Lavoisier--The Crucial Year: The Background and Origin of His First Experiments on Combustion in 1772

The author explores the origins of the eighteenth-century chemical revolution as it centers on Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier's earliest work on combustion. He shows that the main lines of Lavoisier's theory--including his theory of a heat-fluid, caloric--were elaborated well before his discovery of the role played by oxygen. Contrary to the opinion prevailing at that time, Lavoisier suspected, and demonstrated by experiment, that common air, or some portion of it, combines with substances when they are burned. Professor Guerlac examines critically the theories of other historians of science concerning these first experiments, and tries to unravel the influences which French, German, and British chemists may have had on Lavoisier. He has made use of newly discovered material on this phase of Lavoisier's career, and includes an appendix in which the essential documents are printed together for the first time.

Henry Guerlac (1910-1982) graduated from Cornell University in 1932, received a master's degree in biochemistry from Cornell in 1933, and a doctorate in European history from Harvard University in 1941. Before joining the Cornell faculty in 1946, he taught at Harvard and the University of Wisconsin, and for three years was the historian for the Radiation Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1964, he was named Goldwin Smith Professor of the History of Science and in 1970 he became director of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell. Guerlac was awarded the George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society in 1973, was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1978, and in 1982 was named Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur by the French government. Guerlac's books include Science in Western Civilization, Newton on the Continent, and Lavoisier--The Crucial Year, for which he received the Pfizer Prize in 1959.