Antoine Lavoisier named oxygen and hydrogen, disproved the phlogiston theory, wrote the first modern chemistry textbook, and established the law of conservation of mass. He was also a tax collector for the ancien regime, and when the French Revolution came for the tax farmers, his scientific genius could not save him. The judge reportedly said, "The Republic has no need of scientists." The guillotine took his head in 1794.

This episode traces Lavoisier from his privileged Parisian upbringing through the experiments that created modern chemistry, his work as a tax farmer, and the revolutionary trial and execution that cut short the most important scientific career in eighteenth-century France.

• Lavoisier's systematic experiments that disproved phlogiston and identified oxygen's role in combustion
• The law of conservation of  ...