Phlogiston theory
Old drawing of a man wearing a large curly wig and a mantle.
Stahl helped develop and popularize the phlogiston theory.
Robert Hooke, Ole Borch, Mikhail Lomonosov, and Pierre Bayen all produced oxygen in experiments in the 17th and the 18th century but none of them recognized it as an element.[25] This may have been in part due to the prevalence of the philosophy of combustion and corrosion called the phlogiston theory, which was then the favored explanation of those processes.
Established in 1667 by the German alchemist J. J. Becher, and modified by the chemist Georg Ernst Stahl by 1731,[56] phlogiston theory stated that all combustible materials were made of two parts. One part, called phlogiston, was given off when the substance containing it was burned, while the dephlogisticated part was thought to be its true form, or calx.[53]
Highly combustible materials that leave little residue, such as wood or coal, were thought to be made mostly of phlogiston; whereas non-combustible substances that corrode, such as iron, contained very little. Air did not play a role in phlogiston theory, nor were any initial quantitative experiments conducted to test the idea; instead, it was based on observations of what happens when something burns, that most common objects appear to become lighter and seem to lose something in the process.[53] The fact that a substance like wood actually gains overall weight in burning was hidden by the buoyancy of the gaseous combustion products. Indeed one of the first clues that the phlogiston theory was incorrect was that metals, too, gain weight in rusting (when they were supposedly losing phlogiston).
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