Antoine Lavoisier, detail of Jacques-Louis David's portrait (1788). Source · Public domain
About Antoine Lavoisier
Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794) was born in Paris to a family of lawyers, studied law and the sciences at the Collège Mazarin, and was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1768. The same year he bought a share in the Ferme générale, the private company that collected indirect taxes for the crown, and from 1775 he directed the royal gunpowder administration at the Arsenal, where he kept his laboratory. His wife, Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier, assisted his experiments, kept records, translated English chemical works and drew the plates for this book. With Guyton de Morveau, Berthollet and Fourcroy he published the Method of Chemical Nomenclature (1787). During the Revolution he served on the commission that prepared the metric system; arrested with the other former tax farmers, he was tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal and guillotined in Paris on 8 May 1794.
Elements of Chemistry (Traité élémentaire de chimie, Paris, 1789) is Antoine Lavoisier's systematic textbook of the new chemistry he had built over the previous fifteen years. The library text is Robert Kerr's English translation, published at Edinburgh in 1790; Kerr, an Edinburgh surgeon, added Fahrenheit temperatures in brackets beside Lavoisier's Réaumur degrees and appended rules for converting French weights and measures, and the text describes the thirteen copperplates of apparatus drawn by Madame Lavoisier.
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