Lavoisier, Laplace, et les calories :
The universe of good reasons for putting a live guinea pig in an insulated metal pot is small. I can think of only one: in France, in the winter of 1782, the chemist Antoine Lavoisier and his polymath friend Pierre-Simon Laplace placed their unwitting subject into a double-walled metal chamber, the world’s first calorimeter, and sealed the lid. They had packed snow into the space between the walls, and by comparing the rate at which the guinea pig’s body heat melted the snow to the rate of carbon dioxide it exhaled, they discovered metabolism – the “fire of life” that drives our very existence. At last, science had a physical measure of the life force that enables us to grow, reproduce and move. Physiologists like myself have been counting calories ever since.
▻https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24933230-700-metabolism-myths-7-things-we-get-wrong-about-diet-and-e