Madame Lavoisier's Translation of Oxygen

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 9 December 2019

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Philip Ball tells the story of Madame Lavoisier; translator of oxygen. At a time when science was almost a closed book to women, Madame Marie Anne Lavoisier’s skills were indispensable. A translator, illustrator and critic of scientific papers, she learnt chemistry herself and helped her husband Antoine Lavoisier develop his theory of the role played by oxygen in combustion. As modern science was taking shape it lacked any universal language, so communication in many tongues was vital to stay ahead of the game. Even today there is debate as to who can really be considered the discoverer of oxygen, but Madame Lavoisier’s gift for translation helped her husband compete against English rivals and banish their theories. Come the French Revolution however, Anton was branded a traitor to the state and sentenced to death. By a cruel twist of fate Marie lost both husband and father to the guillotine on the same day. Philip Ball talks to Patricia Fara at the University of Cambridge, about the largely unrecognised contribution that women like Marie Anne Lavoisier made to the early days of modern science, and to Michael Gordin of Princeton University about the importance of scientific translation in the past and how it features today, Picture: French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, Credit: Getty Images

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and trust me you'll get there in a moment but if you're a comedy fan
0:05.2	I'd really like to tell you a bit about what we do. I'm Julie Mackenzie and I commission comedy
0:10.1	podcast at the BBC. It's a bit of a dream job really. Comedy is a bit of a dream job really.
0:13.0	Comedy is a fantastic joyous thing to do because really you're making people laugh,
0:18.0	making people's days a bit better, helping them process, all manner of things.
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0:29.8	satire to silly, shocking to soothing, profound to just general pratting about.
0:35.0	So if you fancy a laugh, find your next comedy at BBC Sounds.
0:40.0	I'm Philip Ball and today on Discovery from the BBC I'm here with another story from the history of science
0:47.6	today the remarkable Madame La Voisier It was meant to be a portrait of a great scientist, but the painting didn't quite turn out that way.
1:04.0	Here is the man himself, elegantly bewigged,
1:08.0	writing at his table with his experimental glass apparatus in front of him.
1:13.0	But the figure who dominates the painting is not the scientist, but his wife.
1:19.0	She leans over him, her wig by far the more exuberant, her voluminous white dress outshining her husband's somber black.
1:28.3	He looks up at her adoringly, perhaps a little anxiously, while she is the one who's cool, mildly amused gaze, looks
1:37.6	out of the canvas at the viewer, and her expression tells us who is really in charge.
1:44.4	This is the French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier and his wife Marie Anne Pierrette Palza Lavoisier, painted in 1788 by the most distinguished artist in France at that time,
1:57.8	Jacques Louis Davide.
2:00.1	And what a time that was. It was the best and worst of times. In just a few years,
2:07.3	David, a supporter of the French Revolution, was doing very well for himself.
2:13.0	Antoine Lavoisier, meanwhile, was dead.
	...

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