Photo credit: Jacques-Louis David — Wikimedia Commons · Public domain

Antoine Lavoisier

1743–1794 · France · Born in the 1700s

Established the law of conservation of mass, explained combustion as combination with oxygen and helped create modern chemical nomenclature.

Fields

General chemistry

Related topics

Conservation of mass, stoichiometric ratios

In a closed system, chemical reactions conserve total mass because atoms are rearranged, not created or destroyed. Balanced coefficients set mole ratios for quantitative calculations.

Chemists in the same field

Joseph Priestley (1733)Henry Cavendish (1731)Joseph Black (1728)John Dalton (1766)Amedeo Avogadro (1776)Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac (1778)