Lavoisier Preempted Gay-Lussac by 20 Years!.

In his Traite E lementaire, Anton Lavoisier states clearly that exactly two volumes of hydrogen gas react with one volume of oxygen gas to yield water. One may well speculate that had he not been guillotined in 1794, Lavoisier would in all probability have deduced by 1810 that oxygen and hydrogen were diatomic. Thus atomic weights would have been correctly differentiated from equivalent weights fifty years before the Karlsruhe conference.