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The chemical revolution, also called the ''first chemical revolution'', was the early modern reformulation of chemistry that culminated in the law of conservation of mass and the oxygen theory of combustion. During the 19th and 20th century, this transformation was credited to the work of the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier (the "father of modern chemistry").〔(The First Chemical Revolution ) – the Instrument Project, The College of Wooster〕 However, recent work on the history of early modern chemistry considers the chemical revolution to consist of gradual changes in chemical theory and practice that emerged over a period of two centuries. The so-called scientific revolution took place during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries whereas the chemical revolution took place during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Several factors led to this revolution. First, there were the forms of gravimetric analysis that emerged from alchemy and new kinds of instruments that were developed in medical and industrial contexts. In these settings, chemists increasingly challenged hypotheses that had already been presented by the ancient Greeks. For example, chemists began to assert that all structures were composed of more than the four elements of the Greeks or the eight elements of the medieval alchemists. The Irish alchemist, Robert Boyle, laid the foundations for the Chemical Revolution, with his mechanical corpuscular philosophy, which in turn relied heavily on the alchemical corpuscular theory and experimental method dating back to pseudo-Geber. Other factors included new experimental techniques and the discovery of 'fixed air' (carbon dioxide) by Joseph Black in the middle of the 18th century. This discovery was particularly important because it empirically proved that 'air' did not consist of only one substance and because it established 'gas' as an important experimental substance. Nearer the end of the 18th century, the experiments by Henry Cavendish and Joseph Priestley further proved that air is not an element and is instead composed of several different gases. Lavoisier also translated the names of chemical substance into a new nomenclatural language more appealing to scientists of the nineteenth century. Such changes took place in an atmosphere in which the industrial revolution increased public interest in learning and practicing chemistry. When describing the task of reinventing chemical nomenclature, Lavoisier attempted to harness the new centrality of chemistry by making the rather hyperbolic claim that: The latter stages of the revolution was fuelled by the 1789 publication of Lavoisier's ''Traité Élémentaire de Chimie'' (Elements of Chemistry). Beginning with this publication and others to follow, Lavoisier synthesised the work of others and coined the term "oxygen". He also explained the theory of combustion, and challenged the phlogiston theory with his views on caloric. The ''Traité'' incorporates notions of a "new chemistry" and describes the experiments and reasoning that led to his conclusions. Like Newton's ''Principia'', which was the high point of the Scientific Revolution, Lavoisier's ''Traité'' can be seen as the culmination of the Chemical Revolution. Lavoisier's work was not immediately accepted and it took several decades for it gain momentum. This transition was aided by the work of Jöns Jakob Berzelius, who came up with a simplified shorthand to describe chemical compounds based on John Dalton's theory of atomic weights. ==References== 〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Chemical revolution」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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