A hypothetical substance once believed to be present in all combustible materials and to be released during burning

Usage examples of phlogiston.

Recall that to Priestley, oxygen was dephlogisticated air, while Cavendish believed that oxygen was water from which all of the phlogiston had been removed.

Lavoisier read an article on phlogiston by the French lawyer and chemist Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau.

The absolute leviation of phlogiston, in contrast with the gravitation of all other forms of matter, discredited that supposed agent.

Kathy thought of celebrity as a subtle fluid, a universal element, like the phlogiston of the ancients, something spread evenly at creation through all the universe, but prone now to accrete, under specific conditions, around certain individuals and their careers.

Three elves manning a ballista fell under the scro onslaught, one elf tumbling over a rail to fall into the phlogiston like a limp doll.

He was living in a cottage down the hill from the university, down in a flat, scuzzy student part of Santa Cruz, rooming with Benny Phlogiston and Aanna Vea.

It was then that I conceived the idea of boiling, to gather together the tiny atomies of phlogiston.

Right up to the closing years of the eighteenth century (and in Priestley’s case a little beyond) scientists everywhere searched for, and sometimes believed they had actually found, things that just weren’t there: vitiated airs, dephlogisticated marine acids, phloxes, calxes, terraqueous exhalations, and, above all, phlogiston, the substance that was thought to be the active agent in combustion.

A thousand years from now, our current views of physics will seem as primitive as the phlogiston theory seems to us today.

The field of psychodynamics had risen above alchemy and Freudian psychology, to about the level of the phlogiston theory, but had yet to birth its Newton or Lavoisier.

I advised him that I understood, diffidently mentioning that I was no stranger to scientific rigor, my own grandfather having published a massive Evidences for the Phlogiston Theory of Heat.