Principles inflammable

These globules, numerous experiments soon shewed to be the substance I was in search of, and a peculiar inflammable principle the basis of potash. I found that the platina was in no way connected with the result, except as the... 

To some chemists phlogiston was fire itself a form of the ancient element. Others, accepting the blurring of the demarcation between elements and alchemical principles , concurred with Becher s definition of terra pinguis-. Metals contain an inflammable principle which by the action of fire goes off into the air. ... 

It is composed of an acid salt and the inflammable principle because the vitriolic acid is either changed into an alkali, or evaporated, or remains in the sulphur. It is not changed into an alkali, since the weight of the alkali is not very different from what it was before it is not evaporated, since it can be obtained from the new compound. Moreover by deflagration it produced a bitter salt formed of an acid and an alkali. It lacks for the formation of the sulphur only the inflam-... 

The reader will recognize this clear description as a brief summary of the analysis and synthesis of sulfur carried out by Homberg and GeoflFroy early in the century. Metals also contain the inflammable principle, though his demonstration of their composition is not so elaborately illustrated as it is for sulfur. 

It is important to note that in all these uses, phlogiston or the inflammable principle is used merely as a name when describing ordinary (and familiar) chemical behavior. There is no apparent effort to organize larger blocks of chemical knowledge around a phlogistic doctrine, nor to extend it beyond the bounds of its traditional application to metals and sulfur. I... 

Macquer defined combustion as nothing else than the disengagement of the inflammable principle contained in several kinds of bodies, which are therefore called combustibles. He had rather little else to say about it. His entries in the Dictionary under air and combustion indicate that the... 

Note that in Lavoisier s account of these relationships, the metal is simple and the calx is compound, just the reverse of the phlogistic view, which had the calx simple, and the metal compound. This interpretation derives from his model of the gaseous state as a combination oPsome solid or fluid body with the inflammable principle. Lavoisier clearly summarized his... 

If it were permitted me to indulge in conjectures, I should say, that some experiments, which are not sufficiently complete to submit to public inspection, induce me to believe that every elastic fluid results from the combination of some solid or fluid body with the inflammable principle, or perhaps even with the matter of pure fire, and that on this combination the state of elasticity depends. I should add that the substance fixed in metallic calces, and which augments their weight, would not be, properly speaking, on this hypothesis, an elastic fluid, but the fixed part of an elastic fluid, which has been deprived of its inflammable principle. The principal action of charcoal, and all other... 

But how does all this relate to eighteenth-century chemistry of principles, the idea of the universal acid, the inflammable principle, and so on ... 

These metals appear actually to contain an inflammable principle, which is burnt out in the calcination, and extracted from them by acids. Nitre, which deflagrates with and dissipates the inflammable principle wherever it is to be found, deflagrates with the imperfect metals, and thus occasions instantly the same change that fire alone would more slowly produce Some of these metals emit visible flames by themselves. 

Experiment has fully evinced that sulphur is no other than the concentrated vitriolic acid combined with a small proportion of the phlogistic or inflammable principle, and to this combination alone, which is always one and the same except for adventitious admixtures, the more judicious chemists have wholly confined the name. ... 

At this time Priestley had no notion of the real nature of this air. He was steeped in the fire principle of John Becher, a German scientist who in 1669 explained burning as due to some inflammable principle possessed by all substances that could burn. This he called phlogiston from the Greek to set on fire. When a substance burned, explained Becher, its phlogiston was given off in the form of a flame. Becher believed... 

The fire that burns is nothing other than a matter placed in movement but all matter is not proper to receiving, keeping and communicating this movement of ignition, the proximate cause of heat. One has been forced to recognize that there is in the nature a substance essentially endowed with this property, bodies more or less provided with the inflammable principle. It is this principle, considered in the composition of bodies, abstraction made from the movement, that Stahl has named phlogiston. 

However different this opinion may seem to be from that of M. Stahl, it yet perhaps is not incompatible with it. It is possible that the addition of charcoal in the reduction of metals may answer two purposes at once 1st, That of restoring to the metal the inflammable principle which it has lost 2dly, That of restoring to the fixable elastic fluid in the metallic calx, the principle which constitutes its elasticity. But I repeat again that it is with great caution, that an opinion on so delicate, so difficult a subject should be hazarded a subject which is very nearly connected with one still more obscure, I mean the nature of elements themselves, or at least of what we regard as elements. Time and experiment alone can settle our opinions on these points. ... 

Finally, the contestants and commentators made it clear that their ultimate goal lay beyond the immediate questions of chemical theory. The limited experimental genre of combustion suddenly became central to chemical theorizing because it became a hurdle in constructing the true representation of nature. In the introduction, Kirwan narrowed the focus of controversy to the question of whether the inflammable principle existed in combustible bodies. Limited in scope, the question had a disproportionate consequence for chemical theory because these bodies were the instruments of many chemical operations. It was crucial to work out the implications of the inquiry ... 

The controversy is therefore at present confined to a few points, namely, whether the inflammable principle be found in what are called phlogisticated acids, vegetable acids, fixed air, sulphur, phosphorus, sugar, charcoal, and metals. 

Stahl, in turn, gave a new name to the imagined materia igniSf or inflammable principle, of combustible bodies he called it phlt iston (Greek, burnt, inflammable). 

Davy s third Bakerian Lecture mentions that Becher and Stahl had suggested that metals are compounds of earths with an inflammable principle. Neumann was unable to extract anything metallic from chalk, but Bergman regarded baryta as a metallic calx. Lavoisier suggested that earths were metallic oxides (see p. 45). Davy found that they were difficult to decompose, since they could not be fused and rendered conducting, but when ... 

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