“Chemistry is class warfare. It begins with people just trying to start a fire with perfumers, slaves, with artisans in Egypt. It then moves into the middle classes with doctors, with physicians, with apothecaries, with people like Paracelsus. And now it has moved into the nobility. And it's only with the nobility that we can then start filtering it through all of the population.”

…And so they would buy microscopes and they would start doing experiments. And we start getting this huge surge in the late 18th century, sorry, in the late 17th century, moving into the early 18th century, of people mastering the basic principles of experimental design. And that is incredibly important and can't really be overlooked because it shows how chemistry has moved through the classes. Chemistry is class warfare. It begins with people just trying to start a fire with perfumers, slaves, with artisans in Egypt. It then moves into the middle classes with doctors, with physicians, with apothecaries, with people like Paracelsus. And now it has moved into the nobility. And it's only with the nobility that we can then start filtering it through all of the population. And so we start getting this incredible surge in everyone being really interested in science. And starting to understand the world and unraveling alchemy, we get a surge in the 18th century of people experimenting with gases. We have the isolation of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, particularly oxygen, being probably the most important. And of course, we then end up with the French Revolution and…