Jacques Louis David’s ‘Portrait of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier and Marie Anne Lavoisier (Marie Anne Pierrette Paulze)’ is a tense painting created just before the chemist was guillotined.

Technically, it was Antoine Lavoisier that proved we have an internal combustion engine, but let’s give the guinea pig credit. It nearly froze in Lavoisier’s special calorimeter to prove ...

Antoine Lavoisier gave oxygen its name, from the Greek words for “acid-former.” But that wasn’t his only contribution to scientific understanding of what it does. Born August 26, 1743 ...