My mother, on whom I depend for all my New Jersey history, passed on a delightful tale of George Washington, Tom Paine, and their passion for chemistry experiments. In early November 1783, Tom Paine paid a visit to George Washington in Rockingham, New Jersey, where Washington was waiting for news of the end of the revolutionary war.  One night Paine and Washington got to talking with two colonels about the will-o-the-wisp, the fiery globe that people sometimes claimed to see floating over marshes.

They came up with two plausible hypotheses. The colonels thought that they were produced from some kind of matter in the marches, such as turpentine. Washington and Paine thought it was a gas.

So the next night,