Review - Lavoisier in the Year One

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Review - Lavoisier in the Year One - Madison Smartt Bell

Antoine Lavoisier is one of those names that you are likely to have come across if you are interested in science - and you probably have some vague idea that he was involved in the French Revolution (in fact was executed during the Terror), but it might be difficult to pin down mentally just what he did. Did he discover oxygen? No, that was Priestley. Was it the periodic table? No, Mendeleev. So why should we care who Lavoisier was, and what he did? Madison Smartt Bell sets out to educate us.

There are three factors interweaving here - the struggle in France as it underwent the revolution, the emergence of chemistry from alchemy, and the destruction of the phlogiston concept in favour of the acceptance of air containing a number of gasses including oxygen. It's hard to believe now, but at the time (the late 18th century), there was still a lot of enthusiasm for the old Greek idea that everything was composed of the four "elements" earth, air, fire and water. The simple realization that air wasn't an element was quite dramatic in itself, and Lavoisier was to unravel much of the old theory. As a "hero" story of achievement, there are some problems, as much of Lavoisier's work overlapped with the work of others, but there is no doubt that he was responsible for the modern structure of naming elements, and for a lot of the detail that would help make chemistry a respectable science.

There are other dramatic developments here too. Bell gives us an interesting picture of Madame Lavoisier's contribution - much more than might have been expected in the social strictures of the time - and there is a certain fatal dramatic horror in seeing the collapse of Lavoisier's assumption that he was safe from the revolution, at least in part because of a snub to a failed scientific rival turned journalist and revolutionary, the infamous Marat.

There's nothing really wrong with this book - it does the job of bringing Lavoisier's contribution to science out of obscurity, and it's great to have a chemistry-based popular science book, as they are few and far between. But I have to confess that for me this book didn't quite work. There was too much use of quotes in the rather dull style of the period, and too much detail on the tiny steps along the way to Lavoisier's main discoveries. It's interesting to compare it to Miss Leavitt's Stars, another book in the same series. I read that in one day, and though I take the reviewer's point about not having much in it about Miss Leavitt herself, it was a truly enjoyable experience. I felt with this book that everything seemed to take a long time - it had none of the pace and interest.

Lavoisier is an interesting subject and made important contributions to the foundation of chemistry as a science, and in the absence of another short biography of him, I have to recommend this one - but it could have been better.

Also in hardback:

Reviewed by Miles Vincent

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