Travel together with your friend Guettard through different regions of France exploring the subsoil and creates the first geological atlas of his country. Lavoisier was in charge of the investigations while Guettard was in charge of making the atlas. It is submitted to a competition on the most effective and economical way of distributing public light in the cities of France. He was awarded a gold medal for his proposal in August 1766.
From then on he is recognized as a prestigious researcher and entered the Academy of Sciences after the death of the chemist Baron. After a while he marries Maria Ana Pierrette, marriage for convenience, but he discovers in María an excellent collaborator of his work.
He postulated the phlogiston theory, which is that matter contains a combustible substance, released upon combustion. Later he rectified the theory based on the amount of mass of an element before its combustion.
Due to his research he defines his theories culminating in the famous phrase “matter is neither created nor destroyed, it only transforms”. Created together with Claude Louis Camelot the chemical nomenclature that serves as the basis for the current system. He clarified several concepts, including the element that cannot be divided by any known system, combustion or various postulates about the nature of acids.
During his last years of his life he worked in the collection of taxes, being arrested in 1793. Many of his friends and professional colleagues tried to save him but nothing could prevent the beheading to which he was subjected under the reigning republic fifty years after age, specifically May 8, 1794.
After his death, the scientist Joseph Louis Lagrange He said: “An instant has been enough to cut off his head; it will be a hundred years before another like it is born.”