Chemical revolution

In the history of chemistry, the chemical revolution, also called the first chemical revolution, was the reformulation of chemistry during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which 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 so-called Scientific Revolution took place during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries whereas the chemical revolution took place during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Several factors led to the first chemical revolution. First, there were the forms of gravimetric analysis that emerged from alchemy and new kinds of instruments that were developed in medical and industrial contexts. In these settings, chemists increasingly challenged hypotheses that had already been presented by the ancient Greeks. For example, chemists began to assert that all structures were composed of more than the four elements of the Greeks or the eight elements of the medieval alchemists. The Irish alchemist, Robert Boyle, laid the foundations for the Chemical Revolution, with his mechanical corpuscular philosophy, which in turn relied heavily on the alchemical corpuscular theory and experimental method dating back to pseudo-Geber.

Earlier works by chemists such as Jan Baptist van Helmont helped to shift the belief in theory that air existed as a single element to that of one in which air existed as a composition of a mixture of distinct kinds of gasses. Van Helmont's data analysis also suggests that he had a general understanding of the law of conservation of mass in the 17th century. Furthermore, work by Jean Rey in the early 17th century with metals like tin and lead and their oxidation in the presence of air and water helped pinpoint the contribution and existence of oxygen in the oxidation process.

Other factors included new experimental techniques and the discovery of 'fixed air' (carbon dioxide) by Joseph Black in the middle of the 18th 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. 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. When describing the task of reinventing chemical nomenclature, Lavoisier attempted to harness the new centrality of chemistry by making the rather hyperbolic claim that:

We must clean house thoroughly, for they have made use of an enigmatical language peculiar to themselves, which in general presents one meaning for the adepts and another meaning for the vulgar, and at the same time contains nothing that is rationally intelligible either for the one or for the other.

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.

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.