| Lavoisier's experiments | | A French chemist Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794), known as the "father of modern chemistry" laid the foundation of modern Chemistry. Lavoisier accepted the idea of an element as any material made of only one component. He identified a compound as any material composed of two or more elements. Hydrogen, for example, is an element because it is made of only hydrogen atoms, and water is a compound because it is made of atoms of the elements hydrogen and oxygen |  | | A representation of Lavoisier’s notion of elements and compounds: Substances A and B cannot be broken down to smaller components and so are classified as elements. These two elements can react together to form the more complex substance C, which is classified as a compound because it is made of more than one element. | | Lavoisier hypothesized that mass is always conserved during a chemical reaction, where conserved in this context means that the amount of the mass does not change the number of grams of mass present after the reaction is the same as the number of grams present before the reaction. | | Previous | Next |
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