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Peter Household - Oxygen and alchemists
According to Nick Lane’s “Oxygen : The molecule that shook the world” (2002) alchemists got there 170 years earlier. Sendivogius (Polish) heated nitre to make this “aerial food of life” in 1604 and Drebbel (Dutch) bottled it to sustain the crew of a submarine for James I in 1621.
Tudor Hale: Oxygen
Although Priestly is credited with the discovery of oxygen, and Lavoisier with mistakenly giving it the name 'oxygen', Dr Nick Lane's book on the subject 'Oxygen - the molecule that made the world' (OUP 2002) suggests that oxygen had been discovered some 170 years before Priestly, Scheele, and Lavoisier. He points to the Polish apothecary Michael Sendivogius who understood the importance of oxygen in 1604 and believed that he had discovered the gas which he called "the Elixir of Life, without which no mortal can live, and without which nothing grows." by heating nitre. There is also the work of the Dutch alchemist Cornelius Drebble who demonstrated the first submarine in 1621. In front of James I a wooden vessel containing twelve oarsmen stayed under water during a 3 hours trip on the Thames from Westminster to Greenwich. It seemed that Drebble had somehow not only produced oxygen, but also managed to bottle it. In 1674, the English physician John Mayow showed that it was 'aerial nitre' that gave arterial blood is red colour, and that it becomes "food for fires, and passes into the blood of animals by respiration." As Lane points out, these insights make Priestley's attachment to phlogiston and his de-phlogisticated air somewhat comical. No doubt, the panellists knew this, but were steered away from a full exposure of the discovery of oxygen to a social history of revolutions - in which case the title of the piece might well have been 'Two revolutionaries - Priestly and Lavoisier.'
Damian Krushner - Discovery of Oxygen
A very informative episode but slightly biased against Lavoisier (or at least his personality and politics). Let's not forget that he bravely helped fellow scientists escape the French revolutionary terror. This may have contributed as much to his own tragic end as his tax farming, in pursuit of which he ironically eased the financial burden on the poor by quite some margin.
Will Stevens: The Discovery of Oxygen
A quibble, perhaps, but, like John Finlay, I wish we had had more of the science. If I remember rightly, there were some simple and classic experiments to demonstrate that the phlogiston hypothesis was wrong - and a spirited last-ditch defence of phlogiston which depended on the idea that phlogiston had a _negative_ weight. I should like to have heard about these.
Jim Godfrey: re The discovery of oxygen
I would just like to report a small coincidence relating to this programme. I was listening while driving to the Yorkshire Museum where a group of volunteers are working on the library established in the past by the Yorkshire Philosophical Society. On arriving I went to the chemistry shelves where there are three volumes by Priestley, I think 'Experiments with different kinds of air'. On the shelf above, with the bookplate of M. Lavoisier and a signature on the fly-leaf, is Dissertato Experimentalis de Magnete, Petre van Musschenbroek, 1754. I enjoyed the programme as I have many others over the years and look forward to enjoying many more.
Allen Esterson The Discovery of Oxygen
What a pity we didn't get more of the science and a little less of the social and political history in the programme on the discovery of oxygen. At one point there was a reference to the crucial importance of measurement in Lavoisier's work. I thought, good, now we'll hear precisely how his measurements led to his conclusions in relation to oxygen. But instead of following this up, Melvyn Bragg intervened to bring the discussion back to Priestly's nonconformist ideas and the revolutionary background of the times. Perhaps if there had been a chemist (rather than, say, someone whose main field of expertise was literature) among the contributors we'd have had more chemistry and less social history. After all, the title of the programme was "The Discovery of Oxygen".
Roger Hird: Priestley and Lavoisier
I listened to this morning's (14 november) programme. First of all, a perhaps pedantic correction. You started by saying that Priestley called his oxygen phlogiston? Surely not: "dephlogisticated air" perhaps. A slip I assume - but it is typical of the phlogiston theory that such slips were so easy. Phlogiston was not thought of as a substance but as some sort of essence or property or quality. It was one of the downfalls of the phlogiston theory, as contemporary sceptics understood, that its supporters could not agree on how to define what phlogiston was!Much more significant and surprising is that you present the advances in our understanding of "airs" in the terms of principally a bilateral exchange between Priestley and Lavoisier. Central to the experimental underpinning of the arguments was work by Henry Cavendish whose papers to the Royal Society filled in major gaps in our understanding of the composition of the atmosphere and the properties of its components. Although Cavendish remained a supporter of the phlogiston theory, without his painstaking, honest - and still reliable* - experimental work Lavoisier might not have achieved what he did. What actually happened was a marvellous example of the real working of science - the work of many people with differing views combining to discover the truth and the replacement of a complex and ill defined theory that did not make reliable predictions with an essentially simpler and more satisfactory one that did.Of course it may be that Cavendish does not fit into the political/historical picture you are trying to paint with this incredibly description of these processes: he came from the Chatsworth Cavendishes, went to Cambridge and unlike Priestley he did not come from a dissenting or lower middle class background.Try reading the Scientific Papers of the Hon Henry Cavendish, FRS, published by CUP in 1921 - and read particularly the introduction to Volume 2. Roger Hird* Rayleigh, in his papers on the discovery of Argon in the atmosphere in 1895, refers to consulting the papers of Cavendish and finding small unexplained discrepancies acknowledged by Cavendish in his 18th century work on the composition of the air which were to be consistent with Rayleigh's own Nobel Prize winning discovery a century later - and he even used some of Cavendish's methods!
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