Hydrogens Discovery Phlogiston and Inflammable Air

Hydrogen was first produced, more or less unwittingly, around the end of the fifteenth century, when early European experimenters dissolved 

Not until the seventeenth century was doubt cast on the notion that air was one of the basic elements. A Dutch physician and naturalist, Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738), was the first to suspect that there is some lifesupporting ingredient in the air that is the key to breathing and combustion. The chemists will find out what it actually is, how it functions, and what it does it is still in the dark, Boerhaave wrote in 1732. Happy he who will discover it. 3 In England, the brilliant scientist Robert Boyle (1627-1691) also maintained that some life-giving substance, probably related to those needed for maintaining a flame, was part of the air. The English physician and naturalist John Mayow (1645-1679) claimed that nitro-aerial corpuscles 4 were responsible for combustion. 

Meanwhile, the British preacher Joseph Priestley (1733-1864), the Swedish-German apothecary Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742-1786), and other 

Hydrogen s buoyancy was quickly put to aeronautical use. Our colleague has put this knowledge to practical advantage in making navigation in the air safe and easy, said a eulogizing contemporary the year after Cavendish s 

In 1793, four years after the storming of the Bastille, large-scale economical hydrogen production was invented under the shadow of the uprising 

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