Letter from Bettally and Noseda to William Temple Franklin. Sending a sample of Phosphorous candles. Bettally was a French maker and dealer of scientific instruments who was at the time working with Noseda, a partner about whom we know little. This document concerns an invention that Jean-François Pilatre de Rozier had described and announced for sale in the previous day's Journal de Paris: phosphoric candles, or self-igniting candles. Bettally & Noseda, finding that their customers complained of low success rates, soon began selling phosphoric candles of their own manufacture. Franklin was so impressed with these devices that he included phosphoric candles among the recent scientific developments he described to François Steinsky and Jan Ingenhousz. When Thomas Jefferson arrived in Paris in 1784, he was likewise amazed by these “phosphoretic matches” and planned to send some to America. He later learned that they were already being sold in Philadelphia.; American Philosophical Society
