Antoine Lavoisier: The Next Crucial Year: Or, The Sources of His Quantitative Method in Chemistry
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Antoine Lavoisier: The Next Crucial Year: Or, The Sources of His Quantitative Method in Chemistry
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Overview
Through his development of quantitative experimental methods, the chemist Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) implemented a principle that many regard as the cornerstone of modern science: in every operation there is an equal quantity of material before and after the operation. The origin of Lavoisier's methods, however, has remained a missing piece in this remarkable episode of scientific history, perhaps because the talented young scientist himself was not prepared for the journey his discoveries would set before him. In this book, Frederic Holmes suggests that Lavoisier gradually came to understand the nature and power of his quantitative method during the year 1773, when he began to carry out a research program on the fixation and release of airs. Drawing upon Lavoisier's surviving laboratory notebooks, Holmes presents an engaging portrait of a scientist still seeking the way that would lead him to become the leader of one of the great upheavals in the history of science.
Holmes follows Lavoisier day-by-day at work in his laboratory over a course of several months. The scientist's resourcefulness and imagination spring to life in this account, as does his propensity to make mistakes, which taught him as much as his successes. During the course of this odyssey, Lavoisier saw his early theory of combustion collapse under the weight of his own efforts to provide experimental evidence to support it. In compensation, he acquired a method and the hard-won experience on which he would later construct a more enduring theoretical structure.
Originally published in 1997.
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400864652 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #374 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 194 |
| File size: | 15 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
Antoine Lavoisierâ?"The Next Crucial Year
Or the Sources of His Quantitative Method in Chemistry
By Frederic Lawrence Holmes
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1998 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-01687-0
CHAPTER 1
The Sources of Lavoisier's Quantitative Method in Chemistry
Chemists, historians, and philosophers have long attributed to Antoine Lavoisier the introduction into chemistry of the quantitative methods characteristic of "modern" science. From an inconspicuous place in his Traité élémentaire de chimie they have extracted and made famous his statement that "nothing is created, either in the operations of art, or of nature, and one can state as a principle that in every operation there is an equal quantity of material before and after the operation." This principle, treated by present chemical textbooks as "the cornerstone of all chemistry," is generally acknowledged to be far older than Lavoisier; but he is viewed as the historical figure who turned a general law of causality into the guiding principle of his research. "It is on this principle," he wrote, "that the whole art of making experiments is founded." This statement had not been true when Lavoisier entered chemistry, but it was true of the mode of experimentation through which he himself transformed the practices of his field.
In the book which first popularized the phrase "Revolution Chimique" to summarize Lavoisier's achievement, Marcellin Berthelot wrote that Lavoisier's claim to be the principal author of that event rested on "three things, a fact, a theory, and a practice." The third, and most important of these—the practice—was "the exact weighing of all the products of chemical reactions: not only the weighing of solid or liquid products, as one had always done, but especially the weighing of gaseous products." In the chapter on the conservation of matter in his Identity and Reality, the great philosopher Emile Meyerson wrote a few years later that "it was with the aid of the balance that Lavoisier accomplished his 'chemical revolution.'" These judgments have been sustained by more recent historians. In 1961, Henry Guerlac affirmed in his nodal book Lavoisier—The Crucial Year, that "methodologically, the key to the Revolution was Lavoisier's systematic application of his 'special reagent,' the balance, not merely to solids and liquids, but also to the gases."
Historians have recognized that it was not merely the practice of weighing gases, liquids, and solids that distinguished Lavoisier's chemistry, but its combination with the reasoning that Lavoisier summarized in the final sentence of his oft-quoted passage: "One must suppose in every case a true equality or equation between the principles of the bodies one examines and those which one obtains through an analysis." Translating this idea into the modern language of chemical reactions, John McEvoy has written that "Lavoisier's quantitative calculations involved the mental use of equations in which the weight of materials remained constant during a reaction and only a change of arrangement took place." It was this underlying epistemological view that, according to McEvoy, distinguished Lavoisier from his contemporary Joseph Priestley, who also used quantitative methods and arguments, but who rejected the theoretical presuppositions on which Lavoisier based his practice.
That the balance had many meanings for Lavoisier, both within and beyond chemistry, is the subject of a thoughtful chapter in Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent's important book on Lavoisier. I shall refer here only to two of her insights concerning its use in his chemistry. "Instead of concerning itself with the reactions themselves," Bensaude points out, the balance approach of Lavoisier "concentrates the attention on the initial and final states." Lavoisier did not, in fact, use the term chemical "reaction." His favored term, "operation," did not distinguish between an intervention performed by the chemist and the interactions of chemical substances on one another. Bensaude notes also, that Lavoisier's balance method did not rely exclusively on weighings performed with the instrument known as the balance. She adduces the areometer, which Lavoisier used to measure the specific gravity of liquids, as an essential complement to his balance measurements. "The association of diverse gravimetric techniques," she writes, "created a new order of discourse," in which all substances were "rendered commensurable" through the measure of their weights. To this central point I would add that Lavoisier's focus on gases made the most important complement to the balance his use of the pneumatic trough, invented by Stephen Hales, to measure the volumes of substances in the aeriform state. It was necessary, then, to know also the density of a given gas in order to convert a measured volume to a weight.
If there is widespread agreement on the importance of Lavoisier's quantitative methods, there is much less consensus about their source. Because pre-Lavoisian chemistry is assumed to have been primarily qualitative, some historians have looked outside of chemistry for Lavoisier's inspiration. In 1960 Charles Gillispie firmly rejected some of these alleged sources:
Social scientists ... sometimes like to see science drawing inspiration from society and politics. It has even been suggested that Lavoisier derived his chemical "philosophy of the balance sheet" from the accounting practices of the corporation which farmed the taxes. The economic interpretation of creativity takes special pleasure in Lavoisier's hobby of agricultural reform.
In his agricultural experiments Lavoisier recorded meticulously the quantities of seed, fertilizer, and work introduced into every field, and compared them with the quantities of grain harvested. "But surely," Gillispie objected, "the historian need not go thus far afield to find the origin of Lavoisier's input-output chemical procedure. Lavoisier ... had studied Joseph Black before he became a gentleman farmer or a pillar of the tax farm."
Gillispie's assertion that the model for Lavoisier was the quantitative reasoning applied by Joseph Black in 1755, in his retrospectively famous "Experiments upon Magnesia Alba," to prove the existence of "fixed air" relied on the assumption made by earlier historians of chemistry that Black's historic treatise, the opening signal for the events leading to the chemical revolution, was well known to all chemists by the time Lavoisier entered the field. This seemingly straightforward intellectual lineage has seemed more difficult to maintain since Henry Guerlac showed that chemists in Paris, including Lavoisier, were unfamiliar with Black's work at the time Lavoisier first took up his studies of combustion in 1772.
Many historians have noticed that, several years before Lavoisier took up the questions about combustion and related processes to which he applied the "balance sheet" method, he had already used similar techniques and reasoning to show that water is not transmuted into earth. This and several other youthful interests in instruments and measurements have lent support to a view that Lavoisier must have brought to chemistry a predilection for quantitative experimental methods acquired elsewhere. The assumption made by some earlier historians that the source for this approach was physics has been developed by Arthur Donovan into a vigorous argument that Lavoisier was inspired from the earliest stages of his scientific education by the precision and rigor of contemporary experimental physicists such as the Abbe Nollet, and that his driving motivation throughout his scientific career was to make chemistry more like physics.
The need to identify such a specific source for Lavoisier's inspiration is diminished by the results of a recent set of collaborative studies which assert collectively that "from about 1760 on," there was a "rapid rise in the range and intensity of application of mathematical methods," including the adoption of precision instruments and methods of measurement, in many areas of activity, ranging from the physical sciences to economic and political management. In accord with such an interpretation, a young man such as Lavoisier, whose formative years coincided exactly with this movement, would experience many inducements to prefer quantitative methods in any domain of activity to which they could profitably be applied.
Whether we choose with Donovan to affix Lavoisier's style of experimentation to his "attachment to the methods of experimental physics," 16 or whether we allow greater latitude for the play of the "quantifying spirit" of his age on him, neither influence can explain the specific form of quantification embodied in the balance sheet method on which he built his revolution. I would like to suggest that, instead of seeking a source from which Lavoisier might have brought his distinctive method to the problem of the fixation and release of airs in 1772, we seek within his early efforts to cope with that problem the origins of what afterward grew into a method of far broader scope.
In Lavoisier—The Crucial Year, Henry Guerlac posed the critical question, how did Lavoisier "hit upon" the "idea of the role of air in combustion" that first led him to undertake his "classic researches"? Since its publication in 1961, several other historians have offered refinements of the story Guerlac told, and the identification of a critical additional manuscript led Guerlac's student, Carl Perrin, to construct, during the 1980s a version which may well prove definitive. The fascination with this question has partly arisen from the paucity of documentary evidence for the historical order in which Lavoisier made the initial moves that drew him into the problem. The first experiments which led him to make the claim, in November of that year, that phosphorus and sulfur gain weight when burned, and that metals gain weight on calcination, had also been sparsely described in the surviving documents from that period known until recently. The manuscript re-assigned to that period by Perrin now gives us, however, full accounts of the two most critical of them. The evolution of a systematic method to attack these problems more comprehensively began after Lavoisier laid out for himself, in February 1773, a "plan" for a "long series of experiments" dealing with all of the processes he could think of in which "elastic fluids" are absorbed by or disengaged from solid and fluid bodies. Fortunately, for this period the laboratory register which Lavoisier began to keep then provides much fuller documentation for his experimental activities than is available for the preceding period. The rest of this book presents the case that, by following this record of his investigation from his initial experiments on phosphorus and lead, through the first two volumes of his register, and by connecting what he did in his laboratory to the work of the predecessors on which he drew for both methods and ideas, we can witness the emergence, between November 1772 and October 1773, of the main outlines of what we have come to call his balance sheet method.
CHAPTER 2Consequences of the Crucial Year
When Lavoisier described his first experiments on the combustion of phosphorus in a closed vessel, in a memoir he drafted on October 20,1772, he was uncertain about how much weight the substance had gained. "This augmentation of weight, of which it is not easy to confirm exactly the quantity [proportion]," he wrote, derives from the combination of the air which is fixed in that operation." Perrin has pointed out that the uncertainty arose from the rapidity with which the phosphoric acid absorbs water. Lavoisier could not tell how much of the gain to ascribe to the water, and how much to the air. He could not even be sure that all of the increase was not due to the humidity of the atmosphere. What seemed for him for a time to be an "insurmountable obstacle" he overcame by an ingenious strategy. He burned 2 gros, 42 grains of phosphorus under a bell jar that he had saturated with water vapor. The product had the appearance of an acid very diluted with water. He placed it in a narrow tube and marked the height of the liquid. The liquid weighed 6 ounces, 7 gros, 69 ½ grains. He filled the narrow tube to the same height with pure water, which weighed 6 ounces, 4 gros, 42 grains. The difference between them—3 gros, 27 ½ grains—he reasoned, "could derive from nothing else than the acid contained in the water and lodged between its parts." The phosphorus burned (2 gros, 6 grains of the 2 gros, 42 grains with which he began) had gained more than one-third of its original weight. The result was a minimum, he realized, because if the phosphoric acid had actually increased the volume of the liquid, then his weighing of an equal volume of pure water had overestimated the weight of the water in the first liquid.
This experiment can be seen in retrospect as the first one for which Lavoisier devised a complicated balance sheet approach to establish a chemical "operation." Until then, his effort to measure the weight gained by burning phosphorus was methodologically little different from that employed by Guyton de Morveau in the measurements of the weights gained in the calcination of metals that de Morveau had announced six months earlier at the Academy of Sciences. Lavoisier's innovation, as far as can be judged from his description, was not an application of a general strategy, but a response to a particular "obstacle" that he had encountered.
Believing that the weight gain "observed in the calcination of metals was too similar" to that in the combustion of phosphorus and sulfur not to "presume that they arose from the same cause," Lavoisier decided that "no experiment could be more decisive" for examining that question than "the reduction of lead calx in the apparatus of Hales." For this purpose he used a modified form of Hales's apparatus devised by Guillaume-Francois Rouelle, which consisted of a glass retort whose neck was bent in such a way that it connected with the interior of a vessel inverted over water. The air produced or absorbed in the retort would increase or decrease the volume of air in the vessel, lowering or raising the level of the water over which the air was contained. When Lavoisier heated a mixture of the lead ore minium with charcoal until the retort began to redden, "a prodigious quantity of air" was released, causing the water to descend rapidly. It rose again after the retort had cooled, but there was a net release of "462 cubic inches of air, that is to say, about one gros, which is nearly what lead gains by calcination." Noting that the material calcined had "lost only 2 gros of its weight," Lavoisier ascribed the difference between that amount and the one gros of air to "a little oil and phlegm which the lead had furnished during the operation and which had passed into the receiver." He seemed unconcerned to verify that assumption, or to measure exactly the various quantities involved. In the "sealed note of November 1,1772" on which historians have previously relied for a briefer description of the same experiment, Lavoisier did not report weights at all. He stated merely that he had "observed the disengagement of ... a considerable quantity of air, and that it formed a volume at least one thousand times greater than the quantity of litharge employed."
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction 3
Ch. 1 The Sources of Lavoisier's Quantitative Method in Chemistry 7
Ch. 2 Consequences of the Crucial Year 12
Ch. 3 Vision and Reality 18
Ch. 4 The Public Arena 30
Ch. 5 Reflections 41
Ch. 6 In the Shadow of Black 47
Ch. 7 Caution and Consolidation 60
Ch. 8 The Long Summer Campaign 82
Ch. 9 The End of the Beginning 104
Ch. 10 Mopping-Up Operations 125
Ch. 11 Conclusion 140
Ch. 12 Before and After 1773: Lavoisier Studies 145
Appendix Names, Substances, and Apparatus in Eighteenth-Century Chemistry 153
Notes 157
Index 181