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Sir James Dewar, 1842-1923 Sir James Dewar, 1842–1923 A Ruthless Chemist J.S. Rowlinson SIR JAMES DEWAR, 1842–1923 A RUTHLESS CHEMIST Science, Technology and Culture, 1700–1945 Series Editors David M. Knight University of Durham and Trevor Levere University of Toronto Science, Technology and Culture, 1700–1945 focuses on the social, cultural, industrial and economic contexts of science and technology from the ‘scientific revolution’ up to the Second World War. It explores the agricultural and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth century, the coffee-house culture of the Enlightenment, the spread of museums, botanic gardens and expositions in the nineteenth century, to the Franco- Prussian war of 1870, seen as a victory for German science. It also addresses the dependence of society on science and technology in the twentieth century. Science, Technology and Culture, 1700–1945 addresses issues of the interaction of science, technology and culture in the period from 1700 to 1945, at the same time as including new research within the field of the history of science. Also in the series Popularizing Science and Technology in the European Periphery, 1800–2000 Edited by Faidra Papanelopoulou, Agustí Nieto-Galan and Enrique Perdiguero Essays on David Hume, Medical Men and the Scottish Enlightenment ‘Industry, Knowledge and Humanity’ Roger L. Emerson The Language of Mineralogy John Walker, Chemistry and the Edinburgh Medical School, 1750–1800 Matthew D. Eddy Sir James Dewar, 1842–1923 A Ruthless Chemist J.S. RoWlINSoN University of Oxford First published 2011 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Taylor & Francis 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business First published 2012 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © J.S. Rowlinson 2012 J.S. Rowlinson has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Rowlinson, J.S. Sir James Dewar, 1842–1923: A Ruthless Chemist. – (Science, Technology and Culture, 1700–1945) 1. Dewar, James, 1842–1923. 2. Chemists – Great Britain – Biography. I. Title II. Series 540.9’2–dc23 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rowlinson, J.S. (John Shipley), 1926– Sir James Dewar, 1842–1923: A Ruthless Chemist / J.S. Rowlinson. p. cm.– (Science, Technology and Culture,–1945) 1700 Includes bibliographical references and indexes. 1. Dewar, James, 1842–1923. 2. Chemists– Great Britain – Biography. 3. Inventors– Great Britain– Biography. 4.Science – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 5.– Science Great Britain– History– 20th century. I. Title. QD22.D345R69 2012 540.92 – dc23 [B] 2012005199 ISBN: 978-1-409-40613-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-60921-8 (ebk) JAMES DEWAR Persons of good sense, I have since observ’d, seldom fall into it [professional disputation] except lawyers, University Men, and Men of all Sorts that have been bred at Edinborough. Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, 1771 … an individual of untiring energy, united to courage and inventiveness of no common order, and indispensable for the furtherance of this important enterprise. Agnes Clerke, lecture on ‘low temperature research at the Royal Institution, 1893–1900’, 1901 I know – as your Grace also knows – that Sir James Dewar is a man of quarrelsome disposition and ungovernable temper … John W. Gordon, barrister-at-law, to the Duke of Northumberland, President of the Royal Institution, 1914 … that crusty dreamer, who loved poetry, and made and played on his fiddle; who studied the sky at night through a skylight in the roof of the RI at the age of 80, invented an explosive, and treasured a soap bubble. Gwendy Caroe, daughter of William Bragg, in The Royal Institution: An Informal History, 1985 Portrait of James Dewar in 1902 holding a flask in his laboratories of The Royal Institution, (photogravure) by Alexander Scott. Courtesy of The Royal Institution, london/The Bridgeman Art library. Contents List of Figures ix Preface xi Nomenclature and Units xv Abbreviations xvii 1 Boyhood 1 2 Edinburgh 5 3 Cambridge 17 4 Demonstrators 25 5 Spectroscopy 35 6 London 45 7 Commerce 57 8 Cryogenics 77 9 Argon and Helium 129 10 The Davy Faraday Research Laboratory 147 11 Decline 155 Chronology 173 Appendix: Liquefying a Gas 177 Notes and References 183 Name Index 223 Subject Index 231 This page has been left blank intentionally List of Figures 2.1 Dewar’s models of possible forms of benzene, C6H6. These include Kekulé’s structure which became conventional in the nineteenth century, the central structure in the first row, and the form called ‘Dewar benzene’, the right-hand structure in the second row. 9 8.1 Schematic sketch of the cycle in an apparatus for the cooling of a gas. 98 8.2 A comparison of Hampson’s apparatus (left) with that of Dewar (right). The upper part is in each case formed of the coils of the interchanger. In Dewar’s apparatus there is also a coil, shown in black, for preliminary cooling with liquid carbon dioxide. In both cases the liquid air comes out at a valve at the base. 110 8.3 Dewar’s sketch of the lower part of the first apparatus for the liquefaction of hydrogen, from his notebook RIA D V b/1. 115 8.4 Engraving of the apparatus for liquefying hydrogen, from Dewar’s article on ‘Liquid gases’ in the 10th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1902. 119 8.5 Drawing from the blueprint of the apparatus built in 1903 for the St Louis Exhibition. The central tube at the top contains the liquid hydrogen which is surrounded by the vacuum flask. The liquid is delivered into the lower detachable vacuum tube through the helical capillary. 121 A.1 The three phases of matter showing the usual effect of cooling a gas at a constant pressure, taking it first to a liquid and then to a solid. ‘t.p.’ and ‘c.p.’ show the triple and critical points. 178 A.2 Cooling by expansion in a Cailletet tube (top) and by Joule-Thomson expansion (bottom). 179 This page has been left blank intentionally Preface The nineteenth century marked the coming of age of the physical sciences. In 1800, astronomy was the only observational science to have reached maturity, as exemplified by the appearance a few years later of the five volumes of Laplace’s Mécanique Céleste. This book has been characterised both as the culmination of the Newtonian era of the eighteenth century and the first recognisable book of theoretical physics of the nineteenth. By 1800 the elasticity of solids, the elasticity and patterns of flow of gases and liquids, and simple optics and electrostatics had all been studied and reduced to mathematically ordered descriptions, but little progress had been made with most of the other subjects that we now classify as physics. The situation in chemistry was no better; many facts had been established but the subject still had more in common with the classificatory field of natural history than with what we now see as a physical science. By 1900 the situation had changed totally. The powerful experimental and theoretical structure of classical physics was almost complete, and chemistry, following the acceptance of Dalton’s atoms, had become a coherent field of experimental science. Organic chemistry, a subject that did not exist in 1800, became one of the great achievements of the time. The devising of systematic methods of analysis and synthesis had created an immense corpus of knowledge that must be reckoned one of the glories of the intellectual life of the nineteenth century. Chemistry’s link with the biological sciences was, however, only just starting in 1900. Its links with physics had been underway since the middle of the nineteenth century. At first physical chemistry was most successful in those aspects of chemistry, such as the thermodynamics of solutions and the kinetics of reactions, which made little immediate demand on atomic interpretations. Spectroscopy was valued principally as an analytical tool that proved its worth in the discovery of new elements, particularly with the inert gases at the end of the century. But the link of chemistry to physics could not reach fruition until the advent of quantum mechanics in the twentieth century. Only then could it be understood how the physics of atoms differed fundamentally from the physics that sufficed for billiard balls. Those behind this huge body of nineteenth-century science have received their due attention from historians, but the most studied have been those whose theoretical ideas drove the subjects forward. The men responsible for the experimental foundations of this theoretical structure have been less studied, with the exception of perhaps the greatest of them all, Michael Faraday. This book is an account of the life of one of them, James Dewar, a Scots chemist by training whose principal work lay in fields that we now reckon to be physics – atomic spectroscopy, the liquefaction of gases, and so the achievement in the laboratory of low temperatures, which turned out to be an environment in xii Sir James Dewar, 1842–1923 which the properties of matter differ in unexpected ways from those at ambient temperatures.
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