Customer Reviews

Lavoisier in the Year One: The Birth of a New Science in an Age of Revolution (Great Discoveries)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

3 ½ stars.

The Englishman Edmund Burke, one of the most outspoken critics of the French Revolution, once said that in revolutionary France "learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude." The death by guillotine of Antoine Lavoisier, one of the founders of modern chemistry, during the revolution's Reign of Terror speaks to Burke's pessimistic prophecy. Lavoisier and his fate is the subject of Madison Smart Bell's compact (186 pages) but informed, "Lavoisier in the Year One: The Birth of a New Science in an Age of Revolution." Despite some flaws I think the book is worth reading.

The first three quarters of the book is a straight forward, condensed biography of Lavoisier. Although brought up in a comfortable environment Lavoisier managed to accumulate great wealth in a very short period of time. Although a student of law, Lavoisier developed a great interest in science and thereafter dedicated his life to his business activities and to expanding his knowledge of the physical world. He quickly focused his greatest efforts and achieved astonishing results in the realm of what we now know as chemistry. In particular, after repeated experiments with equipment he largely designed and built, Lavoisier identified the element of oxygen, which he identified as le principe oxygine. Perhaps more importantly he developed methods for scientific investigation and a particular, methodological language for describing the results of the elements he identified. This language, or nomenclature, was set out in the first periodic table, or Table of Chemical Nomenclature as it was then known.

The revolutionary nature of Lavoisier's work is set out well by Bell. Bell discusses alchemy, the voodoo like practice that tried to convert base elements to gold, as a forerunner of chemistry. By the 18th century alchemy was beginning to evolve. It lost some of its mystical nature. Some historians of science refer to the period leading up to Lavoisier as "chymistry". Lavoisier was the bridge that turned chymistry into chemistry. Bell spends a good deal of time, to good effect, describing how Lavoisier applied to the more rigorous principles of mathematics to his own efforts.

Bell also does a good job in setting out the importance of Lavoisier's focus on addressing narrow questions rather than seeking to find a universal solution for the world and its constituent parts. Bell describes Isaac Newton and Newton's view that the laws of Newtonian physics were originally god-given. Newton saw himself as a discoverer of divine properties installed by god in the natural world. This was dramatically different from Lavoisier's approach and Bell concludes thusly: "Lavoisier, though impressed by Newton and influenced by the logical rigor of Newtonian physics, would begin to deconstruct this holistic vision of the universe by concentrating much more narrowly on its component parts."

The remainder of the book describes Lavoisier's ultimately unsuccessful efforts to navigate safely through the dangerous political currents that made up the French Revolution. Lavoisier welcomed the Revolution but who hoped that it would end in a political system similar to that established by the young United States. But his wealth and standing as an intellectual ultimately brought him down once the Reign of Terror took hold. The great irony of Lavoisier's life and death may be seen in the symbolism of his death. Here was someone whose experiments showed that flames burned brighter when fed oxygen and who died when the oxygen feeding the French Revolution created flames of terror that consumed all those who got in its way.

Unfortunately, the two sections of the book do not seem to mesh as well as they could have. This latter section seems a bit too separate and distinct from the scientific and biographic discussion that preceded it. In other words, I found the bright line between the two sections a bit jarring. For me, the sections on Lavoisier's scientific life and his creation of a language that facilitated scientific advancement were the highlights. The discussion on the Reign of Terror and Lavoisier's demise seemed a bit rushed and disjointed. Hence, I would actually give this book 3 and ½ stars rather than four if the rating system permitted it. Nevertheless, I found the book enlightening and entertaining.

There was the French Revolution in the eighteenth century, but there was an even greater and more far-reaching revolution in France at the time. It was a chemical revolution, an abandonment of ancient ideas about the material around and in us, and an adoption of the products of experiment and rationality. The greatest of the revolutionaries in chemistry was Antoine Lavoisier, whose story has been told many times before. It is brightly summarized within W. W. Norton's valuable "Great Discoveries" series by Madison Smartt Bell in _Lavoisier in the Year One: The Birth of a New Science in an Age of Revolution_ (Atlas Books). Bell is usually a novelist, not a biographer, and he knows how to tell a good story. The title is an exaggeration, as it only concentrates on events around "Year One" of the French Revolutionary Calendar which started at the establishment of the French Republic in 1793. The important accomplishments of Lavoisier's life, and the stupid blood festival that put an end to it, are thus highlighted in a useful and accessible biography.

Lavoisier was born into a prosperous bourgeois family in 1743, and gained his fortune as a private investor working as a tax collector for the government. His wealth enabled him to practice his passion, science. Perhaps more than anyone else, Lavoisier pulled scientific chemistry out of the ancient and respected practice of alchemy. He also dethroned the well-accepted theory that burning represented the release of a peculiar element called phlogiston. He also quite spectacularly decomposed water into hydrogen and oxygen, and recomposed it again from the two gases. The importance of such a literally elemental deconstruction cannot be overstated; water was everywhere, and had been thought of since Aristotle as one of the four basic elements. But deposing the old chemistry did not come only scientifically. It was a political and rhetorical effort. Scientists before Lavoisier had isolated "eminently breathable air," but Lavoisier called it oxygen and further built a new system of chemical nomenclature. For instance, calcium nitrate by its very name reveals that it has more oxygen in it than calcium nitrite. It is the same nomenclature that we use today. Lavoisier's new chemistry was intensely resisted, with phlogiston fans finding new and convoluted ways that their element accomplished everything. His new nomenclature, however, was useful and was an irresistible aid to teaching. Once chemists came to Lavoisier's terms, they had to start accepting his theories.

Some of Lavoisier's previous scientific work endangered him after the Revolution. The Jacobin firebrand Jean-Paul Marat denounced him in 1791 because twelve years before, Lavoisier had discredited Marat as having a charlatan's views of science. Lavoisier had served on the famous committee (alongside his friend Benjamin Franklin) that showed that Mesmerism was bunk, although it had been supported by Marat and by another future member of the Jacobin government Jacques-Pierre Brissot. Brissot went on to champion the abolishment of the national academies of the arts and sciences, insisting that they were elitist and tyrannical. Lavoisier did have a magnificent scientific record, but in gaining it he had made enemies. It was his involvement in the tax system that was his undoing, even though he had been scrupulously fair and honest in his public responsibilities. It may be apocryphal that at his kangaroo court someone said, "The Revolution has no need for scientists," but the outcome once he had been arrested was never in doubt. He was guillotined along with 27 other tax assessors in 1794, facing death with good cheer; he wrote, "The events in which I find myself enveloped will probably spare me the inconveniences of old age." Bell's book rightly concentrates on the scientific accomplishments and explains the way that many of Lavoisier's experiments were performed. It serves well as a reminder of how little we knew of our material world just a couple of centuries ago. It must make us appreciate anew the famous remark of one of Lavoisier's colleagues: "It took them no more than a moment to make that head fall and a hundred years may not be enough to produce another one like it."

Antoine Lavoisier, a meticulous laboratory chemist, was one of three European chemists credited with the discovry of oxygen; however, he is remembered even more for developing an effective language for chemistry itself. Unfortunately, Lavoisier is also known for his tragic death by guillotine.

Many accounts of the early years of chemistry are at best confusing, some even bewildering, largely because alchemy's secrets (in many cases poorly understood to begin with) were disguised and obfuscated by codes, ciphers, arcane terms, and even literary metaphors. Despite this inherent difficulty, Madison Smartt Bell's examination of the formative years of modern chemistry is surprisingly clear and lucid. Lavoisier in Year One will appeal to a wide audience.

The young Lavoisier learned in university classes that the presence of phlogiston (the 'matter of fire') in a substance was responsible for the combustibility of that substance. Charcoal, wood, and sulfur burned readily because they contained significant phlogiston.

The process of smelting ores was described as the transfer of phlogiston from charcoal to the ore; the ores absorbed the phlogiston, thereby becoming refined metals. In calcinations (now call oxidation) metals were heated and transformed back into ores, thereby releasing their phlogiston.

Obviously, one serious drawback to this widely accepted explanation was that phlogiston had never been observed in the laboratory.

For years Lavoisier directed his efforts toward understanding the essence of fire and the nature of air. He compiled a detailed account of all earlier research on on free air and 'fixed air' (carbon dioxide) by French, English, German, and other European scientists. He carefully repeated earlier experiments, using state of the art scientific instrumentation, some that he devised himself.

There is disagreement on whether the discovery of oxygen should be attributed to France (Lavoisier's eminently breathable air), England (Joseph Priestly's dephlogisticated air), or Sweden (Carl Wilhelm Scheele's fire air). The basic problem is that Lavoisier, Priestly, and Scheele were slow to understand exactly what they had discovered.

Finally, in a paper to the French Academy of Sciences in 1777, Lavoisier stated: "I shall henceforward designate dephlogisticated air or eminently breathable air ...by that of le principe oxygine." With this new term 'oxygen', Lavoisier clearly won the nomenclature battle.

But even more importantly, in his later years Lavoisier brought forth an entirely new language for naming substances. This new lexicon would no longer employ arbitrary names, but use terms which expressed chemical relationships.

For example, from the name alone a student of chemistry can immediately recognize that calcium nitrate is a product that has a higher oxygen content than calcium nitrite. This language for naming substances encapsulated the results of laboratory measurements. Lavoisier indeed changed the face of chemistry.

Bell's historical account of Lavoisier is equally a story of a revolution gone awry, a tale of terror and senseless executions.

The French Revolution envisioned fundamental changes to all aspects of society. Some innovations, such as the metric system survived, while others have been forgotten.

A new calendar divided each month into ten three-day cycles, and each day into ten periods of 100 minutes. Each minute consisted of 100 seconds. The French Revolutionary calendar began year one on September 22, 1792, the day on which the French Republic was formally established. Lavoisier's encounter with the French Revolution's dread Committee of Public Safety was in Year One.

Lavoisier in the Year One is a good addition to the Great Discoveries Series. It is among my favorites.

I also recommend Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel (by Rebecca Goldstein), and Einstein's Cosmos: How Einstein's Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time (by Michio Kaku), and Miss Leavitt's Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe (by George Johnson).

I didn't quite like this book for several reasons. First, I am not sure how much of the book is original material that was derived from original sources. For one thing, the Notes section at the end gives me the impression that most, if not all, of the quotations in the book are regurgitations of what was already in Lavoisier's previous biographies. Gathering up all the existing biographies of a person and then writing a "new" biography out of them doesn't sound like a big deal to me.

Second, I found the author's habit of mixing up the chronological orders of events quite confusing and annoying. Example: the very 1st sentence of the book is about the events of 1793, the year before Lavoisier died; as the chapter progresses, the narrative moves backward; rather annoying. Another example: chapter V begins in August 1789, but on the next page we suddenly return to March 1789 and start over again; rather confusing.

Third, Mr. Bell's apparent lack of a background in chemistry seems to have introduced a few errors that an editorial review should have corrected. Example: The footnote on page 94 states that "Carbon dioxide dissolved in limewater {Ca(OH)2(aq)} precipitates carbonate ion {CaCO3}." What precipitates is not carbonate ion, but calcium carbonate proper, CaCO3. Also, I had never seen the use of curly brackets ({}) around chemical formulae before.

Criticism aside, I did learn from this book, but that was mostly because I knew very little about Lavoisier's life before.

Although this book's main focus is the life of Antoine Lavoisier, it also has two sub-themes: the French Revolution and the birth/development of chemistry; both are recounted without losing sight of the primary focus. Of the book's 186 pages of main text, over one-third are devoted to the French Revolution (the first and the last chapters) and the remainder to chemistry.

Overall, I found the book generally interesting - but some parts less so than others. For example, I felt that the scientific atmosphere was rather well-captured, but I also found that some of the details on the socio-political situation were a bit overdone and rather tedious.

The writing style is serious, objective, focussed and, occasionally, rather dry. The only parts that I thought were "full of suspense and intrigue" (to quote an editorial review) were located in a few pages near the end of the last chapter. Overall, when compared to other biographical works, I feel that this one could have been better. History of science enthusiasts would likely enjoy this book the most.

In Lavoisier in the Year One, Madison Smartt Bell makes a good effort in giving a glimpse into the life of one of the most well-known scientist of his time, and also a rather influential politician. Bell starts by giving an insight into the influential figures, such as Abb'e Nicolas Louis de Lacaille, who first brought Antoine Lavoisier in contact with the scientific world. Bell reveals the benefits that Lavoisier received as a politician, such as having taxes support for his research; a benefit that other aspiring scientists lacked. Bell illustrates that as Lavoisier made strides, he introduced different theories that differed from the statues quo, such as his theory about combustion. Bell essentially makes it noticeable that Lavoisier did not face resistance for such theories, but Bell does introduce an antagonist force known by as Jean-Paul Marat. Bell achieves his goal of giving detailed insight into a scientist's life.
However, the biography at times presents itself unclear as it tends to go off topic and fails to make connections. More importantly it is unclear to see at times how what Lavoisier had accomplished, influenced the future. Since Lavoisier is "Father of Modern Chemistry," he has much to pass on to major figures in the scientific world. Besides some misguiding in the biography, it presents itself well and it is worthy of respectful recognition.

Very good book. Explains the dificult times of the French revolution, that caught Lavoisier in the guillotine. Interesting detail on his experiments, and how he did careful scientific research. Many interesting tid-bits on his personal life. Explains how he was careful in doing his experiments & careful in drawing his conclusions. Good examples even today on good experimental procedures. Explains how he discovered Oxygen, at about the same time as Priestly in England.

Lavoisier in the Year One is a complex biography that discusses both the life of Antoine Lavoisier and also the times that he lived in. Lavoisier was a very intelligent man that lived a multifaceted life. Lavoisier is best known for his work as a scientist, and more specifically a chemist. Known as the "Father of Chemistry," Lavoisier turned chemistry into a mainstream science that was respected by the scientific community as a whole. Before Lavoisier, chemistry was simply a hobby that was essentially a fact-based form of alchemy. This biography discusses how Lavoisier became the man that would change the world of science permanently.

Lavoisier was much more than a chemist. He served various other roles as a scientist, such as a debunker of false scientific claims submitted to the French Royal Society. Lavoisier should also be remembered for the role he played as a member of the French government. He was an inspector for the Tobacco Commission of France, and cracked down both on tobacco smugglers and on those who grew adulterated tobacco. Later, Lavoisier was the head of the Gunpowder Administration, and his efforts to increase the French arsenal proved vital to the American Revolution, as the American revolutionaries received most of their arms from the French. Other major government affairs that Lavoisier was involved in include financing, and the construction of a wall around Paris to prevent goods from being imported into the city without the transporters paying a tax on the goods. Unfortunately, it was his role in these various government affairs that led to his downfall; Lavoisier would be executed by the radical Jacobins during the Reign of Terror in May of 1794.

Chemistry is a subject that is based around elements. In the mid-to-late 18th century, the Aristotelian theory of four elements (fire, earth, air, and water) was beginning to lose popularity after having existed for centuries as the unquestioned truth. Georg Stahl, a German physicist and chemist, came up with the idea of the "phlogiston," which he believed was essentially the driving force behind every effervescent reaction. Lavoisier didn't really believe that the phlogiston existed, even though the idea was gaining popularity at exponential rates. Lavoisier exploited many new inventions, most importantly one which could collect gases that were released during a reaction, to discover and develop the theory of the existence of oxygen. Oxygen was the first element that was discovered, and with its discovery came a chemical revolution.

I believe that Madison Bell was compelled to recount this story because very few people really know about the man that Lavoisier was. Antoine Lavoisier was truly an ingenious man that was involved in just about every part of French society. I believe that Bell simply wanted to share the true story of this complex man.

Anyone interested in reading this book should read it. It is a very well written novel, and Bell shows his mastery of the English language repeatedly throughout the story to bring it to life. This book shows how Lavoisier had ability not only as a scientist, but also as a government reformer, and also how well he was able to keep balance in his life between the two subjects. Bell really did his research with this biography, as he shows how the social developments of the time affected Lavoisier and his work. It truly is a deep book that will show any reader just how intelligent and diligent a man Lavoisier was.

After thoroughly enjoying Obsessive Genius I eagerly ordered this book in the Great Discoveries series. A thorough disappointment. I finished it with great effort. The writing was disorganized and muddled.The author apparently is a fiction writer. This book reads like a weak thesis paper. I came away from it with an appreciaition of his accomplishments, although not totally clear, but no strong feelings about Lavoisier
Koz