hemistry in the early eighteenth century was in a state of flux. Many people still believed what Aristotle had taught, two thousand years earlier, that everything was made of four elements. Nobody understood combustion: it was believed that anything that caught fire contained a substance called ‘phlogiston’, which burnt if ignited. Alchemists were still trying to turn base metals into gold.
A tale of two revolutions
Feb 10, 2023
2 minutes
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