chemical reactions.

Traditionally Antoine has been called the "father of modern chemistry" (with little to no mention of his wife) though more modern scholarship points out that Paulze translated all his contemporaries' works from English to French (complete with footnotes pointing out errors in chemistry), took notes of all observations, illustrated all experimental set-ups, edited his reports and worked so closely with him we can't easily separate their roles. 🧵 2/n

Attributing everything to him alone is clearly not the full picture. She fought to defend his legacy after he was executed during the French Revolution, and kept his name for the rest of her life, even during her short-lived 2nd marriage to physicist Benjamin Thomson, Count Rumford. (She dumped Rumford as soon as she realized that he did not intend for her to work alongside him in the lab.) ⁠

⁠Made for an art show about tarot, I chose them, not only as a well-matched historical scientific 🧵3/n

couple but because the card is associated with flames and the element of air. The Lavoisiers studied air and were the ones who really showed that air was not an element (in the modern chemical sense) by isolating various constituent gases like oxygen, and debunking the earlier phlogiston theory. I have specifically shown them with their famous phlogiston experiment apparatus.

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Further, not only did they recognize the role that oxygen played in combustion, Lavoisier and his friend Pierre-Simon Laplace also recognized that the process of respiration was in fact a slow, controlled combustion - hence the image of the lungs with flames (also an allusion to the flaming heart symbol and iconography).

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https://www.etsy.com/listing/571164948/antoine-laurent-lavoisier-and-marie-anne