Lavoisier and Oxygen's Role in Combustion

In the 1770s and 1780s, Antoine Lavoisier carried out quantitative experiments that helped explain combustion as a reaction with oxygen and overturn the phlogiston theory; he also showed that air is a mixture of gases, including oxygen and nitrogen. However, oxygen had been isolated earlier independently by Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Joseph Priestley, so Lavoisier should not be described as its sole “discoverer.” [1–3]