Lavoisier's laboratory

Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier is regarded as the father of modern chemistry. His experiments leading to the identification of oxygen, the law of the conservation of mass (‘nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed’) and the synthesis of water were landmarks in the history of chemistry. To successfully conduct his experiments, Lavoisier used some thirteen thousand instruments and apparatuses, including thermometers, barometers, areometers, hourglasses, crucibles, rulers, vacuum pumps and reflector mirrors. He worked in close collaboration with manufacturers to construct the instruments required for his experiments. With Nicolas Fortin he devised scales with a precision hitherto unknown to determine the equivalence of the kilogram. He also created gasometers for the synthesis of water and calorimeters to measure the quantity of a body’s heat. An administrator of the Ferme Générale, he was guillotined in 1794, but his wife took care of his laboratory’s safekeeping. His grandniece, Madame de Chazelles, donated some of the most prestigious pieces to the Académie des Sciences, and they were transferred to the Conservatoire in 1866. In 1956 the Du Pont de Nemours company acquired some five hundred apparatuses for the museum, which bear testimony to chemistry in Lavoisier’s time.