The Two Reactions of the Chemical Revolution

Chances are, you’re not like me: you cringe when someone says the word “chemistry.” Your memory of it vaguely harkens back to an undergrad class whose knowledge you flushed once you finished the final. That’s okay — my goal for this series is to change that paradigm, make it understandable to all, and provide some entertainment.

I covered the scientific contributions of Antoine Lavoisier (aka the Hugh Hefner of chemistry) previously in very general terms mostly because I wanted to highlight the cooler things about him as a person (he threw chemistry parties with live demonstrations!). Here, I want to get a little scientific (read: nerdy) and relay the two chemical reactions that headlined the chemical revolution. These reactions were bleeding-edge, and their results and how they fit into chemical theory at the time (mid-to-late 1700s) were, shall we say, all over the place. Lavoisier performed these experiments himself, reasoned through the results, and finally diverted chemistry onto the path of righteousness after millennia in the dark.

To briefly set the stage, by the 1700s, the classical view of chemistry was starting to crumble. Even though the four classical elements got a rebrand in the late 1600s, researchers were starting to learn, after 2000 years of being told otherwise, that there were actually more than four elements in the world. The first step early chemists took towards dispelling the four classical elements was proving that air was indeed a mixture of some sort. Again, because air was seen as…