3. 18C Chemistry

History of Chemistry Organisch-chemisches Institut Universität Zürich Professor Ramberg Early Eighteenth Century Chymistry In 1700, chemistry continued its explicit emphasis on the corpuscular nature of matter, but there was a reaction, particularly in the German States, to the purely mechanical chemistry of Boyle and Newton’s concept of attractions and repulsions between particles. By the middle of the century, chemists had both dropped transmutional alchemy, and reorganized their work around the concept of chemical composition, determined by analysis and synthesis. I. Limitations of Mechanical Chymistry 1. Robert Boyle 2. Isaac Newton II. Chymistry at the Paris Academy of Sciences 1. Nicolas Lemery (1645-1715) 2. Wilhelm Homberg (1652-1715) 3. Guilliame Francois Geoffroy (1672-1731) III. Reaction to Mechanical Chymistry 1. Hermann Boerhaave (1668-1738) 2. Georg Ernst Stahl (1660-1734) a. Set of five corpuscular principles: Air, water, earth (vitrifiable, inflammable, mercurial) b. Hierarchical matter theory c. Aggregates vs mixts IV. Atoms or Elements? 1. Wilhelm Homberg, “Essay de l’analyse du souffre commun,” (1703) The word ‘principle’ has two significations in chemistry. ... [First] we have still been unable to determine anything uncontestable about the shape arrangement, and the movements of the primary matter. ... [Chemically, principles] are the simplest matters into which a mixt is reduced by chemical analysis. 2. Georg Ernst Stahl, Philosophical Principles of Universal Chemistry (1704) [A] difference, at present, prevails between the physical and chemical principles of mix’d bodies. Those are called physical principles whereof a mixt is really composed; but they are not hitherto settled.... And those are usually termed chemical principles, into which all bodies are found reducible by the chemical operations hitherto known. 3. Peter Shaw Chemical Lectures (1734) [T]he more intelligent among the modern chemists do not understand by principles those original particles of matter, of which all bodies are by the mathematical and mechanical philosophers supposed to consist. Those particles remain indiscernible to the sense...nor have their figure and original difference been determined by a just induction. Leaving therefore, to other philosophers the sublimer disquisition of primary corpuscles, or atoms,...genuine chemistry contents itself with grosser principles, which are evident to the sense, and known to produce effects. 4. William Cullen (1762) Elements are physical or chemical, the former are the real elements of bodies or as they are often called atoms, but these physical elements are rather imagined than actually known ... the strict and precise meaning of element is, that no human art can divide; and these we call chemical elements...but physical elements are beyond which no power in our system can go ... All the bodies obvious to our senses, are compounded through several degrees ... art never attains the ultimate degree of division, but rests in some of the intermediate stages, which we may consider as the elements, only of a higher composition ... 5. Richard Watson Chemical Essays (1781) By chemical elements, which are the last products of chemical analysis, we are to understand not the simple homogeneal parts of bodies which are not capable, so far as our experience teaches us, of any farther resolution or division... 6. Antoine Lavoisier Traité Elementaire de Chimique (1789) That if, by the terms elements, we mean to express those simple and indivisible atoms of which matter is composed, it is extremely probable we know nothing at all about them; but if we apply the term elements, or principles of bodies, to express our idea of the last point which analysis is capable of reaching, we must admit, as elements, all the substances into which we are capable, by any means, to reduce bodies by decomposition. V. General Characteristics 1. Gabriel Francois Venel (1723-1775), “Chime,” in the Encyclopedie (1751) Chemistry is “a science concerned with the separations and combinations of the constituent principles of bodies, whether effected by nature or by artifice, with the goal of discovering the properties of those bodies, or to reorder them suitable for different uses.” 2. Two Component Theories of Composition 3. Composition vs chemical principles VI. The Decline of Chrysopoetic Alchemy Further Reading Frederic L. Holmes, Eighteenth Century Chemistry as an Investigative Enterprise, Berkeley: Office for the History of Science and Technology, 1989. Frederic L. Holmes, “The Communal Context for Etienne-François Geoffroy’s ‘Table Des Rapports’,” Science in Context, 9 (1996): 289-311 Frederic L. Holmes, “Chemistry in the Académie Royale Des Sciences,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 34 (2003): 41-68 Frederic L. Holmes, “Investigative and Pedagogical Styles in French Chemistry At the End of the 17th Century,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 34 (2004): 277-309 David Oldroyd, “An Examination of G.E. Stahl’s Philosophical Principles of Universal Chemistry,” Ambix, 20 (1974): 36-52 Lawrence M Principe, “Evidence for Transmutation in Seventeenth-Century Alchemy,” in Scientiﬁc Evidence: Philosophical Theories and Applications, edited by Peter Achinstein, pp. 151-64. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Rhoda Rappaport, “Rouelle and Stahl––The Phlogistic Revolution in France,” Chymia, 4 (1964): 73-102.

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