Lavoisier and Laplace ice calorimeter
Calorímetro de hielo de Lavoisier y Laplace
- Date
- 1782-1783 · confidence high
- Place
- Paris, Île-de-France, France
- Credited to
- Antoine Lavoisier and Pierre-Simon Laplace
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What it is
A chamber surrounded by ice in which the heat of a reaction or of a living animal is measured by the meltwater collected, with an outer chamber that insulates from the surroundings. With it they measured specific heats and the heat of respiration and combustion.
Joseph Black had already measured latent heats by another method; the ice calorimeter is credited to Lavoisier and Laplace (1783 memoir), with a precedent in Wilcke's and Black's ideas.
What it led to
- quantitative heat measurement in chemistry and physiology
- comparison of respiration with combustion
- later bomb and flow calorimeters