The Chemical History of a Candle

We have several tests for oxygen besides the mere burning of bodies. You have seen a candle burnt in oxygen, or in the air; you have seen phosphorus burnt in the air, or in oxyg...

There is another condition which you must learn as regards the candle, without which you would not be able fully to understand the philosophy of it, and that is the vaporous con...

[One of the iron bottles burst at that moment.] Ah! There is one of our bottles burst, and here you see is a crack down one side an eighth of an inch in width. [The other now ex...

I want you now to follow me in this point,—that whenever a substance burns, as the iron filings burnt in the flame of gunpowder, without assuming the vaporous state (whether it...

Now, with regard to this substance, let me tell you briefly how we get it. The process used to be this. The ore which I shewed you just now was taken, and digested in nitro-muri...

From the primitive pine-torch to the paraffin candle, how wide an interval! between them how vast a contrast! The means adopted by man to illuminate his home at night, stamp at...

Now, see what happens. These two platinum-plates are the two ends (or I will make them so immediately) of this apparatus; and I am about to put them in contact with that solutio...

But we have a better means of getting this substance, and in greater quantity, so as to ascertain what its general characters are. We find this substance in very great abundance...

Now, I must take you to a very interesting part of our subject—to the relation between the combustion of a candle and that living kind of combustion which goes on within us. In...

I have two or three rough drawings here, representing the kind of furnaces which he employs. They are larger, however, than the actual furnaces he uses. Even the furnace in whic...