Georg Ernst Stahl

Georg Ernst Stahl was a German chemist, physician and philosopher who around 1703 named and systematized phlogiston, a fire-like substance he held was released by combustible materials as they burned. He built on Johann Joachim Becher's earlier terra pinguis, or fatty earth, concept, turning it into the fully worked theory that dominated chemical explanations of combustion, rusting and respiration for most of the eighteenth century until Antoine Lavoisier's oxygen theory of combustion displaced it in the 1780s. Stahl was also physician to the King of Prussia and a defender of vitalism, the view that living matter is governed by a principle distinct from ordinary physical and chemical law.