Research Traditions, Lavoisier, and the Chemical Revolution

Abstract

E VERYONE LOVES A PARADOX; historians of science are no exception. The past quarter century has not only enriched our discipline with new methods and perspectives, it has beguiled us with paradoxical interpretations of familiar episodes and personalities. So Isaac Newton-once a paragon of scientific rationality-has been revealed as a closet magician; Gregor Mendel has turned out to be no Mendelian. I Nor has the development of chemistry in the late eighteenth century escaped paradoxical restatement. For generations, scientists and historians have taken the Chemical Revolution for granted. It consisted, we are told, in the overthrow of Georg Ernst Stahl's phlogiston theory of combustion. The architect of the new theory, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, succeeded in vanquishing phlogiston by his persistent application of quantitative methods, especially his attention to weight changes observed in calcination and combustion. The departure from tradition that he orchestrated was underscored by the introduction of an original language into chemistry, one grounded in a newly conceived set of simple substances and a system of naming compounds according to their elemental composition. The shift was so dramatic that it has been widely equated with the foundation of modern chemistry.2 What are we to make, then, of recent intimations that the Chemical Revolution was not so much about a new theory of combustion as about a general theory of the gaseous state or an original theory of acidity or a new view of chemical composition?3 A proliferation of articles on neglected aspects of the revolution suggests that the traditional view sketched above is at best incomplete. But current revision of conventional historiography cuts deeper. Historians of chemistry