History of Chemistry

5 Key excerpts on "History of Chemistry"

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  eBook - ePub

  A Cultural History of Chemistry in the Eighteenth Century

  • Matthew Daniel Eddy, Ursula Klein, Matthew Daniel Eddy, Ursula Klein(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Introduction The Core Concepts and Cultural Context of Eighteenth-Century Chemistry URSULA KLEIN AND MATTHEW DANIEL EDDY Before the late seventeenth century, chemistry was neither a professional occupation nor an academic discipline. Persons recognized as alchemists or chemists (collectively: “chymists”) were individuals scattered over different places and professions. Making a good living as a chymist was achieved mainly at princely courts. Add to this the fact that the medieval and Renaissance university did not include chymistry in its curriculum. After the introduction of medical chymistry in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, several universities included courses on chymistry in their medical curricula. This made it possible for professors of medicine, physicians, and apothecaries to earn money by preparing chemical remedies. But how did chymistry expand from being a philosophy and an art practiced in a variety of local contexts into a fully fledged chemical discipline? This introductory chapter answers this question by presenting an overview of the core concepts and cultural context that enabled chemists to transform chemistry into an independent discipline that systematically collected local knowledge about a broad range of material substances and ways of their change, and how it further engendered new empirical and theoretical knowledge. INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF CHEMISTRY AND THE FORMATION OF CHEMICAL COMMUNITIES Before the late seventeenth century, the book, in printed or manuscript form, was a central mode of communication through which chemical knowledge was accumulated, structured, and socially transmitted. Many historians see Andreas Libavius’ Alchemia, published in 1597, as the first chemical textbook that presented the terrain of chemical knowledge in a comprehensive and systematic way (Hannaway 1975)

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  Chemistry

  With Inorganic Qualitative Analysis

  • Therald Moeller(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  We travel on highways surfaced with asphalt and concrete. We drink water that has been purified with chlorine. We read from paper made from cellulose and printed with highly colored inks. We watch television screens that have been coated with tiny chemical spots, each of which responds with a color when energy is applied. With chemistry, we alter an almost endless variety of materials to form other materials with characteristics that we desire.

  Not all chemistry has a practical product as its objective, of course. Chemists search for understanding and the ability, based on understanding, to predict what will happen when changes occur. And some chemists pursue inquiries into the nature of matter solely because they enjoy it.

  With these observations in mind, we may consider a more formal definition of chemistry: Chemistry is the branch of science that deals with matter, with the changes that matter can undergo, and with the laws that describe these changes. As this definition implies, chemistry is both a theoretical and an applied science. The principles of chemistry are the explanations of the chemical facts; this is where you meet the hypotheses, the laws, and the theories. Descriptive chemistry , as you might expect, is the description of the elements and compounds, their physical states, and how they behave. No matter how chemistry is used, a good balance between principles and descriptive chemistry is a necessity. We will attempt to maintain such a balance throughout this textbook.

  1.5 Subdivisions of chemistry

  The five major subdivisions of chemistry are listed in Table 1.2 . Originally, organic chemistry dealt only with substances obtained from living materials, but this distinction has long since vanished. Organic chemistry has become the chemistry of carbon compounds and their derivatives. Organic compounds that contain only the two elements carbon and hydrogen are called hydrocarbons . Almost all other organic compounds can be thought of as derivatives of hydrocarbons. Inorganic chemistry is the chemistry of all elements (including carbon) and their compounds, with the exception of hydrocarbons and hydrocarbon derivatives. The other major subdivisions—analytical chemistry, physical chemistry, biochemistry—are defined briefly in Table 1.2

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  Chemistry, Pharmacy and Revolution in France, 1777-1809

  • Jonathan Simon(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The argument that pharmacy has an important place in the history of science depends, therefore, on challenging two prejudicial attitudes within the field. First, a bias towards theoretical developments as being the only interesting subject of the history of science. Second, a lack of sensitivity with respect to the importance of disciplinary divisions in the context of eighteenth-century chemistry. In a broader context, both these attitudes have been vigorously challenged in the last few decades, so the time seems ripe for a reappraisal of pharmacy's place in the history of science.

  Reconsidering the chemical revolution

  One of my central aims in this book is to indicate the ways in which taking the history of pharmacy into account might change our view of the chemical revolution itself. As with most historical categorizations, the meaning of the chemical revolution has not remained stable, rather it has been contested by a number of historians, and has shifted accordingly. Nevertheless, unlike many other historical debates, disputes about the chemical revolution operate around an assumed orthodoxy that serves to locate all the various dissenting positions as deviations from an apparent norm. Although it does not originate here, this standard history is best exemplified in the account of the chemical revolution offered by Thomas Kuhn in his influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (henceforth, Structure). It was this work that brought the canonical version of the chemical revolution its widest public exposure. While Kuhn himself was a historian of science, Structure was primarily a contribution to the philosophy of science, proposing a general model for scientific revolutions, of which the chemical revolution was just one example. The model of scientific revolution that Kuhn proposed was very clearly articulated around theory change, and suggested a fairly straightforward picture of how, in passing through a revolution, a community of scientists changes allegiance from one theory to another. A theory determines a paradigm in any science and the usual work of scientists – so-called normal science – remains within the conceptual structure determined by this paradigm. At some point, the dominant theory enters into a crisis and is replaced by another theory which brings with it a new paradigm. It is not difficult to see how the canonical version of the chemical revolution fits into this model. Stahl's phlogiston theory/paradigm was replaced by Lavoisier's oxygen theory/paradigm, with the discovery of gases and their participation in reactions (in particular combustion) supplying the precipitating crisis. Kuhn reproduced a picture of the chemical revolution very similar to that presented by his Harvard professor – James Bryant Conant – a dozen years earlier.15 Since the publication of Structure,

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  Matter and Method in the Long Chemical Revolution

  Laws of Another Order

  • Victor D. Boantza(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Introduction

  Historiography

  There are good reasons why the history of science tends to focus on successes rather than failures, on the “winners” rather than the “losers,” on the drama of the revolution—climactic shifts in science lend themselves to self-contained accounts that command attention. However, the longstanding focus on scientific revolutions has overlooked underlying currents over longer timeframes, across multiple historical locales and intellectual spheres, resulting in a discontinuous narrative of the emergence of modern science. Nowhere is this problem clearer than in the account of how modern chemistry emerged, an account that is dominated by two separate and distinct revolutions: the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, which marks the dawn of modern physics and experimental science; and the chemical revolution of the late eighteenth century, to which the origin of modern chemistry is exclusively attributed. It is becoming increasingly evident that the rise of modern chemistry cannot be explained using the revolution-centered narrative alone. This approach, to name some of its drawbacks, tends to downplay historical and conceptual continuity; it emphasizes theory over practice, since practice is typically slower to change than theory; and it draws our attention to the revolutionaries, although we can often learn more from the scientists whose contributions had a subtler impact over longer periods.

  Since Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), the seventeenth-century scientific revolution and especially the eighteenth-century chemical revolution have been widely recognized as the two greatest transformations of early modern science.1 In these sweeping substitutions of one scientific paradigm for another, Newton and Lavoisier stand as archetypal scientific revolutionaries alongside only Copernicus and Einstein. Yet the two revolutions are rarely considered together. The rise of modern physics and the emergence of modern chemistry have been traditionally viewed as two distinct and unconnected episodes.2 Newton modernized celestial and terrestrial physics, invented calculus, and introduced universal gravitation in his Principia Mathematica of 1687. A century later, Lavoisier’s Elements of Chemistry

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  Atmospheric Chemistry

  A Critical Voyage Through the History

  • Detlev Möller(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  1962 ).

  1.3.5.1  From alchemy to quantum chemistry

  Alchemists knew that heat was the power to proceed conversions of substances; using alchemistic symbols and names, chemical reaction diagrams, are first known from the French iatrochemist Jean Beguin (about 1520–1620), in his “Tyrocinium Chymicum ”, a set of chemistry lecture notes started in 1610 in Paris and later published by several editors (first 1634 in Wittenbergæ176 by C. Bergeri, 620 pp.). Boyle first combined in his studies on gases (relation between amount, pressure, and temperature) alchemy with the exact discipline physics. He introduced the scientific terms element, chemical compound and chemical reaction. In 1757, Scottish physician and chemist William Cullen (1710–1790), building on the new science of affinity chemistry, launched in 1718 by French chemist Etienne Geoffroy (1672–1731), pioneered the use of reaction arrow (→) to express or characterize the “elective” affinity preference (affinity force) of the reacting species. The next development of chemical equation theory, the use of reaction diagrams and affinity tables comes from Cullen’s student Joseph Black, in 1775 from the Swedish chemist Tobern Bergman (1735–1784), and in 1782, Antoine Lavoisier, who was employed, it seems for the first time, a “horizontal” (modern) mathematical-stylized (+, −) representation of chemical reactions, using ratios and products; moreover, in 1787 he was the first to make the first chemical equation with the sign of equality (=); Hartley (1971 , p. 82). In about 1884, the Dutch physical chemist Jacobus van’t Hoff

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