Thursday, September 14, 2006

Phlogiston on the Web

So continuing the elaboration/rant about the phlogiston theory, I suppose that I should explain it. Rather than pull out references to the particular print literature that discusses the history of the theory, I am going to try to use this 'intra-web' thingy to assemble useful information about the history of the Phlogiston theory.

After entering "Phlogiston:" as my basic search term on Google.com, the top results were (in descending order):

Wikipedia
Infoplease
JimLoy.com (a personal webpage)
A transcription of Joseph Priestly's 1796 Essay: "Considerations on the Doctrine of Phlogiston and the Decomposition of Water" (transcription by C. Giunta, Dept. of Chemistry, LeMoyne College).
Each of these websites is interesting, and (hopefully soon) I will share some of my thoughts on how useful they are to a historian.

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