9781422279489

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Oxygen

Scheele did not publish his findings, in a volume titled Chemical Obser- vations and Experiments on Air and Fire , until 1777. That delay allowed Priestley, a Unitarian clergyman and self- trained chemist from Great Britain, to steal much of Scheele’s thun-

der. In 1775—a full two years before Scheele’s publication—Priestley published his own find- ings in the second vol- ume of his six-volume masterwork, Experiments and Observations on Dif- ferent Kinds of Air . Priest- ley described a series of experiments he under- took in an attempt to un-

A statue to honor Swedish scientist Carl Scheele.

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