Elizabeth Fulhame

[1][2] Although she only published one text, she describes catalysis as a process at length in her 1794 book An Essay On Combustion with a View to a New Art of Dying and Painting, wherein the Phlogistic and Antiphlogistic Hypotheses are Proved Erroneous.

The book relates in painstaking detail her experiments with oxidation-reduction reactions, and the conclusions she draws regarding phlogiston theory, in which she disagrees with both the Phlogistians and Antiphlogistians.

[3] In 1798, the book was translated into German by Augustin Gottfried Ludwig Lentin as Versuche über die Wiederherstellung der Metalle durch Wasserstoffgas.

[5][6] Thomas P. Smith applauded her work, stating that "Mrs. Fulhame has now laid such bold claims to chemistry that we can no longer deny the sex the privilege of participating in this science also.

She was married to Thomas Fulhame, an Irish-born physician who had attended the University of Edinburgh and studied puerperal fever as a student of Andrew Duncan (1744–1828).

[15]: viii–ix "The possibility of making cloths of gold, silver, and other metals, by chymical processes, occurred to me in the year 1780: the project being mentioned to Doctor Fulhame, and some friends, was deemed improbable.

[22][23] Fulhame's work on the role of light sensitive chemicals (silver salts) on fabric, predates Thomas Wedgwood's more famous photogram trials of 1801.

Irish chemist William Higgins complained that she had ignored his work on the involvement of water in the rusting of iron, but magnanimously concluded "I read her book with great pleasure, and heartily wish that her laudible example may be followed by the rest of her sex.