Air and Fire

Pottery, one of the earliest human-made ceramic materials, is actually an artificial form of stone, made by combining the four basic elements recognized by the ancient Greeks earth (clay), water, air, and fire. In fact pottery is made from a circumstantial or deliberately prepared mixture of clay, other solid materials known by the generic name of fillers, and water. When a wet mixture of clay and fillers is formed into a desired shape, then dried and finally heated to high temperature (above 600°C), it becomes consolidated... 

The connection between First Matter and the protyles is obvious. It remains for me to deal with the concept of the Four Elements. These are often thought to denote the hot, cold, moist and dry principles or qualities of bodies but we may also suppose that the elements, earth, water, air, and fire, represent respectively the solid, liquid, gaseous, and what may be called incandescent-gaseous states of matter, although this is by no means a satisfactory or complete interpretation. It must be confessed that the subject of the elements is a difficult one, and I have not yet found explanations for it in the language of modem science. (1913, 43-44)... 

A room has mass flow rates of fuel, air and fire products at an instant of time in the fire, as shown in the sketch. 

In 340 bce, Aristotle (384—322 bce) published Meteorologica, in which he postulated that the Earths matter is composed of four elements—earth, water, air, and fire. His speculations... 

The results supported the ancient theory which asserted that earth, water, air, and fire are the four Elements of the world. The solid residue represented earth, the liquid products of the distillation, water, and the spirituous substances, air. Fire was regarded sometimes as the means of purification, sometimes as the soul, or invisible part, of all substances. 

Early scientists and philosophers invested much effort in the search for the fundamental substance or substances—the simplest kind of matter that comprises the world and all of its various materials. The ancient Greek philosopher Thales (ca. 635-556 b.c.e.) postulated that water is the fundamental substance. Although this idea may not sound realistic today, the hypothesis was a reasonable one. Life depends on water and Earth contains a huge quantity of water in oceans and rivers water falls from the sky as rain and seeps through the ground in wells. The ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles (ca. 495-435 b.c.e.) expanded the list of fundamental substances to four—water, earth, air, and fire. 

Even to J. G. Gahn and Scheele, phosphorus was a rarity. When Scheele first read the English translation of his treatise On air and fire, he found that Johann Reinhold Foxster had translated the word Gran as ounces instead of grains. Nine ounces of phosphorus, said Scheele, I have never yet seen (43). 

The Greek philosophers coupled a four-element theory to the idea of four primary colours to Empedocles these were white, black, red, and the vaguely defined ochron, consistent with the preference of the classical Greek painters for a four-colour palette of white, black, red, and yellow. The Athenian astrologer Antiochos in the second century ad assigned these colours, respectively, to water, earth, air, and fire. 

Aristotle s response to the question of what is permanent behind observed changes in the natural world, offered a single undifferentiated but permanent matter. This matter, however, carries properties which give it form, forms manifested fundamentally in the four elements, earth, water, AIR, and FIRE. 

T]he elements earth, water, air and fire are also called " Matrices —the wombs in which objects are generated, in which they dwell, and from which they receive their signature and ultimate destination. Already the alchemists had compared the elements with hermetic vessels, not only as mere containers, but in the sense that the shape and kind of vessel used essentially and specifically influenced the nature of its contents. This idea may have inspired Paracelsus concept of element-... 

Rhoda Rappaport has provided an analysis of Rouelle s overall structure into what she has denominated his Element/Instrument theory. In Rouelle s design, happily laid out more clearly by Rappaport than Rouelle ever expressed it himself, each of the four elements, earth, water, air and fire, occurred either fixed in a chemical combination, or free in an uncombined... 

The key to this system lies in the recognition that components by which compound bodies are named must be simple bodies or considered as simple rather than elements in the ultimate meaning of that term. This was not the first time Guyton had made the distinction between the philosophical and operational components. Only a few years earlier in his Elemens de chemie, he had carefully identified the ultimate, metaphysical components, the earth, water, air, and fire, as the natural elements, and the more operational ones as chemical elements.The latter, though presumably composed of the natural elements, were still simple according to art for it has not yet been possible to separate their principles. Nor was Guyton the first to make this kind of distinction. In the late seventeenth century Nicholas Lemery had written... 

Pliny writes in his Natural Bistory, Book XV, Chap. 32 "It is a singular thing that three of the principal elements of nature—water, air and fire—should have neither taste nor smell, nor indeed any flavoring principle whatever. ... 

The work (Air and Fire) which Scheele had completed for printing, by 1775, but which was not printed until 1777, was undertaken to attempt to solve the problem of the constitution of fire. Scheele recognized that this problem was not to be solved unless the constitution of the air, in which combustions take place, was also known. His first effort therefore was to analyze the air, and his first step was to subject a confined volume of air to various substances which, as he would say, give off phlogiston readily... 

In 1777 appeared the notable work of Scheele on Air and Fire already referred to.3 It will be noted that this work contained many of the discoveries made by Priestley, and as Scheele s manuscript bad been delayed for some two years in printing, the work of Scheele was independent of Priestley s publication and accomplished about the same time. Scheele, however, interpreted his results as Priestley does in terms of the phlogistic hypothesis.33... 

C. W. Scheele, Kongl. Vet. Acad. Hand ., 40. 50, 1779 Experiments on Air and Fire, London, 202,1780 J. Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, London,... 

All things are Atoms Earth and Water, Air And Fire, all, Democritus foretold. 

I sit at my desk, which is pushed up close under my father s, and open the tract he has given me to read Robert Boyle s New Experiments Physico-Mechanical Touching the Spring of the Air and Its Effects. I already know about Boyle s investigations into the vacuum and his analysis of air, but I don t mind the repetition because I am fascinated by anything to do with air and fire. 

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