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An essay on combustion, with a view to a new art of dying and painting cover

An essay on combustion, with a view to a new art of dying and painting

Chapter 164: CHAPTER XI. CONCLUSION.
By Elizabeth Fulhame
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About This Book

The author presents a systematic series of chemical experiments and arguments about combustion and the reduction of metals, proposing chemical methods to deposit gold, silver, and other metals onto textiles for dyeing, painting, and decorative maps. The essay details procedures involving hydrogen, phosphorus, sulphur and their gaseous compounds, charcoal, light, and acids, examines the oxygenation of combustible bodies, and disputes prevailing phlogiston hypotheses. Practical results, specimens, and applications are described alongside a concluding discussion and a nomenclature that summarise theoretical claims and experimental observations.

CHAPTER XI.
CONCLUSION.

I shall conclude with a general view of the inferences, which I ventured to advance in this essay.

  1. Neither the Phlogistians, nor Antiphlogistians, account in a satisfactory manner for the increase of weight, which bodies acquire during combustion.
  2. Their account of the formation of water, acids, and oxids, is erroneous; for it has been shown that the oxygen of water alone oxygenates combustible bodies.
  3. Combustible bodies, as hydrogen, phosphorus, sulphur, charcoal, light, &c. are capable of reducing the metals in the ordinary temperature of the atmosphere; and indeed I might add, at a much lower temperature, as I frequently experienced.
  4. Combustible bodies do not reduce the metals by giving them phlogiston, as the Phlogistians suppose; nor by uniting with, and separating their oxygen, as the Antiphlogistians maintain.
  5. Water is essential both to the reduction and oxygenation of bodies, and is always decomposed in these operations.
  6. Water does not contribute to metallic reduction merely by dissolving and minutely dividing the particles of metallic salts, and thus removing the impediment opposed to chymical attraction by the attraction of cohesion: for were this the case, metallic solutions in ether and alcohol, in which that impediment is equally removed, should be as readily and effectually reduced, as metallic solutions in water are.

    This circumstance, in which all the experiments on metallic reduction detailed in this essay exactly coincide, merits particular attention, and shows that the manner, in which combustible bodies effect the reduction, is the same in them all.

  7. When one body is oxygenated, another, at least, is restored at the same time to its combustible state; and v. v. when one body is restored to its combustible state, another at least is at the same time oxygenated.
  8. Quantities of air, and water, equal to those decomposed in the different species of combustion, are constantly a forming.

Thus nature, by maintaining this balance of power between combustible and oxygenated bodies, prevents the return of original chaos.

Since then in every act of combustion, one body, at least, is oxygenated, and another restored, at the same time, to its combustible state, the phenomena of combustion may be referred to two heads, viz.

Oxygenation, or the union of oxygen with combustible bodies, and

Reduction, or the restoration of oxygenated bodies to their combustible state.

And since in every instance of combustion water is decomposed, and one body oxygenated by the oxygen of the water, while another is restored to its combustible state by the hydrogen of the same fluid, it follows,

  1. That the hydrogen of water is the only substance, that restores bodies to their combustible state.
  2. That water is the only source of the oxygen, which oxygenates combustible bodies.
  3. That no case of combustion is effected by a single affinity.

This view of combustion may serve to show how nature is always the same, and maintains her equilibrium by preserving the same quantities of air and water on the surface of our globe: for as fast as these are consumed in the various processes of combustion, equal quantities are formed, and rise regenerated like the Phenix from her ashes.