Antoine Laurent Lavoisier

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794) was a French chemist, often called the founder of modern chemistry. A wealthy Parisian who financed his laboratory through a share in the royal tax farm, he demonstrated the role of oxygen in combustion and respiration, overthrew the phlogiston theory, established the composition of water, stated the law of conservation of mass and, with colleagues, devised the systematic chemical nomenclature still in use. His Elements of Chemistry of 1789 was the first modern textbook of the science. He also served on commissions for the metric system and agricultural reform. Arrested during the Terror as a former tax farmer, he was guillotined in May 1794.