Antoine Lavoisier

Antoine Lavoisier was a tax farmer, gunpowder administrator and the founder of modern chemistry, who showed that combustion is combination with oxygen, not the release of phlogiston, that water is hydrogen and oxygen, and that mass is conserved in every reaction, and who with his colleagues gave chemistry the names it still uses. Elements of Chemistry of 1789, the first modern textbook of the science, set all this out with the balance as its instrument. He was guillotined in 1794 as a tax farmer; Lagrange said it took a moment to cut off that head and a hundred years might not produce another like it.