Joseph Priestley’s Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air is one of chemistry’s great primary documents: the pneumatic trough, the mouse under the bell jar, the mint sprig restoring vitiated air, and the August day in 1774 when a burning candle blazed in a new ‘dephlogisticated air’ — oxygen, though he never called it that.
Lavoisier built the modern science on what Priestley found and misread. Download the free EPUB and watch discovery outrun theory.