re: phlogiston

oh, right.. as in that wonderful sf writer Joe Priestly, "Mr. Lavoisier is well known to maintain, that there is no such thing as what has been called phlogiston." (Philos. Trans., 1785)

I like Asimov's thiotimoline..

"The result was that I wrote a pseudo-dissertation [in 1948]
written as stodgily as I could manage about a compound
which dissolved 1.12 seconds before you added the water.
I called it The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated
Thiotimoline."
- Isaac Asimov, I.Asimov: A Memoir (1994)

"It can only be initiated in my continuum, because the
molecules of the activating substance, thiotimoline,
have different properties when they're reversed."
- Spider Robinson, Time Travelers Strictly Cash (1981)