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phlogiston
May. 1st, 2009 07:17 amIt's a Forgotten English Friday with bonus encyclopedic discursion:
phlogiston - "A chymical name for an imaginary substance thought to be a constituent part of all inflammable bodies. —William Grimshaw's Ladies' Lexicon and Parlour Companion, 1845
Specifically, it was an attempt to explain combustion and other oxidation processes within the framework of the four-element theory. Phlogiston theory got extremely elaborate, as it tried to explain better observations while keeping the original theoretic framework: I have a reproduction of the first (1772) edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which has 40 folio pages devoted to explicating it. A few years later Lavoisier showed that the constituent responsible for combustion (which we now call oxygen) is part of the air, not the combusting body, throwing the whole construct into a cocked hat, to be replaced by modern elemental theory. It's a textbook example of Thomas Kuhn's paradigm shift process per The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
As for the word itself, it's from Late Latin, from Greek, the neuter form of phlogistos, inflammable, from phlogizein to set on fire, from phlog-, phlox flame.
---L.
phlogiston - "A chymical name for an imaginary substance thought to be a constituent part of all inflammable bodies. —William Grimshaw's Ladies' Lexicon and Parlour Companion, 1845
Specifically, it was an attempt to explain combustion and other oxidation processes within the framework of the four-element theory. Phlogiston theory got extremely elaborate, as it tried to explain better observations while keeping the original theoretic framework: I have a reproduction of the first (1772) edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which has 40 folio pages devoted to explicating it. A few years later Lavoisier showed that the constituent responsible for combustion (which we now call oxygen) is part of the air, not the combusting body, throwing the whole construct into a cocked hat, to be replaced by modern elemental theory. It's a textbook example of Thomas Kuhn's paradigm shift process per The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
As for the word itself, it's from Late Latin, from Greek, the neuter form of phlogistos, inflammable, from phlogizein to set on fire, from phlog-, phlox flame.
---L.
