if only he’d gotten started sooner
Dang it. Joseph Priestley has robbed me of my chance to use the word “dephlogisticated” in this book.
(The term, and the substance it was coined to describe, didn’t come on the scientific scene until his experiments in the mid-1770s. So I can’t talk about dephlogisticated air — aka oxygen — because nobody knows about it yet.)
Pity. It’s such a fun word.
