An incredibly varied spring meeting, from alchemy to Arrhenius, elixirs to electrons
Venue: Clare Hall (NOT to be confused with Clare College!), Herschel Road, Cambridge and Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Free School Lane, Cambridge
For registration form, click here.
Programme
10.00am
Registration and Coffee, Clare Hall Common Room
10.25am
Opening of meeting, Clare Hall Meeting Room
10.30-10.55am
Luca Garai (Museo della Cittá, Bologna)
‘The alchemy of Cyliani and the Origin of Life’
Abstract: Alchemy was a real empiric science, and at its highest level its purpose was to transmute metals into organic substances, in short to create life, and was therefore called the divine art. There are many theories about how life on earth was originated, even if the true way remains unknown. Some of these theories tell about self-chemistry that is a rudimentary self-organization of chemical compounds that made them able to organize themselves and create an ancestor of present living organisms. Among the few theories about the origin of life supported by laboratory experiments, Gunter Wachtershauser’s experiment of 1990 could help the understanding of Cyliani’s paper. All alchemy books concur that at first the chemist had to make “il nostro chaos”, that is the substance that produces life and has the virtues of universal medicine. To produce Our Chaos, that is philosophers’, not vulgar, gold, sulphur and iron have to combine together in a stove boiling (that is in hydrothermal conditions) at 120-125°. Under these conditions, iron and sulphur fuse and form pyrites, a mineral known as fool’s gold. At the same time hydrogen is produced, that is energy that activates a self-chemistry of metals that organize themselves and reproduce this chemical configuration on the surface of pyrites. Adding citric acid, this self-chemical “organism” starts organizing its life cycle, a rudimentary Krebs Cycle.
10.55-11.20am
Eoin Bentick (University College London)
‘Sex, knowledge, and transmutation: alchemical afterlives of Le Roman de la Rose‘
Abstract: This paper explores the way in which the extremely popular Old French poem is taken up by alchemists in the centuries after its creation and read as an alchemical text. I also touch on the alchemical references that are indeed latent within the poem, and examine why they were modelled on his style, such as La Fontaine des Amoureux de Science. Finally, the paper looks at the apt relationship between alchemy, allegory and sexual metaphor, suggesting that the ineffable sexual desire is akin to the intangible alchemical one.
11.20-11.45am
Robin Gordon (Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles)
‘The Art of the Yellow and the White: Chinese Alchemy, Chinggis Khan and Maria Prophitissa’
Abstract: The Yellow and the White is a term that refers to alchemy as described by Ko Hung (c. 280-340 CE), a Taoist monk and Chinese alchemist. His treatise, ‘Pao-p’u tzu’, outlined Chinese alchemical theory in great detail. This paper introduces some key concepts from Chinese alchemy such as the Taoist immersion in alchemy regarding the Elixir of Life and the goal of ‘Hsienship’ (immortality). After completing my initial work researching 15th – 17th century European women alchemists, I wanted to expand my research further. In addition to discovering writings about women alchemists from China and India (and some Europeans I did not know of at the time of publication of my Searching for the Soror Mystica), I began to learn how alchemy, worldwide, had features that crossed cultures.
11.50am-12.15pm
Ruben E. Verwaal (University of Groningen)
‘Blood, Sweat and Tears’
Abstract: This paper shows the close relations between chemistry and medicine by using the fluid and flow of blood as a case study, tracing developments of academic chemistry at medical faculties. Dutch physicians and university professors such as Herman Boerhaave, Jerome Gaub and their students analyzed blood in the chemical laboratory. Furthermore, chemical examinations of blood ignited new ideas and theories about physiology and pathology. Blood’s constituent parts and properties were believed to be of great advantage when understanding the signs of health and disease. Thus, the focus on the chemistry of blood can provide a new perspective on eighteenth-century perceptions of the living body and the academic transformation of chemistry.
12.15-12.40pm
Roderick Home (University of Melbourne)
‘Publish or Perish? Assigning Credit for the Discovery of Latent Heats’
Abstract: It is generally expected in science that people will publish their discoveries. But are they under an obligation to do so? What happens if they don’t? Do they thereby lose their claim to priority in such discoveries? What counts as publication, for that matter? Or at least sufficient publication to protect a priority claim? In this paper, I discuss a fascinating exchange of letters between James Watt and the “scientific agent” J. H. de Magellan in 1780, in which these and related questions were debated at length in relation to Joseph Black’s claim to the discovery of the phenomenon of latent heat.
12.40-1.00pm
Frank James (Royal Institution and University College London)
‘What Humphry Davy learnt at Thomas Beddoes’s Medical Pneumatic Institution’
Abstract: This paper will argue that the Medical Pneumatic Institution established in Bristol in 1798 after a four year fundraising campaign by Thomas Beddoes provided the model for much of Humphry Davy’s activities at the Royal Institution. The Medical Pneumatic Institution was avowedly devoted to researching the therapeutic possibilities of the various airs (gases) discovered during the eighteenth century. Davy played a crucial role in this research and also on voltaic electricity during his employment there between October 1798 and March 1801 when he was appointed to the Royal Institution. The Royal Institution, founded in 1799, was originally intended as a venue for delivering lectures, but Davy soon began undertaking scientific research (which had never been intended by its founders), on both airs and electricity. Furthermore, the topics of some of his lectures were remarkably similar to some of those delivered in Bristol by Beddoes and while at the Royal Institution he followed Beddoes’s approach to fundraising for research. On this argument, the Medical Pneumatic Institution becomes significant as the model for the Royal Institution and thus subsequent research laboratories in Britain.
1.00-2.00pm: Lunch in Clare Hall Dining Room
2.00-2.25pm
Harriet Lloyd (University College London)
‘Being made to say things that are ‘absolutely absurd’: Humphry Davy’s Chemical Lectures in the Press, 1801-1812’
Abstract: On 1 April 1811, Humphry Davy, then Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, wrote to the mineralogist Thomas Allan in Edinburgh, also the proprietor of the Edinburgh-based newspaper, the Caledonian Mercury. Davy was about to finish his course of chemical lectures for that year and would soon commence his geological. Complaining to Allan about the inaccuracy of the accounts of his chemical lectures printed in the Observer, Davy accused the London newspaper of making him say ‘things which I never thought of saying and which are absolutely absurd’. Davy went on to warn Allan that he hoped ‘that no report of a similar kind has appeared in Edinburgh’.
The paper addresses the historical reliability of early-nineteenth century press reports that described chemical theories still in their infancy. Newspaper reports of Davy’s lectures pose a problem for the historian of chemistry: Davy’s complaint that the Observer was misrepresenting his chemical philosophy is undermined by other newspaper and magazine accounts of what Davy said in his lectures, accounts that appear in sources other than the Observer. I will argue that newspaper reports that contradict Davy’s own accounts of his lectures should not be dismissed, not least because they provide valuable insight into the difficulties of science communication in the early-nineteenth century.
2.25-2.50pm
Edward Werner Cook (Chemists’ Club of New York)
‘Structural Reasoning in the 1850s-60s’
Abstract: Over Easter Break at the Royal College of Chemistry in 1856, an 18 year old assistant, William Perkin, attempted to synthesize Quinine by oxidizing Aniline. He made a mess, albeit a colourful one, because molecular composition was akin then to coloured marbles tossed into a child’s pouch. A decade later, the Head of the College, August Hofmann, shortly before leaving for Bonn and Berlin, constructed out of table-croquet balls, two-dimensional models showing the tetravalence of carbon using colours which remain standard today. Nearly simultaneously, Kekulé published his conceptual visualization of benzene. And, a decade later leBell cemented the capstone with his three-dimensional, chiral structures. All chemists know Kekulé’s dream, far fewer know the colourful tapestry woven during that extended period, perhaps the age of greatest and most brilliant period of inductive reasoning in history: to see that which cannot be seen; they were an informal, polylingual, multi-cultured, pan-European community of chemists who changed the modern world with a vision we employ unaltered today – Chemists without Borders creating imaginary molecules that became virtual reality, well over a century before the European Union.
2.50-3.15pm
Carolyn Cobbold (HPS, University of Cambridge)
‘Controlling chemical dyes in Victorian food’
Abstract: My talk examines the development of analysis and control of chemical food additives in Europe in the late nineteenth century. From the mid-1850s chemists began to synthesise a manifold array of new chemical substances from coal-tar waste – including drugs, perfumes, and dyes. By 1900 these new substances had become an integral part of modern life. While historians have studied the creation of these new substances in a European spatial context, limited work has been done to examine how many of these novel chemicals were acknowledged, analysed and mediated by different communities and countries.
The talk will examine the introduction of chemical dyes into food production, describing how new categories of professional chemists understood and arbitrated the use of chemically synthesized dyes in food production. As urbanisation and industrialisation increasingly separated the food producer from the consumer, chemical analysts across Europe seized upon the growing public concern surrounding food adulteration as a means of boosting their status and professional credibility, successfully lobbying and promoting themselves as the arbiters and upholders of food probity.
3.15-3.40pm
Vangelis Antzoulatos (University of Lille, France)
‘What is the ‘driving force’ of chemical reactions? The energetical answer of Marcelin Berthelot’
Abstract: Why did Berthelot neglect his successful researches in organic synthesis by 1864 to devote himself to the difficult (and uncertain) path of thermochemistry? The historian Jean Jacques, and others, have argued that Berthelot’s shift can be seen as a result of the fact that he did not well understand the emerging atomistically based theories of molecular structure (i.e. structural chemistry). As a consequence, he discerned that he was being left behind in this field—hence his desire to try something different. By contrast, I will defend the view that thermochemistry takes its necessity from Berthelot’s desire to foresee chemical action, which is a great challenge, in the middle of the 19th century. Much hope is placed on synthesis and chemical industry to transform the conditions of existence. What substances can we expect to create? From which reagents? Finally: how can we tell a chemical reaction will occur?
3.40-4.05pm
Irena McCabe (formerly Royal Institution)
‘Chemistry Transformed: the Rise of a New Discipline of Physical Chemistry in the Nineteenth Century’
Abstract: In this paper the rise of a new discipline of Physical Chemistry is traced from its origins to a mature discipline. The appreciation of its importance is demonstrated by the award of the first three Nobel Prizes for chemistry in the first decade of the twentieth century, all of them to three physical chemists: Jacobus Van’t Hoff (1852-1911) of the Netherlands in 1901, Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927) of Sweden in 1903 and Wilhelm Ostwald (1853-1932) of Riga then in Latvia and Berlin in Germany, in 1909. Their work had a significant impact on the progress of chemistry, including the nature of matter and of chemical affinity. Only when the nature of matter was elucidated, could the mechanical theory of heat and other forces in nature be examined.
4.05-4.25pm
John Perkins (Oxford Brookes University)
‘Situating Chemistry—a relational database for the history of chemistry’
Abstract: The database has been developed for the project Situating Chemistry, 1760-1840 which explores the interactions between the conceptual transformations of chemistry, its institutionalisation and the role of chemistry and chemists in innovation in industry and agriculture. The database stores biographical information on chemists and on others who were involved with chemistry as well as data on the sites where chemistry was practised, the networks of people, materials, processes and substances that circulated around them, chemistry (and other) courses and their audiences, together with events, organisations and associated documents and images. It is searchable and the reports it generates include interactive maps. Although developed for the period 1760-1840 it has been designed for much wider application. It can be found at http://situatingchemistry.org.
ADHOC – the Association for the Discussion of the History of Chemistry
At the close of the meeting at Clare Hall, delegates will proceed to the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science (HPS), Free School Lane. Taxis will be provided from Clare Hall. Tea will be available at HPS from 4.30- 5pm.
An ADHOC seminar will take place from 5pm to 6.30pm: The title of the session is ‘Quotidian, Protonic, and Electronic Acidity’, with discussion led by Prof. Klaus Ruthenberg (Coburg University of Applied Sciences) and Prof. Hasok Chang (University of Cambridge).
Background Reading (this can be supplied electronically on request to Hasok Chang: hc272@cam.ac.uk): Hasok Chang, “Acidity: The Persistence of the Everyday in the Scientific”, Philosophy of Science, 79 (2012), 690–700.