A History of Chemistry from Alchemy to the Buckyball

Mott T. Greene and Sharon Kingsland Series Editors Transforming Matter A History of Chemistry from Alchemy to the Buckyball Trevor H. Levere © 2001 The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2001 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 987654321 The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levere, Trevor Harvey. Transforming matter : a history of chemistry from alchemy to the buckyball / Trevor H. Levere. p. cm. — (Johns Hopkins introductory studies in the history of science) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8018-6609-X (acid-free paper) — ISBN 0-8018-6610-3 (pbk. : acid-free paper) 1. Chemistry—History. I. Title. II. Series. QD11 .L45 2001 540´.9—dc21 00-011487 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction ix 1 First Steps: From Alchemy to Chemistry? 1 2 Robert Boyle: Chemistry and Experiment 14 3 A German Story: What Burns, and How 28 4 An Enlightened Discipline: Chemistry as Science and Craft 39 5 Different Kinds of Air 51 6 Theory and Practice: The Tools of Revolution 66 7 Atoms and Elements 80 8 The Rise of Organic Chemistry 94 9 Atomic Weights Revisited 107 10 The Birth of the Teaching-Research Laboratory 121 11 Atoms in Space 136 12 Physical Chemistry: A Discipline Comes of Age 152 13 The Nature of the Chemical Bond 165 14 Where Now, and Where Next? New Frontiers 182 Suggested Further Reading 201 Index 209 Acknowledgments This book owes much to the undergraduate and graduate students in lecture courses on the history of science and in seminars on the history of chemistry at the University of Toronto over many years of teaching. I am also much in- debted to friends and colleagues. I would especially like to thank Lawrence Principe, William Brock, David Farrar, Anthony Fernandez, and Brian Baigrie for their comments on drafts of this book. I have cheerfully and gratefully adopted many of their suggestions. They have saved me from numerous er- rors, suggested the inclusion of several important topics, and helped me at many points to make arguments clearer. Juliana McCarthy at the Johns Hop- kins University Press was most helpful and efficient at every stage of produc- tion. Introduction Chemistry today is fascinating and far ranging. We know something about the chemistry of the stars, distant crucibles where elements are formed. We know much about the chemistry of life—in biochemistry, complexity and richness are at their peak, supported by elegant and often simple concepts and models. There are just over a hundred kinds of chemical atoms, corresponding to the different kinds of chemical elements, but their possible and actual combina- tions are so many as to seem infinite. In only the past thirty years, the list of known compounds has grown by seven and a half million, which represents almost a tenfold increase in that short interval of time. Complexity, richness, and an economy of means give chemistry its intellectual appeal; utility and ap- plication, its universal relevance. Chemistry in medicine, agriculture, and in- dustry and in its effects on the environment has transformed the conditions of life for our species, and for countless other species as well. Many of the neces- sities for our crowded planet are made possible by the applications of chemistry. Many of the problems that we have created while providing those neces- sities are also tied to chemistry, and so too will be their solutions. We make choices, perceive needs, and create social and political structures in which we use, wittingly and unwittingly, the science of our day. Although chemistry has been important for millennia in its practical ap- plication to the needs and luxuries of human life, the discipline has not always been called chemistry. It has existed in very different forms, and in very different relations to neighboring sciences and crafts, in a flux that only accelerated as the years passed. The goals and concepts of a Chinese or Arabic alchemist of antiquity or the Middle Ages differed greatly from those of a chemist of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, just as the aims and ideas of nineteenth- century research chemists were different from those of their predecessors and successors. Chemistry has, historically, been in constant flux, both in its self-image and in relation to other disciplines that sought to co-opt or absorb it. It has had its sects, its rivalries, and many dead-ends. But from antiquity to the present, there xIntroduction have been men and women (formerly few women, now many) engaged in seeking to understand the way in which different substances are formed, how they react, and how they may be used. Chemistry is and has always been both science and craft or technique, depending on its material subject matter and on the tools and instruments developed for the manipulation and transformation of that matter. The chemistry of gases, for example, only became possible when apparatus were invented in the eighteenth century for containing and con- trolling gases. Chemistry, in its use of instruments and laboratory skills learned through experience, was and is a practical science, despite the existence today of the subdiscipline of theoretical chemistry. But even chemists of the most practical sort could become lyrical in the face of the discoveries of their art. Was it not wonderfully strange that an in- flammable gas and a gas supporting combustion and life could combine to pro- duce pure water, showing no trace of its gaseous origin? So it seemed to many chemists around the time when the composition of water was discovered. How could substances with the same composition exist in different forms with different properties? That was a nice problem for the early nineteenth century. Chemistry has, however, been not only a science of ideas and discoveries but also marvelous in its uses. Think of modern medicine, which depends heavily on compounds synthesized in the chemical laboratory to fight disease. The story in this book traces the study of the qualities and transformations of different kinds of matter from alchemical beginnings to the present. It fol- lows a small number of themes: theories about the elements, the need to clas- sify elements and compounds, the status of chemistry as a science, and the contributions of practice to theory. It explores these themes by concentrating on the contributions of some of the most influential and innovative practitioners of the science. I have addressed the book to those seeking an introduction to the history of chemistry, whether they have a background in the science or not. Formulas are at a minimum, and concepts and technical terms are explained as they ap- pear. A list of further reading appears after the final chapter. Chemistry in for- mer ages will be as unfamiliar to most chemists today as modern chemistry is to nonchemists. There should be something familiar and much new for all but the specialist reader. 1 First Steps From Alchemy to Chemistry? In , scientists at the University of California at Berkeley used a particle ac- celerator to change an unimaginably small sample of bismuth into gold. It cost them $, to make one-billionth of a cent’s worth of gold. They showed that transmutation—the conversion of one chemical element into another— is possible today, but it is clearly not a paying proposition. At the beginning of the twentieth century, transmutation was not even within the reach of scientists. And earlier, in the nineteenth century, few chemists had any interest in such a crazy idea, which they regarded as part of a discredited alchemy. Most historians have had little interest in alchemy, except to show how wrong- headed and unscientific it was. Only a few eccentrics continued to search for the philosophers’ stone, the fabulous substance that would change base metals into gold. Reputable chemists could not take them seriously. But in the seventeenth century, alchemy still mattered. The seventeenth century is widely regarded as the age of the Scientific Revolution, the crucial epoch in the rise of modern science. Finding alchemy alive and well at such a time is surprising to those who see science as something essentially modern and alchemy as prescientific and misguided. Many seventeenth-century scientists and some politicians had a very different picture of alchemy. They could rea- sonably look forward to success with transmutation because their scientific theories could easily find room for it, and they had high hopes of economic as well as scientific benefit. True, no one had yet succeeded in the business of mul- tiplication—the alchemical transformation of a little gold and a lot of base metals into a lot of gold—but several major figures thought a breakthrough was in sight. Robert Boyle (–) was one such figure. Today, we would call Boyle a scientist, but that word was not invented un- til the nineteenth century, when it was coined to describe practitioners of the sciences. Scientist by the mid-nineteenth century meant a person who studied one or more aspects of the natural world using the methods of chemistry, physics, and the other sciences. In the seventeenth century, those who studied the natural world tended to have broader horizons, deliberately including in their study metaphysical and even theological questions. These investigators saw themselves as natural philosophers, as, for example did Boyle and his con- temporary Isaac Newton (–). Boyle was widely regarded as the lead- ing English chemist of the seventeenth century. He was invited to accept the presidency of the Royal Society of London but declined because he refused to swear any oaths, including the president’s oath of office.

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