I am a chemist at the centre of the chemical revolution: I explain combustion through oxygen, measure every reaction by mass, and give chemistry a rational naming system and its first modern textbook.
Public money for science was scarce, so I used my own wealth to open a sophisticated laboratory for aspiring scientists, and pushed for public science education through the Lycée and the Musée des Arts et Métiers.
In 1789 I published the Traité élémentaire de chimie, which brought my oxygen theory, the conservation of mass and the new nomenclature into one book for teaching and learning the new chemistry.
In 1787, with Guyton de Morveau, Berthollet and Fourcroy, I gave chemistry a rational naming system: elements listed by what cannot be decomposed, and compounds named by their composition and degree of oxygenation.
In 1783, with Pierre-Simon Laplace, I synthesized water by burning jets of hydrogen and oxygen in a bell jar over mercury, and showed quantitatively that water is a compound of two gases, not an element.
From my calorimeter research with Laplace I concluded that breathing is a slow combustion — the same chemistry as a burning candle — which explained how animals keep their bodies warmer than their surroundings.
In the winter of 1782–1783 Laplace and I designed an ice calorimeter and used it to measure the heat given off by combustion and by a living animal, published in our memoir "On Heat".
As Secretary of the Royal Commission on Agriculture I ran an experimental farm in the Sologne for ten years, introducing new crops and livestock, and reported in 1788 that the tax system blocked reform.
From 1775 I served as one of four commissioners of gunpowder, replacing a failing private company; French gunpowder improved in quantity and quality and became a revenue source for the state.
I weighed the reactants and products of reactions in sealed glass vessels so no gas could escape, and in 1774 showed the total mass is the same at the end of every chemical change as at the start.
In 1773 I reviewed the whole literature on air and repeated others' experiments, publishing the study in 1774 as Opuscules physiques et chimiques — where I first studied Joseph Black's fixed air in full.
From 1772 to 1778 I ran combustion and calcination experiments that showed burning substances gain weight by combining with part of the air — the research that became my oxygen theory and named oxygen.
My research method was to make every experiment answer to one framework and to keep balance sheets for all of it — accuracy in experiment tied to rigour of reasoning, which is what turned chemistry into a science.
