It's Not Phlogiston, It's Oxygen!

For those of you who do not know, the Phlogiston theory, proposed by Johann Joachim Becker in 1677, is a lousy attempt at explaining the unseen forces at work within the process of comubstion and rust. Although I do salute to Becker for being able to recognize a relating factor between combustion and rust, and for realizing that it is a chemcial process, the idea of the so-called "phlogiston", or as some of you may know it by oxygen, is utterly absurd! It proposes that all flammable materials only burn because of a uncharacterize substance called phlogiston, that has no mass (some have even gone as far as to say that it has negative weight) that is released when objects are burned. After a material is burned, it is said to be "dephlogisticated" and becomes its true form, "calx". Dephlogistication is said to be of utmost importance, as phlogisticated air is supposedly uselss, and does not support combustion, nor does is support life; therefore, respiration removes phlogiston from the body.

Those of you who have been educated in this way have been tricked by professors sprouting nonsense! In fact, if they had preached the opposite of this theory, they would have been surprisingly accurate. My research has once and for all squashed his theory and confirmed the whispers of those, such as Joseph Priestly, who have more logic and common sense to realize the absurdity of this theory. I, through my extensive research, know otherwise. "About eight days ago I discovered that sulfur in burning, far from losing weight, on the contrary, gains it; it is the same with phosphorus; this increase of weight arises from a prodigious quantity of air that is fixed during combustion and combines with the vapors. This discovery, which I have established by experiments, that I regard as decisive, has led me to think that what is observed in the combustion of sulfur and phosphorus may well take place in the case of all substances that gain in weight by combustion and calcination; and I am persuaded that the increase in weight of metallic calxes is due to the same cause." Coincidence proved me correct when Priestly visited Paris and at dinner, told me his discovery of dephlogisticated air, and when Scheele wrote me a letter asking me to repeat an experiment that produced oxygen (dephlogisticated air). Another experiment showed that the part of the Phlogiston Theory that states calx cannot be reversed is also wrong.

There you have it, guys. Becker was far from the truth, and I, through my genius, have discovered the truth, which I have dubbed the Oxygen Theory. There is no such thing as Phlogiston, which in actually, is "a vague principle which is not at all rigorously defined, and which, in consequence, adapts itself to all explanations in which it is wished it shall enter." The element to which people so wrongfully refer to and think of as harmful and useless to human nature, is actually essential! On the subject of oxygen, my conclusion is such: "A man cannot live more than 24 hours unless he has at least three cubic meters of air that is being constantly replaced."