Antoine Lavoisier-Life, Contributions, and the French Revolution Research Paper

Antoine Lavoisier-Life, Contributions, and the French Revolution - Research Paper Example He studied at College Mazarin from 1754 to 1761, where he was taught several subjects, such as Botany, Mathematics, Chemistry and Astronomy. In 1771, when he was 28 years old, he married Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, when she was barely 13 years old. Marie-Anne also took a fancy to chemistry and assisted her husband in translating crucial English documents in French. Furthermore, she came out with a biography of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier by the name ‘Lavoisier’s memoirs’. Lavoisier’s father bought a title for him in 1772, and consequently he came into membership with a privately owned company called the Farmer’s General that collected taxes from the royal government. Subsequently, his wealth and influence amplified considerably. Since he was a member of the Gun Powder Commission, he resided in the Paris Arsenal where he built a private laboratory to investigate and analyze the results of chemical experiments which had been performed by others, and als o to carry out his own. During the year 1791, he was appointed as a Secretary of the Treasury (Scott, 2). Antoine not only came with the discovery and naming of oxygen. He also established the procedure of rusting and asserted the significance of oxygen for the survival of animals and plants by ascertaining its role in respiration. He was also one of the first people who performed some complex chemical experiments, which gave rise to stoichiometry. Furthermore, he also founded the law of conservation of mass and, with the assistance of his chemical experiments, he managed to determine that animals made use of oxygen as a respiratory gas and this gas exchange was a process, which was used to create heat, and it was also very similar to the process of burning of a candle. Other than his role as a physicist, botanist and chemist, Lavoisier also achieved a law degree, but he never practiced law formally in his life. He was a prominent member of the Ferme Generale, and was also one of th e 28th tax collectors of France. During the French Revolution, he was exposed to the ire of the French revolutionaries. Being a liberal, he had to undergo major opposition from Jean-Paul Marat who supported revolutionaries. When the French Revolution was at its peak, Jean Paul Marat pressed treason accusations against Lavoisier for selling watered-down tobacco and several other crimes. During the year 1794, the period of the â€Å"Reign of Terror’, Antoine provided help to some foreign scientists and mathematicians, for example, Joseph Lagrange, under treason (New Advent, 1). The judge presiding over the case of Lavoisier rejected the appeal to forgive Lavoisir’s life and to let him go on with his unfinished work. He said, â€Å"The Republic needs neither scientists nor chemists; the course of justice cannot be delayed.† Consequently, on 8th May, 1794 when Lavoisier was 50 years old, he was guillotined in Paris. Lavoisier’s contribution to the inception of advanced chemistry was primarily concentrated in the field of theory. He added extensions, summarized and confirmed the theories and discoveries of several of his contemporaries in England and the European Continent, particularly Henry Cavendish (1731-1810), Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) and Joseph Black (1728-1799). The consequence was that there was a new and more profound understanding of chemical processes that created the