The chemist Lavoisier actually tried to weigh heat; he found it was weightless.
In 1789, Lavoisier showed that the total mass during the course of a chemical reaction is unchanged. Rather the atoms simply “reorganize” themselves, kind of like the reshuffling of deck or cards.
In 1789, Lavoisier published An Elementary Treatise on Chemistry where he describes 33 elements. The list begins with caloric and continues with light, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen.
Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) imagined heat to be a fluid composed of particles, deemed by Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) as “caloric”.
