Not all concepts are useful, of course; ‘phlogiston’ added nothing to the concept of ‘fire’ except for intuitions about fluids, which mostly proved to make poor predictions.
Phlogiston allowed a lot of predictions to be made that couldn’t have been made before. One of them is that if you burn mercury you get mercury ashes. If you then reheat the ashes with charcoal you get your mercury back.
Phlogiston payed a lot of rent and was adopted because it payed rent.
That’s just wrong.
Phlogiston allowed a lot of predictions to be made that couldn’t have been made before. One of them is that if you burn mercury you get mercury ashes. If you then reheat the ashes with charcoal you get your mercury back.
Phlogiston payed a lot of rent and was adopted because it payed rent.