Tea at Trianon: The Father of Modern Chemistry

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, September 2, 2017

The Father of Modern Chemistry

From Smithsonian:

Lavoisier didn’t think that Priestley was right about phlogiston, prompting a long-running battle. Lavoisier didn’t believe Priestley because of his own groundbreaking approach to chemistry. Lavoisier believed that “matter–identified by weight–would be conserved through any reaction,” writes Chemical History. Today this is known as the law of conservation of mass. What it means is that the same amount of matter that goes into a chemical reaction comes out of it. This central belief led him to study how the gases present in air related to fire and to breathing. Writing for io9, Esther Inglis-Arkell explains how this led Lavoisier to torment the poor rodent. (Read more.)