Top 10 chemistry scientists

Humphry Davy (1778–1829), the son of an impoverished Cornish woodcarver, rose meteorically to help spearhead the reformed chemistry movement initiated by Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier—although Davy was a critic of some of its basic premises.

Self-Made Scientist

Apprenticed to an apothecary-surgeon, Davy taught himself a wide range of other subjects: theology and philosophy, poetics, seven languages, and several sciences, including chemistry. In 1798 he took a position at Thomas Beddoes’s Pneumatic Institution, where the use of the newly discovered gases in the cure and prevention of disease was investigated.

Davy’s earliest published work (“An Essay on Heat, Light, and the Combinations of Light,” in Contributions to Physical and Medical Knowledge, Principally from the West of England, ed. Beddoes, 1799) was a refutation of Lavoisier’s caloric, arguing, among other points, that heat is motion but light is matter.

But his early reputation was made by his book Researches, Chemical and Philosophical, Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide . . . and Its Respiration (1799). His reco

Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, a meticulous experimenter, revolutionized chemistry. He established the law of conservation of mass, determined that combustion and respiration are caused by chemical reactions with what he named “oxygen,” and helped systematize chemical nomenclature, among many other accomplishments.

Scientist and Tax Collector

The son of a wealthy Parisian lawyer, Lavoisier (1743–1794) completed a law degree in accordance with family wishes. His real interest, however, was in science, which he pursued with passion while leading a full public life. On the basis of his earliest scientific work, mostly in geology, he was elected in 1768—at the early age of 25—to the Academy of Sciences, France’s most elite scientific society. In the same year he bought into the Ferme Générale, the private corporation that collected taxes for the Crown on a profit-and-loss basis.

A few years later he married the daughter of another tax farmer, Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, who was not quite 14 at the time. Madame Lavoisier prepared herself to be her husband’s scientific collaborator by l

Henry Cavendish

English natural philosopher, and scientist (1731–1810)

For other people named Henry Cavendish, see Henry Cavendish (disambiguation).

Henry CavendishFRS (KAV-ən-dish; 10 October 1731 – 24 February 1810) was an English experimental and theoretical chemist and physicist. He is noted for his discovery of hydrogen, which he termed "inflammable air".[1] He described the density of inflammable air, which formed water on combustion, in a 1766 paper, On Factitious Airs. Antoine Lavoisier later reproduced Cavendish's experiment and gave the element its name.

A shy man, Cavendish was distinguished for great accuracy and precision in his researches into the composition of atmospheric air, the properties of different gases, the synthesis of water, the law governing electrical attraction and repulsion, a mechanical theory of heat, and calculations of the density (and hence the mass) of the Earth. His experiment to measure the density of the Earth (which, in turn, allows the gravitational constant to be calculated) has come to be known as the Cavendish expe

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