Quah Paik Suan (UID 3035171468) The Chemical Revolution CCST9026: Scientific Revolutions and Their Impact on Modern Society Tutorial Class: Thursday 10.30-11.20am Disproving Phlogiston as a Catalyst for Chemical Revolution The Chemical Revolution occurred from 1760-1800, where chemistry saw a shift from being a disorganised branch of observation based-science heavily influenced by four classical elements of air, fire, earth and water to a science with quantitative methods. The shift from “a science of observation to a science of measurement” occurred as a by-product of the emergence of theory of combustion based on oxygen. (Mahanti, n.d.) During the time, the major field in chemistry was combustion and the properties of air, the normal science as described by Kuhn. A prominent theory of the time was phlogiston theory, representing …show more content…
It was complemented by the principle of conserving mass, where the mass of reactants equals the mass of products. Lavoisier burned hydrogen and oxygen in a closed vessel to produce water equal to the amount of reactants, proving water as a compound, thus supporting the principle. Air was conclusively shown to consist of different components capable of being a participant in reactions while water was finally shown to be a compound, thus ending the paradigm of four elements that chemistry was based on previously. By using precise measurements in experiments, chemists had now a new way to conduct research. The concept of chemical elements proposed by Robert Boyle in 1661 was reintroduced. (American Chemical Society , 1999) From this point on, research in chemistry was done in a quantitative manner on a clear framework of “the specificity of a large number of chemical elements, isolable in the laboratory and detectable by balance,” representing “a reconstruction of the field from new fundamentals,” as Kuhn states of a new