The Charms of Cambridge Chemistry

Mary D. Archer; Christopher D.Haley, editors. The 1702 Chair of Chemistry at Cambridge: Transformation and Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xxi + 318 pp. $95.

Reviewed by Richard E. Rice

This volume collects 12 essays about the first chair of chemistry at Cambridge University and the 15 men who have occupied it; many of the essays were presented at Chem@300, a twoday conference held at Cambridge in December 2002 to celebrate the tercentenary of “the oldest continuously occupied chair of chemistry in Great Britain” (p. xv). This circumlocution alludes to Britain’s first chair of chemistry, established at Oxford in 1683, but sometimes unoccupied for years at a time (though in fact the Cambridge chair was itself vacant for five years during World War II).

Although a relative newcomer to the 800-year-old university, chemistry has been taught there since Newton was secretly performing his alchemical investigations. In February 1703 (1702, Old Style) the Cambridge University senate named Giovanni Francesco Vigani as the university’s first professor of chemistry. A trained apothecary from Verona—and a friend of Newton’s until he made the mistake of telling Newton “a loose story about a Nun” (p. 6)—by 1702/3 Vigani had already been offering lectures in chemistry at Cambridge for about 20 years. Since neither salary nor rooms accompanied his new title, the senate’s action seems to have been a formal recognition of the status quo, or perhaps of Vigani’s academic staying power.

Many of Cambridge’s professors of chemistry, at least through the middle of the 19th century, have been deemed of little consequence by historians of that science. One early professor who ought to escape that judgment is Richard Watson, the fifth chair holder (1764–1771). He boldly offered himself as a candidate for the chair even though, as he later acknowledged, he“knew nothing at all of chymistry, had never read a syllable on the subject, nor seen a single experiment in it” (p. 60). Once ensconced, however, he quickly learned enough "chymistry” not only to offer successful lectures to the undergraduates and publish his well-received Chemical Essays, but also to carry out some significant research. In 1771 he published observations that demonstrated that “resistance to congelation [lowering of the freezing point] is directly proportional to the quantity of salt dissolved” (p. 63), a statement of Blagden’s law made 17 years before Charles Blagden published his findings on the topic.

The first eight chapters of the volume, written by historians of science or by chemists with long interests in the history of their science, cover through the death in 1939 of William Jackson Pope, the 11th chair holder. The first chapter sets the stage for the later essays by discussing some of the academic, philosophical, political, and religious considerations that surrounded attempts to establish chemistry as a legitimate topic of study at Cambridge in spite of the objections from skeptics.

Chapters 9 through 12, on the four most recent chair holders, mark a shift, focusing on the professors’ research on the organic synthesis of biologically important molecules. The authors of the first two chapters were research students of their subjects (and one became a colleague); the authors of the last two chapters are the chair holders themselves. These four essays make liberal use of complicated structural organic formulas, whereas the most complicated chemical formula in the first eight essays is Ca3(PO4)2. Chapter 12, by Steven Ley, professor since 1992, stands out among the last four essays in that he focused less on the synthesis of specific molecules and more on the methods and technologies that he uses in synthesizing them.

This is not a book to take to the beach or to read straight through, sitting by the fireside. These scholarly essays are well written and extensively documented, but as with any collection by multiple authors, they are uneven in various ways. I found it very much a book to dip into at random, to meet many fascinating and often eccentric individuals. One of my favorites was Smithson Tennant, the eighth professor of chemistry, who occupied the 1702 Chair for only two years (1813–1815) at the end of his life. Trained as a physician, he followed his passion in chemistry, discovering osmium and iridium in the course of a joint commercial venture with William Hyde Wollaston to produce pure platinum from platina ore smuggled out of South America. Perhaps most flamboyant was his death: an avid horseman, he fell with his mount through the rotted drawbridge of an old fortress near Boulogne, France, where he was buried in the public cemetery.

The 1702 Chair of Chemistry at Cambridge represents a very narrow slice of the history of chemistry over
the past 300 years, excluding even chemistry encompassed by other Cambridge chairs, with the exception of the Jacksonian Chair. Nevertheless, much of that narrow slice is placed within a broader context of the chemistry of the times, and this collection takes us from the remnants of alchemy to the modern methods of combinatorial chemistry. It tells not only how chemistry arrived at an institution that saw little need for it, but also how chemistry evolved within the university and changed it against significant resistance, inertia, and tradition.

Overall, I found this slim volume a treasure trove of small, often delicious details about the growth of chemistry and the men who brought it about amid “the charms of Cambridge’s more customary anarchic and idiosyncratic habits” (p. 206).