[Lavoisier and radicals]

Lavoisier and his co-workers (Guyton de Morveau, Bertholet, Fourcroy) considered that acids were constituted of oxygen and of something else that they called radicals. These radicals were known in some cases, i.e. nitrogen for nitrous acid, carbon for carbonic acid, phosphorus for phosphoric acid. In the case of sulfur, the sulfuric radical could be associated with different quantities of oxigen leading to sulfuric or sulfurous acids. In other cases radicals remained unknown at the time i.e. muriatic radical for muriatic acid, or benzoyl radical for benzoic acid. It is interesting to notice that Lavoisier evoked the case of compound radicals constituted of different substances such as carbon and hydrogen.