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SpringerBriefs in Molecular Science From the Molecular World A Nineteenth-Century Science Fantasy Bearbeitet von Alan J. Rocke, Hermann Kopp 1. Auflage 2012. Taschenbuch. vii, 105 S. Paperback ISBN 978 3 642 27415 2 Format (B x L): 15,5 x 23,5 cm Gewicht: 189 g Weitere Fachgebiete > Chemie, Biowissenschaften, Agrarwissenschaften > Chemie Allgemein > Geschichte der Chemie Zu Inhaltsverzeichnis schnell und portofrei erhältlich bei Die Online-Fachbuchhandlung beck-shop.de ist spezialisiert auf Fachbücher, insbesondere Recht, Steuern und Wirtschaft. Im Sortiment finden Sie alle Medien (Bücher, Zeitschriften, CDs, eBooks, etc.) aller Verlage. Ergänzt wird das Programm durch Services wie Neuerscheinungsdienst oder Zusammenstellungen von Büchern zu Sonderpreisen. Der Shop führt mehr als 8 Millionen Produkte. From the Molecular World (Printed as Manuscript.) Printed by C. F[riedrich] Winter’s Book-Press in Darmstadt. 18821 [Contents: v Preface 1 Introduction 2 Simple Atoms with Hands 6 The Behavior of Gas Molecules 10 Friendship and Affinity 16 Two Conceptions of the Constitutions of Molecules 29 The Constitutions of Organic Substances 34 A Personal Comment 34 In the Circus 38 Radicals 42 In the Dance Club 45 Atoms of Variable Handedness 52 The Story of Iodine and Hydrogen 59 Friendship under Extreme Heat 68 Molecular States 75 The World of Liquid Molecules 80 In the Annex 90 The Dance of Electrolysis 94 The World of Hydrated Salt Solutions 105 Conclusion] 1 This title-page language represents the first (private) printing of this book. See Introduction, Sections 3 and 4, for the printing history of this book. In Kopp’s book, there are no section- heads (or any other subdivisions); those given in this translation were provided by the present editor, as was everything else that appears here in square brackets. The bolded numbers in curly brackets in this edition indicate the original page numbers of Kopp’s book, identical in all three editions. A. J. Rocke and H. Kopp, From the Molecular World, SpringerBriefs in History of 29 Chemistry, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-27416-9_2, Ó The Author(s) 2012 30 From the Molecular World {v} [Preface] Dear B[unsen]! It sometimes happens that upon the approach of a friend’s anni- versary celebration one yields to his entreaties, and is induced to promise to do what he can to ensure that this anniversary shall not be celebrated at all, or at least shall be taken as little note of as possible. One then does as little as one can get away with; but the invitations still need to go out, as is necessary for such affairs, and, in the end, one is duly rewarded for his efforts: on the one side, by reproaches for not having sufficiently kept one’s promise; and on the other side, by hard feelings that one did not assist with something that others wanted to do, along with the inevitable misinterpretation of motives. This at least has happened to me on one known occasion,2 and I have taken the lesson from the experience: it is best not to get involved in any way with such an event. It is a different matter to mark a friend’s birthday; one determines this for oneself, or in common with a mutual friend, and others have nothing to say about it. For a number of years past I have {vi} pestered you on that day of the year with the proof that I have remembered it. Several times we have spent this day together in Italy3; last year I sent you birthday greetings from that country back to H[eidelberg],4 and this year I would like to send from the latter city to Naples, where I believe you will be on your birthday, a sign that I have not forgotten the event. But this time no postcard and also no letter. On this day each year, the memories of our long and close friendship, recalling the melody ‘‘Oh Don’t You Remember,’’5 resound in me ever more deeply. But at least as far as I am concerned, on this occasion in particular I would like to make the expression of my observance of it a more light-hearted one. But as has happened in many earlier years, so also this year, I have frankly had neither the inclination nor the spare time to dust off and prepare something jocular. You know that lately I have been somewhat more heavily pressed, and have not thought about frivolous amusements. The thought occurred: perhaps I might have something stashed away that was halfway appropriate? I looked in my ‘‘dungeon,’’ namely that compartment of my 2 On 3 November 1881 Bunsen wrote his English friend and former collaborator Henry Roscoe [1, 544]: ‘‘I was absent from [Heidelberg] on my anniversary day [the 50th anniversary of the date his doctoral degree was conferred, 17 October 1831], hoping in that way to escape all official notice, but on my return I found so many tokens of kind interest that I scarcely see how it will be possible for me to answer each one separately … and so I am beginning to feel very much exhausted after all I have been through.’’ On 9 January 1882 Kopp wrote Roscoe [2, 91], ‘‘We certainly had expected you at Bunsen’s celebration. B. had hidden himself away with a few selected friends in Jugenheim on the Bergstrasse [near Darmstadt] … B. bore the unavoidable with dignity and not without pleasure.’’ 3 Bunsen’s surviving correspondence shows that he had made at least two previous trips to Naples on Easter holiday in company with Kopp, in 1875 and 1880; see Bunsen to Kolbe, 4 June 1875, ADM 3507, and Bunsen to Roscoe, 7 March 1880, ADM 1000. 4 Bunsen mentioned Kopp’s Easter 1881 Italian holiday in letters to Roscoe of 5 and 12 March 1881, ADM 1002 and 1003. 5 ‘‘Denkst Du daran, Genosse froher Stunden / Wie wir vereint die Musenstadt begrüsst’’: a sentimental German student drinking song. From the Molecular World 31 desk into which I throw things that I have started, but whose further elaboration appeared to require more time than I wanted at first to spend on it, or some other obstacle intervened; and also finished articles, if I {vii} was not in the mood to publish them. I do not often call roll for the inhabitants of the dungeon; only in the rather rare cases when it strikes my fancy once more to undertake an investigation begun earlier in the case of one of the inmates—perhaps re-started once or even several times—and maybe this time finally to settle it for good. In the course of such revisions, once in a while something is given over to be printed, many more are neutralized forever, and some are consigned once more to their prison for an indefinite sentence. Amongst the latter category I found a bundle of papers titled ‘‘From the Molecular World.’’ I no longer remembered when it had first been thrown into the jail, which for it really could have become a dungeon; as far as I recall it had never received a hearing in the entire period of its incarceration. Looking through it, it appeared to me that it could possibly be more or less what I was looking for, and then I remembered on what occasion I had written the sketch. When once I occupied myself with the possibility of determining, in a certain fashion for certain salts, whether in aqueous solution they exist as anhydrous salts or as hydrates, and I considered it possible that anhydrous salts unite with water to form hydrates only when they crystallize out of solution, and that in solution the hydrates could be dissociated: {viii} then for the latter case I exercised my imagination regarding what it might look like in a salt solution, how the molecules of the salt and of water would knock about there; from that point the play of my thoughts then turned to gaseous bodies, where we have a stronger foundation for what we know about the molecules of the latter. At that time I did a few experiments for the empirical examination of that possibility, and from my laboratory notebook I could easily fix the time when I pursued this not especially productive subject, since there were very few additional entries, considering the conditions that developed for me in H[eidelberg]; it was in the autumn of the year 1876.6 The following pages contain essentially what I wrote at that time. I have gone over it and adapted it to the present purpose, which necessitated some additions. I have also purified it. I have removed some passages which, harmless though they were meant, might have been taken personally. I need to assure you the least of all people, that despite my light-hearted form of expressing myself, I take seriously and highly value many of the advances in our understanding thus described in the following pages. I have untangled the tails of many rat-kings of sentences.7 At that time even more than earlier I {ix} surrendered to the comfortable temptation of stuffing a great deal in a single sentence, and in this way sentences were formed in 6 The work he speaks of may be the same as that referred to in his letter to Wöhler of 15 October 1876, in which he writes that ‘‘das unchemische [?] Arbeiten, dem ich mich mit Liebe wieder einmal hingegeben habe, und das Experimentiren … ist mir ausgezeichnet bekommen. Es ist zunächst verschiedenes Krystallochemisches, was ich in Untersuchung habe …’’ (BBAW-W). 7 A ‘‘Rattenkönig’’ is the purported accidental knotting of a number of rats together through their filthy tails.