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LAVOISIER-The Crucial Year the Background and Origin of His First LAVOISIER-THE CRUCIAL YEAR: The Background and Origin of His First Experiments on Combustion in z772 Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, 17 43-1794, a portrait by David (Photo Roger-Viollet) LA VOISIER -The Crucial Year The Background and Origin of His First Experiments on Combustion in 1772 /J_y llenr_y (Juerlac CORNELL UNIVERSITY CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca, New York Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. This work has been brought to publication with the assistance of a grant from the Ford Foundation. Copyright © 1961 by Cornell University First paperback printing 2019 The text of this book is li censed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommerciai-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. To use this book, or parts of this book, in any way not covered by the li cense, please contact Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978- 1-501 7-4663-5 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-5017-4664-2 (pdf) ISBN 978-1-5017-4665-9 ( epub/mobi) Librarians: A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress TO Andrew Norman Meldrum (1876-1934) AND Helene Metzger (188g-1944) Acknowledgments MUCH of the research and much of the writing of a first draft of this book was completed while I was a mem­ ber of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, in 1953-1955. To the Institute's distinguished director, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, and to the late Edward Mead Earle, I am especially indebted for the privilege of those two unhampered years of research and study. I wish to thank Mrs. Marian Hartz for secretarial assistance and Miss Judith Sachs, librarian of the Institute, for guiding an importunate visitor to needed reference materials and to the riches of the great Rosenwald collection of rare books in the history of science. The completion of the manuscript was postponed until I could consult the second volume ( 1957 ) of Lavoisier's Correspondance, covering the years 1772-1775. In the meantime, with the resources of Cornell's fine basic col­ lection in the history of science, I was able to dispose of certain controverted matters-such as the dating of Lavoisier's February memorandum-and publish the re­ sults separately as articles. At all stages of my investiga­ tions I have drawn extravagantly on my treasury of grace with the devoted staff of the Cornell University Library. I owe special thanks to Dr. Felix Reichmann for his speed vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS and skill in obtaining rare books for the collection and to Miss Josephine Tharpe and Miss Frances Lauman for the many services reference librarians in their mysterious way know how to perform. I wish also to thank their colleagues in the other American libraries where I have worked, especially the Harvard University Library, the Princeton University Library, and the libraries of the New York Academy of Medicine and of the American Philo­ sophical Society in Philadelphia. For their willingness to send rare books and periodicals on interlibrary loan, I am grateful to a number of institutions and persons, espe­ cially to the Yale Medical Historical Library under the direction of Dr. Frederick Kilgour and to the University of Wisconsin, which has generously made available rare items from its remarkable collection of works in early chemistry. Like many another foreign scholar, in Paris I have enjoyed the hospitality of the Bibliotheque Nationale, the library of the Institut de France and of the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle. At the archives of the Academie des Sciences I have been helped on repeated occasions by Mme Pierre Gauja and her staff ithw that unfailing cour­ tesy and efficiency they have shown so many visiting his­ torians of science. Aid and stimulation have come from many friends and fellow workers in the history of science; chief among them are Professor Marie Boas, Dr. Uno Boklund, Dr. Maurice Daumas, Dr. Eduard Farber, M. Rene Frie, Professor Aaron Ihde, Professor Milton Kerker, Father Patrick John McLaughlin, Professor Robert Schofield, Professor Cyril Stanley Smith, and Dr. Owsei Temkin. Mr. Denis I. Duveen has lent generously from his rich collection of viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Lavoisier's books and manuscripts, has discussed with me many aspects of my problem, and has given me the bene­ fit of his deep bibliographical knowledge and wide familiarity with Lavoisier's work. I am glad, also, to record my appreciation to the mem­ bers, past and present, of my seminar in the history of science at Cornell who have heard parts of this study presented for their candid and constructive comments. In particular, I wish to thank Miss Rhoda Rappaport and Mr. Roger Hahn for many helpful suggestions and for their careful reading of the manuscript. I assume, of course, full responsibility for the errors of commission and omission that are sure to be called to my attention by others, or that I shall have the dubious pleasure of dis­ covering-too late-for myseH. The final versions of the typescript-the work of Mrs. Anita Reed, Mrs. C. C. Arnold, and Mrs. Robert M. Garcia-were prepared with the help of a subsidy from Cornell's Faculty Research Grants Committee. Apologies are perhaps due to the reader for my practice of leaving all my citations in the original French; still more, perhaps, for my decision to reproduce all texts exactly as I found them. Thus some citations appear with modernized spelling and punctuation, others as they were printed in the eighteenth century, and still others as they appear in the contemporary manuscripts with their fanci­ ful disregard of punctuation, capitalization, and spelling. In part, I wished to conform with the example set by the editor of the Correspondance de Lavoisier; but my prin­ cipal reason was that I wished to make available to scholars, in the body of the work and in the appendix, all ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS documents known to me bearing on this phase of Lavoi­ sier' s career and to intrude upon them as little as possible. We have long wished to have these documents brought together; and those who may be disposed to challenge my interpretation with my own weapons will find them here unrusted and with their original temper. HENRY GUERLAC December 15, 1960 x Contents Introduction xiii 1 Background of the Problem 1 2 The Introduction of Pneumatic Chemistry into France 36 3 The Origin of Lavoisier's Experiments-Some Theories Examined and Some New Evidence 76 4 The Mysterious Calcination of Metals 111 5 A Striking Anticipation of Lavoisier's Theory 146 6 Lavoisier, Phosphorus, and the Role of Mitouard 156 Conclusion 192 Appendix 197 Index 231 xi Plates Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, 1743-1794 frontispiece The plates will be found between pages 106 and 107 1. The solar calcination of antimony according to Nicolas Le Fevre, 1660 2. A French portrait engraving of Stephen Hales, 1677-1761 3. Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau, 1737-1816 4. Jean Charles Philibert Trudaine de Montigny, 1733-1777 5. Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, 1721-1781 6. Pierre Joseph Macquer, 1718-1784 7. Frangois Rozier, 1734-1793 8. Antoine Baume, 1728-1804 9. Balthazar Georges Sage, 1740-1824 10. Nicholas Desmarest, 1725-1815 11. N. J. von Jacquin, 1727-1817 xii Introduction IN this study I have tried to shed some light on a particu­ larly obscure, yet especially noteworthy, period in the career of the great French chemist, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794 ). We are quite familiar with his early years of scientific apprenticeship, when his inter­ ests ranged over a wide variety of scientific problems; and though much is still to be learned about the work of his mature years, there is a substantial literature dealing with Lavoisier's discovery of the role of oxygen, his share in the revision of chemical nomenclature, and other as­ pects of his massive scientific achievement. But we have understood very imperfectly, if at all, the time of Lavoi­ sier's life when he took the fortunate step of turning to the central problem of combustion. If we cannot know why, and precisely when, he entered on this new path, we will be at a loss to account for one of the truly significant new departures in the history of science. My primary concern, therefore, has been to determine when, in what manner, and under what influences Lavoi­ sier was led before February, 1773, to the key experi­ ments and generative ideas that touched off the Chemical Revolution. In historical episodes of this importance, a study of origins-even one as detailed as this has turned xiii INTRODUCTION out to be-needs no special defense. But if my findings can help illuminate the broader problem of the scientific revolution in chemistry (to which our modern age owes so much), the reader may perhaps forgive the rather intricate argument I have been forced to present in this work. We need hardly stress Lavoisier's pivotal position in the history of chemistry and his role as the chief archi­ tect of the Chemical Revolution. He is one of those epoch­ making figures in the history of science-like Newton in physics and Darwin in biology-who loom larger than life. If he did not create a new science ex nihilo, as some earlier writers believed, he and his disciples nevertheless refashioned the materials, the concepts, and even the language of chemistry so radically that, despite a long and complex early history, the science as we know it to­ day seems almost to have been born with him.
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