Antoine Lavoisier's Head

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1:44Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Menke. Listener discretion advised. In December of 1788, the French painter Jacques-Louis David completed a large and impressive double portrait of the married couple, scientist Antoine Lavoisier and his wife Marie -Anne. Today, Antoine Lavoisier is celebrated as the man who helped discover the role that oxygen plays in combustion. In fact, he was the one who gave oxygen its name. Though Lavoisier wasn't the first to discover the law of conservation of mass, the law that in a fixed system, the mass of everything inside will remain the same and matter can't be created or destroyed, he proved it in a set of experiments and popularized it.

2:42In France, it's still known as Lavoisier's Law. Antoine Lavoisier was an incredibly wealthy and successful man, and he's a massively important figure in the history of science. So it only seems fitting that he should have a massive portrait. And it is really big. You can still see it today at The Met in New York City, almost nine feet high. In the portrait, Lavoisier is sitting at a table covered in a red velvet tablecloth. He's at work on papers, a quill perched in his right hand. His wife, Marie-Anne, leans casually over his shoulder. She's wearing a simple chemise dress with blue ribbons, and she's at the center of the portrait.

3:32While Lavoisier is looking up at his wife, Marie-Anne looks directly out at the viewer, or maybe at the painter. Marie-Anne knew David well. He actually taught her painting, which came in handy because Marie-Anne was invaluable to her husband's work. She drew scientific diagrams for him that were published alongside his writings. She learned English so she could help translate new scientific works for him, took notes, and was a constant presence in the laboratory. This portrait tells the story of a scientific couple. They're surrounded by their equipment. A barometer, gasometer, water sill, and a bell jar sit visible on the table.

4:22A round-bottom flask lolls at the floor, just beyond Lavoisier's extended right foot. Except, that wasn't always how the portrait looked. Recent scanning and analysis was able to uncover an earlier draft of the portrait underneath the final layer of paint, a draft that portrayed the couple in a slightly different light. Originally, Marie-Anne had been painted in a large, elaborate hat, with tall feathers and flowers and a ribbon wrapped around it the size of her head. There had originally been a shelf of books behind Lavoisier, maybe records, a nod to his work as a wealthy and worldly public administrator.

5:14And though now the table is covered by a red cloth, Originally, the desk was bare, a beautiful carved desk with ornate, gilded designs. Perhaps most surprisingly of all, the original painting didn't feature all of Lavoisier's scientific equipment. It was a conscious effort on David's part, a decision made before the portrait was finished, to decide to portray the couple as distinguished intellectual scientists without visible and ostentatious trappings of wealth. Lavoisier is a scientist, this portrait says, not just a wealthy bureaucrat or tax collector. Because Lavoisier was incredibly wealthy, a multi-millionaire by today's standards who built his fortune mostly through his work with a fermé general or a tax collection operation, and through other government positions.

6:21The painter, David, was smart enough to know that in France in 1788, portrait of a wealthy, fashionable nobleman might not go over so well with the public. But even with the changes he made, simplifying the fashion and portraying the couple as less aristocratic and less ostentatious, more scientific, David was still asked not to display the work at the Paris Salon. It was decided that the portrait might be too controversial given the anti-aristocratic sentiment in the air. Things in France were primed for combustion. Seven months after the portrait was completed, the Bastille was stormed. Ten months after it was completed, peasants marched on Versailles and forced the royal family back to Paris.

7:20The spark of the French Revolution was ignited, and Lavoisier knew as well as anyone that sometimes when certain elements combine, the results are explosive. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. In one sense, Lavoisier was born in exactly the right time period. He was a great thinker ready to upend the paradigm of scientific thought powered by the force of the Enlightenment. In another sense, Lavoisier was born at exactly the wrong time, but we'll get to that later. Before we get into why Lavoisier's scientific work represented such a groundbreaking step forward in chemistry, it's worth spending a little time understanding what the status quo was when he started studying.

8:17In the late 1600s, Isaac Newton published his famous Laws of Motion, giving the field of physics a comforting mathematical order. A hundred years after that, chemistry was still lagging behind, still lingering in the world of semi-mythical alchemy. But as the Enlightenment progressed through Europe, a movement of rationality and evidence, it became only a matter of time before the question of what exactly the world was made of would become a more organized field, with men like Lavoisier casting off preconceived notions and old assumptions. Would it be possible to invoke Newtonian order and logic to a subject that seemed as much like magic as anything else?

9:11They would wipe the slate clean, start from zero, and try to establish, step by step, what was demonstrably true. When Lavoisier was a young man, plenty of people still believed in the element that had been laid out by the natural Greek philosophers. Earth, air, water, fire. But during Lavoisier's time, there was an ongoing debate about what exactly fire was. Was it an element? A process? Something else? The most widely held belief in chemistry in the mid-18th century was something called phlogiston theory. If you've never heard of phlogiston, I have good news for you. It doesn't exist. But they didn't know that at the time.

10:02They believed that phlogiston was an element released during combustion that allowed something to burn. If something had more phlogiston in it, it would burn better. And when it stopped burning, it was because it had run out of phlogiston. The convenient thing about that theory is, for most things, when you burn them, they become lighter, decreasing in mass. Well, the simplest way to explain that was because all of the phlogiston was gone. But there was a slight problem with that. Because when metals burned, they realized they would actually weigh more. We know now that it's because some metals react with oxygen and become metal oxides.

10:47But if you believed that phlogiston was supposed to be released into the air, it would be pretty confusing when you were looking at the empirical data. Did it mean that fire was its own element? And that the metal was weighing more because the fire was somehow being added to it? Or wait, wait, maybe phlogiston is real, but it's lighter than air. So phlogiston is being released, and for some reason heavier air is taking its place? If phlogiston was the one constant that you're certain about, it requires a fairly robust amount of mental gymnastics to make it all make sense. Lavoisier would be among the generation of scientists willing to look at things from a completely new perspective.

11:40Antoine Lavoisier was born in 1743 to a family that was wealthy and connected, but not landed nobility. But this is noble blood, so before you get too worried, Antoine Lavoisier did get a noble title, purchased for him by his father as a gift for him after his wedding. Lavoisier's father was an attorney at the Parliament of Paris, a distinguished position with a limited number of slots. Lavoisier actually completed his legal degree too, and was also admitted to the Parliament of Paris. But he never actually practiced law. Instead, he found his passion in science. He studied chemistry, even though the field would not have been called that at the time, learning the most recent theories about the elements that made up the world.

12:32But he was dismayed, even as a young man, by the many contradictions and blind spots in the field. He had also studied under a mathematician and astronomer, and he was drawn to the logic and order of those subjects. Eventually, Lavoisier distinguished himself enough to receive a provisional appointment to the Academy of Sciences, an incredibly prestigious position. But being a man of science wasn't actually a career path, which is to say it wasn't how Lavoisier earned an income. His day job, so to speak, would be as a government official of kinds, a man with nearly half a dozen different official positions, establishing him as an almost omnipresent figure in the royal government, which would, as the 18th century drew to a close, prove dangerous.

13:30But we're not there yet. When Lavoisier was in his 20s, he bought a part of a share of the ferme général, or general farm. In the simplest terms, the farm was an organization which paid the government predicted tax revenues in advance in exchange for the right to then later collect those taxes. For English speakers, the word farm probably brings to mind hay and cow manure. But the English word farmer actually comes from the French fermier, meaning leaseholder. Originally in English, farmer was the word to identify people working the soil on land they didn't own, and then gradually it became the term for all, well, farmers.

14:17But when I say Lavoisier was a farmer, I don't mean he was tilling the fields. For Lavoisier, his work with the farm was incredibly lucrative. By 1786, when he was in his mid-40s, he had made the equivalent of$48 million today. Even so, he wasn't ostentatious or particularly showy. He didn't go by Antoine de Lavoisier, even though he would have been permitted to given his noble title. And his household was small, with only six household servants. But the most useful person in Lavoisier's household would turn out to be his wife. When Lavoisier was 28, he married the 13-year-old Marie-Anne Pierrette-Palsy.

15:04Marie-Anne's father was a senior member of the farm. This marriage would turn out to be not just politically and financially advantageous, but also incredibly helpful to Lavoisier's scientific career. As I mentioned in the episode's introduction, though Lavoisier himself never really learned English, Marie-Anne learned and helped translate important documents for him so he would know the state of learning around the world. Marie-Anne took an active role in helping him in the laboratory, taking notes and drawing and making engravings of his scientific instruments, illustrations that would go into his published papers.

15:48She edited and published her husband's memoirs. And she also helped him socially, hosting parties and entertaining cultural figures like Benjamin Franklin and other notables. Their home was a shared space with their laboratory. Marie-Anne helped create an environment where long days would be spent socializing and experimenting with friends and colleagues. A collaborative salon environment. Thanks to Lavoisier's tremendous wealth, he was able to furnish a top-of-the-line laboratory with equipment he designed and had custom-made. This is one of those places where you realize just how important that money was.

16:34There are letters where Lavoisier is corresponding with a fellow scientist on the continent, and that scientist had all the right ideas, but none of the access to equipment to test them. Lavoisier wasn't an isolated genius working independently. He was in fierce, active competition with other scientists. Scientists in France, also England, Scotland, and Germany. And Lavoisier was going to use all of the resources at his disposal to be the first to discover the true nature of air. At this point, scientists recognized that there seemed to be different types of air with different properties that were released during different reactions.

17:22Joseph Black, a Scottish scientist, identified something he called fixed air, which couldn't support flames and wasn't breathable. We now know that he was writing about carbon dioxide. Another chemist, Joseph Priestley, identified what he called deflogisticated air when he heated mercury calx, what we would now call mercury oxide, and collected the gas. Priestley found that that air was incredibly breathable and absolutely supported flames. Priestley's theory was that things burned so well in that gas because it was deflogisticated. or all of the phlogiston had been removed. The thought then was, as something was burning, since the air had no phlogiston of its own, it would easily be able to absorb more of the burning phlogiston.

18:19Priestley's de-phlogisticated air was actually oxygen, which he had isolated in 1774. He just didn't understand it right. Priestley told Lavoisier about that process, and Lavoisier understood something about what he had done. Lavoisier realized that it could be the key to taking down the paradigm of phlogiston theory altogether. That, quote, eminently breathable air, as Lavoisier referred to it, was an element of air. Air could be broken down into smaller component parts. Though Priestley had arguably discovered oxygen first, Lavoisier was the first to publicly understand it as its own element, and it was Lavoisier who gave it the name oxygen, from the Greek for maker of acids, because he observed the way that when a lot of materials burned in oxygen, they dissolved in water then to create acids.

19:22With a lot of things, but not everything, as we now know, it does create acidic oxides. Lavoisier's real victory was that his naming conventions caught on. The debate about phlogiston theory was still very much ongoing in 1787, when Lavoisier pitched his new nomenclature of chemistry. And with the support of a cadre of his colleagues, and thanks to his social cachet and public prominence, his nomenclature caught on. His system of naming elements is still the basic skeleton we use today, and it's a system that incidentally was completely incompatible with phlogiston theory. Lavoisier understood, if you control the language, you control the ideas.

20:13In 1789, Lavoisier published his groundbreaking elementary treatise on chemistry, which laid the framework for what we'd refer to now as the scientific method, a guide for chemists in their experiments in a rational and, for lack of a better word, scientific way. In the treatise was his clear, new vocabulary for the elements that he recognized, a system for naming chemicals that we still follow. Things aren't calxes, they're oxides. Vitriol of Venus? That's nonsense. It's copper sulfate. Acid of lemons? Citric acid. Flowers of benzoin is benzoic acid. Now, Lavoisier wasn't fully correct on everything.

21:03What he called azote would actually catch on as nitrogen, and he identified light and heat or caloric as their own elements. But the names were systematic and sensible, applying Enlightenment philosophy to the formerly piecemeal world of chemistry. It's genuinely amazing, and it took a major force like Lavoisier, with his financial, social, political, and mental abilities, to create that paradigm shift. He had to look at the results of his experiments, cast off preconceived notions, and build a new framework from the ground up. He started at zero and built something imperfect, but undoubtedly more rational than what had been in place before, and closer to what we now understand to be the reality.

21:57Lavoisier represents a major step forward in the millennia-long human project, trying to use our abilities to make sense of the world around us. But again, all of that was Lavoisier's passion project. At the height of his career in the government in 1788, the year before his treatise was published, he had five important government positions at once. He was a member of the Academy of Science, and he was a farmer general, and he was also a commissioner of agriculture, a commissioner of the Royal Gunpowder and Saltpeter Administration, an inspector for the tobacco. He served on the board of the Discount Bank, and he was a member of the Assembly of Notables called together by King Louis XVI.

22:47Lavoisier's methodical approach to science also served him well as a public servant. Efficiency and order were his superpowers. He determined more effective ways of gathering saltpeter to produce gunpowder and ensured the purity of the elements that made gunpowder in order to increase its quality. The result was that he ultimately made France self-sufficient in gunpowder, which, incidentally, had the consequence of France having enough gunpowder to help supply the American revolutionaries during the American Revolutionary War against Britain. Thank you, Lavoisier. Lavoisier also introduced standardized procedures for tobacco being sold in France, determining that 6.3 % water by volume made the processed tobacco the highest quality, and ensuring that it would be implemented across the board in all factories run by the Fermet General.

23:47But Lavoisier's clinical approach to administration wouldn't always make him popular. He was, after all, a taxman, no matter how David's portrait tried to make him look. At one point, Lavoisier determined that based on the amount of tax revenue the farm was collecting and the amount of goods Paris was consuming, that about a fifth of all goods were being smuggled into the city untaxed. His solution, proposed in 1779, was to build a wall around the city, calculating that the cost of said wall would more than pay for itself in the increased tax collection. The wall was wildly hated by the French people.

24:37The playwright and revolutionary Pierre-Augustin de Beaumarchais came up with the little pithy play on words, Le murmura peré rende peré murmura, or in English, The wall walling Paris keeps Paris murmuring. He also wrote a little poem, which I will mercifully not attempt to say in French, but which translates to, To increase its cash and shorten our horizon, the farm judges it necessary to put Paris in prison. In terms of his reputation, it didn't help that Lavoisier had a very powerful, very prominent enemy, the radical writer Jean-Paul Marat. Now, Murat is mostly known as a revolutionary pamphleteer, the writer of the newspaper The Friend of the People, but he was also a scientific writer.

25:36In 1780, he published his research into FIRE, claiming that his paper was approved by the Academy of Science. Though his experiment had been evaluated by the Academy, they hadn't endorsed its findings. Lavoisier publicly demanded that the Academy disavow the paper, which it did. And Lavoisier had also humiliated Marat's scientific beliefs before, when Lavoisier had been on a commission to prove that animal magnetism, something Marat was a public proponent of, wasn't actually real. It almost seems cliché to say that Marat, humiliated by the scientific elite, then spent all of his energy trying to tear the elite down.

26:22And that narrative is a little pat, but that is the progression of how things happened. Murat hated Lavoisier and frequently wrote about him with personal and political attacks. Though Lavoisier certainly liked the revolutionary ideals of rationalizing the systems in France and throughout the French economy, and Lavoisier would be on the committee helping to establish the metric system for the new government, but he was also well aware that things were primed for combustion. In 1789, the summer that people stormed the Bastille, Lavoisier was involved in an altercation on the streets of Paris that almost certainly made him realize just how dangerous revolution could be.

27:09In his role as a gunpowder administrator, Lavoisier was helping to oversee the movement of a shipment of gunpowder labeled poudre de trait, or powder for trade, incidentally almost certainly to fund the Atlantic slave trade. But the semi-illiterate crowd with hair-trigger tempers misread the shipment as for traitors, traitors powder, believing that it was gunpowder for the purpose of putting the revolution down. The mob descended, and though Lavoisier tried to engage in an open debate and to explain things, it was no use. He barely managed to escape with his life. By the beginning of the 1790s, as the revolution got more radical, things only got more dangerous.

28:03As the pieces of the old regime were being torn down, Lavoisier fought to keep the Academy of Sciences, despite its royalist associations, arguing that science was helping France. Lavoisier publicly declined to take a salary for his many government appointments in 1791, although he was already so despised that that only backfired. It drew attention to his wealth and also to the elitism of the institutions he was serving for. What does it say about who can serve on those committees if you need to be so wealthy that you could do it without pay? Still, as I mentioned, Lavoisier served on the commission establishing the metric system.

28:49Out of the many ways the French revolutionaries were attempting to rationalize the world, this was actually a great one. They did also try to establish revolutionary time, in which the day would be divided into not 24, but 10 hours, and those hours would be divided into 100 minutes, which would each be divided into 100 seconds, but that one didn't catch on, and at a certain point, even the revolutionary government said people could stop using it. Metric measurement, though, that one caught on, just not in America. In an attempt to secularize the calendar and strip it of Christian references, the calendar itself was remade with new months and a new counting system for the years.

29:35The French Republican calendar would begin with 1792 as year one, although it was only identified as such the next year in 1793. The way Lavoisier had needed to cast off preconceived notions of the elements and of chemistry in order to come up with an entirely new system, the revolutionaries were doing the same thing with time itself, starting from scratch, right this time. 1793 would be the year Lavoisier would be removed from the Commission on the Metric System. That summer, Marat would be assassinated in his bathtub and become a political martyr. In September, police officers arrived at Lavoisier's home.

30:23He no longer lived at the famous laboratory at the arsenal, because he had resigned from his gunpowder post by this point. The police demanded entrants to search for documents related to the tax-collecting farm. The police didn't find anything incriminating, just some letters that Lavoisier had exchanged with other scientists around Europe. But perhaps astutely, figuring that his political enemies might forge documents or incriminating evidence, Lavoisier insisted that he seal his correspondence with his personal wax seal to prevent it from being tampered with before the police officers took it away.

31:04A few weeks prior to that, the Academy of Science was dissolved. Despite the ways it might have helped the Republic, it was too deeply tied to the Ancien Regime. The farm itself had been dissolved too, and Lavoisier had resigned from it years before. but his role as a former tax collector would be his undoing. The Republican government was angry and frustrated that even after the farm had been dissolved, its assets hadn't been transferred to the government treasury yet. Clearly something traitorous was happening. 19 former farmers, not yet including Lavoisier, were arrested with warrants. In the meantime, Lavoisier wrote desperate letters trying to explain that he had long since resigned from the farm and had nothing to do with its administrational operations, but he received no reply.

32:00Eventually, knowing their time was up, both Lavoisier and his father-in-law turned themselves in on November 28th, probably still idealistic enough to think that, since they hadn't done anything actually wrong or illegal, they would be fine. Though the charges against them weren't told to them, Lavoisier and the other farmers put together a 42-page rebuttal, written by Lavoisier, that former law student, before trial. In the meantime, his wife, Marie-Anne, was aiding her husband to the best of her abilities, the way she always had. She found herself in front of the prosecutor, Antoine Dupit, where she might have found a way to argue to separate her husband's case from the rest of the farmers.

32:50He could have been tried separately, moved to another prison where he might have escaped. But Marie-Anne's father was also among the farmers. Marie-Anne could not save them both, and so the would-be deal that might have saved Antoine Lavoisier dissolved like sulfur dioxide in water. Another young man did his part to try to save Lavoisier. Allegedly, the day before Lavoisier's trial, Antoine-Francois de Foucret, a fellow editor at the French Science Journal that Lavoisier had founded, spoke before Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety, and attempted to communicate what a loss it would be for science should Lavoisier be killed.