Composition to Commerce Conference Abstracts - Chemical Heritage Foundation

Composition to Commerce:
Chemistry, History, and the Wider World
A Conference at the Chemical Heritage Foundation
12–13 June 2009
Chemical Heritage Foundation
315 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106

“Laboratories in 18th-Century Germany”
Ursula Klein, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

In the 18th century, laboratories were exclusively sites of chemical operations, and they were located both at artisanal workshops and at academic institutions. Laboratories thus are excellent historical objects to scrutinize for connections between chemical science and chemical technology. A comparison of the architecture and equipment of pharmaceutical- and academic-chemical laboratories in particular shows that there was a strong correspondence between these two types of laboratories. Likewise the chemical techniques employed for the production of chemical remedies and those used for the analysis and preparation of chemical substances in academic-chemical laboratories were largely the same. This helps to explain why about fifty percent of 18th-century German chemists were apprenticed and practicing apothecaries. The laboratory of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, established in 1754, provides further evidence for the strong overlap of 18th-century chemical science and technology.

“Chemistry as a Technoscience: Historiographical and Contemporary Perspectives”
Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Université Paris-X Nanterre

The issue addressed in this paper was inspired by a volume of Perspectives on science (13, 2005 N°2 and 3) entitled “Technoscientific Productivity.” The main message of the volume is that chemistry has always been a technoscience because of its concern with productivity and the interconnection of science and technology. The various contributors argue that already in the 19th century, and even in the 18th century, chemistry was an early technoscience. This interesting and challenging claim will first be discussed from a historiographical standpoint. Projecting the recent notion of technoscience onto the past may seem anachronistic; however, it reveals the values attached to various scientific disciplines and how chemistry suffered from the dominant model of science in the 20th century. Then, by looking more closely at the current notion of technoscience, the distance between chemistry and technoscience will be emphasized. Today chemists only moderately sympathize with the technoscientific paradigm; even when they are engaged in nanotechnology research, they tend to retain their strong disciplinary identity.

“Between the Workshop and the Laboratory: Lavoisier’s Network of Instrument Makers”
Marco Beretta, University of Bologna

Throughout his career Lavoisier paid particular attention to the apparatus that he wanted to use in his experimental pursuits. To this aim he established contact with many instrument makers operating in Paris, in the French provinces, and abroad, and he made several efforts, more or less successful, to design a new environment for chemical experimentation. In addition to famous instrument makers such as Fortin, Mégnié, and Ramsden, Lavoisier had his instruments made by more than 30 others whose identity has so far remained obscure. This presentation will include a cursory survey of their identity and contributions and a preliminary attempt to establish their role in the design of Lavoisier’s instruments.

“Changes in the Laboratory as a Result of the Introduction of Physical Methods into Chemistry”
Carsten Reinhardt, Universität Bielefeld

Twentieth-century chemistry experienced a transformation that replaced chemical methods, most notably chemical reactions, with physical methods, most importantly spectroscopies of various kinds. With this transformation in the analytical parts of chemical practice came changes in the functions and the organization of the chemical laboratory. In 1900, the laboratory was a place for human labor based on manual procedures and focusing on sense impressions. It was designed to enhance education, to channel communication, and to sustain the hierarchy of the research group. Above all it was a place for producing, and of dealing with, a stream of substances. In contrast, around 1970, the chemical laboratory had to accommodate a whole array of machines, with NMR-, IR-, UV-, and mass spectroscopy taking over large domains of chemical work. Sensory perception was replaced by data measurement, and manual dexterity in shaking test tubes had to give way for an aptitude for tinkering with electronic gadgets. From lab to shop? Basically, the functions of the “shop” were the same as those of the “lab”: education, communication, and research. Nevertheless, there are far-reaching differences. Changes of space (how the laboratory is built) relate to differences in place (where the laboratories and their users are located), and the modern, instrument-based laboratory depends more heavily on its external relations, often done in a collaborative manner, while the traditional laboratory is more inward-bound, and often rests on an internal hierarchy. These two types of chemical laboratories will be compared, using some examples and arguing that the “shop” did not completely replace the “lab,” but complemented it.

“Continuities and Discontinuities Between Alchemy and Chemistry—Some Case Studies”
William Newman, Indiana University

The relationship between alchemy, including early modern chymistry, and the chemistry of the 18th century is a vexing historiographical question. Although it has long been acknowledged that the mercury-sulfur theory originating in medieval alchemy was the progenitor of Georg Ernst Stahl’s phlogiston theory, the general tendency of historians has been—until quite recently—to dismiss alchemy as having had no serious impact on eighteenth-century chemistry. Recent historiography has begun to question this viewpoint by drawing links between 18th-century chemistry and such areas as the formulation of the principle of mass balance, the reliance upon a negative-empirical principle in arriving at the constituents of bodies, the explicit awareness that many chemical reactions involve retrievable ingredients of a robust nature (i.e. “chymical atoms”), and even the very definition of chemistry as “the art of analysis and synthesis.” A further area that needs exploration is the idea that chemical corpuscles combine to form hierarchies of increasing complexity, a theory that reaches its maturity in the work of Stahl and then goes on to form an enduring strand in later 18th-century chemistry. After discussing the various themes linking alchemy and later chemistry, the hierarchical matter theory that is linked with the name of Stahl will be considered.

“Turning the Tables: Print Culture and Mineralogical Instruction in the Age of Reason”
Matthew Eddy, Durham University

This paper offers a fresh view that complicates the notion that late Enlightenment naturalists and physicians treated composite substances as fixed categories that could be explicitly viewed as pure kinds or species. Instead of giving priority to the theoretical picture of matter intimated by the canon of chemistry texts traditionally used by historians to interpret the chemical revolution, it concentrates on manuscripts that give insight to the day-to-day practices of sorting, extracting, inserting, and defining words—the topical logics—used to create mineralogical classification systems. Drawing from work on the anthropology of texts and the senses, it focuses on the mineralogy lecture notes taken by the students of John Walker, the professor of natural history in the University of Edinburgh's medical school from 1779 to 1803. In this setting a “system” was seen as a pedagogical tool as well as an attempt to reduce the vast data of chemistry down to a representative schema that had mnemonic traction. Using examples drawn from the changing system that Walker developed over a twenty-year period, this paper shows that the ordering practices that he taught to his students were textually and conceptually malleable and were reinforced on a daily basis in classrooms, libraries, lecture theatres, studies, and museums, as well as in natural settings.

“Chemistry in Everyday Life: A ‘Bottom-Up’ History of Dutch Chemistry”
Lissa Roberts, University of Twente

The history of chemistry has long been a house divided. Historians of science have largely approached it as a story of knowledge production through examinations of theory development, disciplinary formation, and experimental practice. Historians of technology have focused instead on material production, often tied to questions of industrial or economic concern; for them, the question of knowledge has generally been treated as prior, theory-informed material practice (or, in a few cases, theory arose from unenlightened practice but then assumed its superior position) and/or exogenous, or transmuted into examinations of skill, organization, and management. There are, of course, a few notable exceptions to this characterization, but much more work needs to be done before we can appreciate the ways in which the highly variegated field of chemistry was historically experienced by its practitioners. This presentation maps mundane involvement with chemistry in the Netherlands during the 18th century as a way to begin charting the actuality of its practices, which, arguably, always entailed the hybrid engagement of mind and hand.

“The Philosophical Chemist in the Enlightenment Public Sphere”
Mi Gyung Kim, North Carolina State University

Chemistry has suffered significantly from a lack of social prestige despite the material wealth it brought to Western civilization. Historians are quite used to the narrative of the Scientific Revolution that conveniently leaves out Paracelsus, chemists’ identity as the “sooty empirics,” and its absence in the philosophy of science since the 1830s. It will require diligent archeology to recover the historical figure of the chemist in public culture; this is particularly true of the Enlightenment, which is when chemists actively sought to cultivate the discourse of philosophical chemistry. Despite the substantial literature on Lavoisier, for example, there has been little effort to understand his status within the larger chemical community in France or to link him to other French chemists. Venel’s prophetic call for a new Paracelsus in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, one who would combine the material knowledge of the chemical laboratory and the social skills of a public persona, has remained more of a puzzle than a prelude to his eminence. Using De la Folie’s description of “the philosopher without pretension,” this paper configures the ideal persona of the philosophical chemist in Enlightenment public culture.

“Image and Reality: The Role of the Visual Imagination in Chemistry”
Alan Rocke, Case Western Reserve University

Recent historians have rightly argued that material images can serve not merely as discretionary illustration, but as constitutive elements of scientific argument. This paper extends that idea by examining historically the role of the visual imagination in the pursuit of science, especially chemistry. Nineteenth-century chemistry holds a special place in this story, since the primary objects of chemical investigation, atoms and molecules, were and are beyond the direct reach of our bodily senses. Chemists were the first to move beyond high-level philosophical speculation regarding the unseen microworld into the kind of productive, empirically-founded, and heuristically powerful investigative programs that have since become routine. For centuries, chemists and other natural philosophers had been pondering the invisibly small. In the early and middle decades of the 19th century, these conceptual forays were transformed into an epistemically robust methodology that could be employed to confidently explore many of the intriguing details of that world. A habitual and recurrent (though nearly invisible) pillar of that methodology was the productive use of the visual imagination. Many 19th-century chemists learned to apply the technique with particularly pointed effect. They combined their mental images with complex chains of inference reaching from the sensual world right down to the microworld, successfully connecting macroscopic evidence to their imagined tableaux.

“The Revival of Political History and the Structures of Chemistry”
Kathryn Steen, Drexel University

This paper considers recent revival and reformation of political history and its implications for the history of chemistry and chemical industry. In recent decades, the expansiveness of social and cultural history pushed political history to the sidelines, and, indeed, all the way out of the stadium to a different discipline. But the tighter embrace of historical approaches by political scientists helped to spark a renewed scholarly interest in political history, which, in its new incarnation, has been transformed by social and cultural history. Urban, regional, transnational, and environmental histories have been or are becoming fruitful terrain for political history. In part because the history of chemistry has often meant the history of the chemical industry, issues of political economy are also never far from explorations of chemistry in the past, and here, too, lies scholarly potential.