ABSTRACT
Combustion has a very long history. From antiquity up to the middle ages, fi re along with earth, water, and air was considered to be one of the four basic elements in the universe. However, with the work of Antoine Lavoisier, one of the initiators of the Chemical Revolution and discoverer of the Law of Conservation of Mass (1785), its importance was reduced. In 1775-1777, Lavoisier was the fi rst to postulate that the key to combustion was oxygen. He realized that the newly isolated constituent of air (Joseph Priestley in England and Carl Scheele in Sweden, 1772-1774) was an element; he then named it and formulated a new defi nition of combustion, as the process of chemical reactions with oxygen. In precise, quantitative experiments he laid the foundations for the new theory, which gained wide acceptance over a relatively short period.
