caused by chemical reactions with what he named “oxygen,” and helped systematize chemical nomenclature, among many other accomplishments.

Lavoisier’s research in the early 1770s focused upon weight gains and losses in calcination. It was known that when metals slowly changed into powders (calxes), as was observed in the rusting of iron, the calx actually weighed more than the original metal, whereas when the calx was “reduced” to a metal, a loss of weight occurred.

Lavoisier also contributed to chemistry a method of understanding combustion and respiration and proof of the composition of water by decomposition into its constituent parts. He explained the theory of combustion, and challenged the phlogiston theory with his views on caloric.

In attempting to dismantle phlogiston theory and implement his own theory of combustion, Lavoisier utilized multiple apparatuses. These included a red-hot iron gun barrel which was designed to have water run through it and decompose, and an alteration of the apparatus which implemented a pneumatic trough at one end, a thermometer, and a barometer. The precision of his measurements was a requirement in convincing opposition of his theories about water as a compound, with instrumentation designed by himself implemented in his research.

Lavoisier is most noted for his discovery of the role oxygen plays in combustion. He recognized and named oxygen (1778) and hydrogen (1783), and opposed the phlogiston theory.

Lavoisier also translated the names of chemical substance into a new nomenclatural language more appealing to scientists of the nineteenth century. Such changes took place in an atmosphere in which the industrial revolution increased public interest in learning and practicing chemistry.

Much of the reasoning behind Antoine Lavoisier being named the "father of modern chemistry" and the start of the chemical revolution lay in his ability to mathematize the field, pushing chemistry to use the experimental methods utilized in other "more exact sciences." Lavoisier changed the field of chemistry by keeping meticulous balance sheets in his research, attempting to show that through the transformation of chemical species the total amount of substance was conserved. Lavoisier used instrumentation for thermometric and barometric measurements in his experiments, and collaborated with Pierre Simon de Laplace in the invention of the calorimeter, an instrument for measuring heat changes in a reaction.

Lavoisier's work was not immediately accepted and it took several decades for it gain momentum.This transition was aided by the work of Jöns Jakob Berzelius, who came up with a simplified shorthand to describe chemical compounds based on John Dalton's theory of atomic weights. Many people credit Lavoisier and his overthrow of phlogiston theory as the traditional chemical revolution, with Lavoisier marking the beginning of the revolution and John Dalton marking its culmination.

Antoine Lavoisier, in a collaborative effort with Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau, Claude Louis Berthollet, and Antoine François de Fourcroy, published Méthode de nomenclature chimique in 1787. This work established a terminology for the "new chemistry" which Lavoisier was creating, which focused on a standardized set of terms, establishment of new elements, and experimental work. Méthode established 55 elements which were substances that could not be broken down into simpler composite parts at the time of publishing. By introducing new terminology into the field, Lavoisier encouraged other chemists to adopt his theories and practices in order to use his terms and stay current in chemistry.

To propagate his ideas, in 1789 he published a textbook, Traité élémentaire de chimie, and began a journal, Annales de Chimie, which carried research reports about the new chemistry almost exclusively.

In1803, Dalton gave the concept of atom. All matter is made up of atoms, he said. He made a list of relative atomic weights. Taking the weight of hydrogen as unity, he calculated the weights of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon and so on.

Proust gave the law of definite proportion. “Elements combine in definite proportion by mass, while forming compounds”, he said.

One of science’s great odd couples — British minister Joseph Priestley and French tax administrator Antoine Lavoisier — together discover a fantastic new gas called oxygen, overturning the reigning theory of chemistry and triggering a worldwide search for new elements. Soon caught up in the hunt is science’s first great showman, a precocious British chemist named Humphry Davy, who dazzles London audiences with his lectures, introduces them to laughing gas and turns the battery into a powerful tool in the search for new elements.

Humphry Davy established that Electricity is the fundamental property of matter.

Humphry Davy discovered new elements, using the Voltaic pile as electric energy to isolate elements of their natural compounds. The list of elements grew over the time. He wrote the book, the elements of Chemistry. The elements were symbolically represented by Jakob Berzelius and used symbols for writing chemical formulae.

Many doubts relating to chemical science were discussed in the first world chemical conference held in 1860 . A list of atomic weights was presented in the meet by Cannizzaro. The young Russian scientist Mendeleev attended this meet and later in1869, he constructed the periodic table of [known] elements. He arranged elements with their increasing atomic weights in rows and columns in his table of elements.

Thus modern chemistry flourished between 1756 and 1869; A century of chemical revolution, Chemistry as a fundamental Science of Matter was established.