Priestley, Cavendish, and Lavoisier

Resuscitation Great. The contributions of Lavoisier, Scheele and Priestley to the early understanding of respiratory physiology in the Eighteenth Century.

The mid Eighteenth Century was a time of great scientific experimentation and observation during which some of the basic aspects of respiratory physiology and metabolism began to be elucidated. This was the time when the fundamental elements of earth, air, fire and water proposed by Aristotle began to be reappraised. The Phlogiston theory was finally exploded and a basic understanding of elemen...

Priestley Rings and Priestley Order-Compactifications

We introduce Priestley rings of upsets (of a poset) and prove that inequivalent Priestley ring representations of a bounded distributive lattice L are in 1-1 correspondence with dense subspaces of the Priestley space of L. This generalizes a 1955 result of Bauer that inequivalent reduced field representations of a Boolean algebra B are in 1-1 correspondence with dense subspaces of the Stone spa...

The Legacy of Lavoisier

Lavoisier and the Caloric Theory

PROFESSIONAL historians of science generally recognize the importance of Lavoisier's theory of heat. However, it commonly receives scant attention in the historical treatment of his chemical theories except perhaps as an example illustrating his conservatism and giving the impression that the caloric theory, although perhaps important in the development of ideas on the nature of heat, is indepe...

Imaging the experiments on respiration and transpiration of Lavoisier and Séguin: two unknown drawings by Madame Lavoisier.

This paper presents two hitherto unknown drawings by Marie-Anne-Pierrette Lavoisier dating to the early 1790s that illustrate the experiments on respiration and transpiration of her husband Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his assistant Armand Séguin. These works may be associated with the well-known sepia drawings that were published for the first time by Edouard Grimaux in 1888. Details containe...