‘Chemical Industry, Upheld by Pure Science Sustains the Production of Man’s Necessities’, frontispiece to A. Cressy Morrison, Man in A Chemical World: the service of chemical industry (London & New York: Scribner’s, 1937) Reproduced courtesy of Scribner’s, Collier Macmillan, New York
PREFACE TO THE FONTANA HISTORY OF SCIENCE
Academic study of the history of science has advanced dramatically, in depth and sophistication, during the last generation. More people than ever are taking courses in the history of science at all levels, from the specialized degree to the introductory survey; and, with science playing an ever more crucial part in our lives, its history commands an influential place in the media and in the public eye.
Over the past two decades particularly, scholars have developed major new interpretations of science’s history. The great bulk of such work, however, has been published in detailed research monographs and learned periodicals, and has remained hard of access, hard to interpret. Pressures of specialization have meant that few survey works have been written that have synthesized detailed research and brought out wider significance.
It is to rectify this situation that the Fontana History of Science has been set up. Each of these wide-ranging volumes examines the history, from its roots to the present, of a particular field of science. Targeted at students and the general educated reader, their aim is to communicate, in simple and direct language intelligible to non-specialists, well-digested and vivid accounts of scientific theory and practice as viewed by the best modern scholarship. The most eminent scholars in the discipline, academics well-known for their skills as communicators, have been commissioned.
The volumes in this series survey the field and offer powerful overviews. They are intended to be interpretative, though not primarily polemical. They do not pretend to a timeless, definitive quality or suppress differences of viewpoint, but are meant to be books of and for their time; their authors offer their own interpretations of contested issues as part of a wider, unified story and a coherent outlook.
Carefully avoiding a dreary recitation of facts, each volume develops a sufficient framework of basic information to ensure that the beginner finds his or her feet and to enable student readers to use such books as their prime course-book. They rely upon chronology as an organizing framework, while stressing the importance of themes, and avoiding the narrowness of anachronistic ‘tunnel history’. They incorporate the best up-to-the-minute research, but within a larger framework of analysis and without the need for a clutter of footnotes – though an attractive feature of the volumes is their substantial bibliographical essays. Authors have been given space to amplify their arguments and to make the personalities and problems come alive. Each volume is self-contained, though authors have collaborated with each other and a certain degree of cross-referencing is indicated. Each volume covers the whole chronological span of the science in question. The prime focus is upon Western science, but other scientific traditions are discussed where relevant.
This series, it is hoped, will become the key synthesis of the history of science for the next generation, interpreting the history of science for scientists, historians and the general public living in a uniquely science-oriented epoch.
ROY PORTER
Series Editor
So as not to encumber the book with footnotes, I have employed the simple device of indicating the source of a quotation by a superscript number. These sources will be found in the relevant notes section (often briefly) and more details are given in the bibliographical essay, which not only provides an up-to-date guide to the published literature, but is also my acknowledgement to the hundreds of historians whose work has guided me in writing this book. For historical convenience, trivial rather than systematic (IUPAC) names are used for inorganic compounds, viz. ‘alum’ rather than ‘aluminium potassium sulphate-12-water’. In the case of organic compounds, systematic names are used only for more complex compounds.
That all plants immediately and substantially stem from the element water alone I have learnt from the following experiment. I took an earthern vessel in which I placed two hundred pounds of earth dried in an oven, and watered with rain water. I planted in it the stem of a willow tree weighing five pounds. Five years later it had developed a tree weighing one hundred and sixty-nine pounds and about three ounces. Nothing but rain (or distilled water) had been added. The large vessel was placed in earth and covered by an iron lid with a tin-surface that was pierced with many holes. I have not weighed the leaves that came off in the four autumn seasons. Finally I dried the earth in the vessel again and found the same two hundred pounds of it diminished by about two ounces. Hence one hundred and sixty-four pounds of wood, bark and roots had come up from water alone.
(JOAN-BAPTISTA VAN HELMONT, 1648)
Helmont’s arresting experiment and conclusion capture the essence of the problem of chemical change. How and why do water and air ‘become’ the material of a tree – or, if that sounds too biochemical, how and why do hydrogen and oxygen become water? How does brute matter assume an ordered and often symmetrical solid form in the non-living world? Helmont’s experiment also raises the issue of the balance between qualitative and quantitative reasoning in the history of chemistry. Helmont’s observations are impeccably quantitative and yet, because he ignored the possible role of air in the reaction he was studying, and since he knew nothing of the hidden variables of nutrients dissolved in the water or of the role of the sun in providing the energy of photosynthesis, his reasoning was to prove qualitatively fallacious.
Chemistry is best defined as the science that deals with the properties and reactions of different kinds of matter. Historically, it arose from a constellation of interests: the empirically based technologies of early metallurgists, brewers, dyers, tanners, calciners and pharmacists; the speculative Greek philosophers’ concern whether brute matter was invariant or transformable; the alchemists’ real or symbolic attempts to achieve the transmutation of base metals into gold; and the iatrochemists’ interest in the chemistry and pathology of animal and human functions. Partly because of the sheer complexity of chemical phenomena, the absence of criteria and standards of purity, and uncertainty over the definition and identification of elements (the building blocks of the chemical tree), but above all because of the lack of a concept of the gaseous state of matter, chemistry remained a rambling, puzzling and chaotic area of natural philosophy until the middle of the eighteenth century. The development of gas chemistry after 1740 gave the subject fresh empirical and conceptual foundations, which permitted explanations of reactions in terms of atoms and elements to be given.
Using inorganic, or mineral, chemistry as its paradigm, nineteenth-century chemists created organic chemistry, from