Factitious airs
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Factitious airs

Factitious airs was a term used for synthetic gases which emerged around 1670 when Robert Boyle coined the term upon isolating what is now understood to be hydrogen. Factitious means "artificial, not natural", so the term means "man-made gases".

Robert Boyle coined the term Factitious Air upon isolating hydrogen in 1670. Henry Cavendish (1731–1810) used the term "factitious air" to refer to "any kind of air which is contained in other bodies in an unelastic state, and is produced from thence by art".

An archaic definition from 1747 for the production of factitious air was defined as being caused by: "1- by flow Degrees from Putrefactions and Fermentations of all Kinds; or 2- more expeditiously by some Sorts of chymical Dissolutions of Bodies; or 3- and lastly, almost instantaneously by the Explosion of Gunpowder, and the Mixture or some Kinds of Bodies. Thus, if Paste or Dough with Leaven be placed in an exhausted Receiver, it will, after some Time, by Fermentation, produce a considerable quantity of Air, which will appear very plainly by the Sinking the Quicksilver in the Gage. Thus also any Animal or Vegetable Substance, putrifying in Vacuo, will produce the same Effect."

There are significant inconsistencies in the archaic nomenclature due to the limited knowledge of chemistry and primitive analytical technology of the era (i.e. based on the chemistry, it is clear the terms were mistakenly assigned to more than one gas by different investigators). Furthermore, in most cases the gases were not pure.

Names used for factitious airs may have included:[citation needed]

Source:

Fixed air, or fixible air, is an ancient term for carbon dioxide

Joseph Priestley credited Joseph Black for discovering and coining "fixed air", which was thought to exist in a fixed state in alkaline salts, chalk, and other calcareous substances. Black considered substances containing fixed air to be "mild", and upon expulsion of the gas by heating the resulting state is "caustic" by corroding or burning plants and animals (e.g. CO2 released by chalk upon decomposition to calcium oxide). In other words, the fixed air (also known as fixible air) was thought to be fixated within a corrosive molecule.

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