In a 1794 essay, her first and only publication, Scottish chemist Elizabeth Fulhame postulated the mechanism of catalysis decades before the term was coined and documented metal photoreduction, a process crucial to the development of photography (thread) physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.…
The essay also addressed a raging debate of the era, on the merits of phlogiston theory. Fulhame used the evidence from her experiments to show that phlogistonists were wrong. Then she showed that antiphlogistonists were wrong too.
Fulhame's essay received glowing reviews in Europe and the US. She was one of the first women elected to the Philadelphia Chemical Society.
Despite the recognition from her colleagues, Fulhame soon vanished from the historical record, and she rarely gets mentioned in scholarly accounts of the phlogiston debate. In her essay she railed against a society that thought so little of its female scientists.
For more on the remarkable but little-known chemist, read the profile by @StAndrewsLynx physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.…
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