The father of modern chemistry was executed as a tax collector.
Lavoisier went to the guillotine in 1794 for his role in tax farming, and the mathematician Lagrange said it took a moment to cut off that head, and a century might not produce another like it.
More amazing facts
- 1792 · 1798 The metre is a slice of the Earth: one ten-millionth of the distance from the pole to the equator.
- 1793 · 1795 France once had clocks on which noon came at five.
- 1795 In 1795 cavalry captured a navy.
- 1795 In 1795 Britain taxed hair powder at a guinea a year.
- 1796 · 1980 It took 184 years to get from the first vaccination to a world without smallpox.
- 1796 The word 'vaccine' comes from the Latin vacca, cow. Jenner took material from milkmaid Sarah Nelmes, who caught cowpox from a cow called Blossom.