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Autumn 1999: ‘Scottish Chemistry’
Spring 2000: ‘Friedrich Wöhler and the Göttingen School of Chemistry’
Autumn 2000: ‘Preserving the Chemical Memory’
Scottish Chemistry – a meeting to mark the 200th Anniversary of the Death of Joseph Black
20 November 1999, Science Museum Library
Dr Anderson (British Museum) set the scene for the meeting with his paper “18th Century Scottish Background and Forefront”. The paper described the University of Edinburgh in the second half of the 18th century, and the contributions made by Joseph Black, both as a teacher and as a consultant to a variety of Scottish industries. The paper served to reemphasise the enormous importance of Joseph Black in the history of chemistry in general, as well as his more specific influence on industry and teaching in Edinburgh.
Jean Jones’s (Independent Scholar, Edinburgh) paper was entitled “Joseph Black and James Hutton”. Both men were resident in Edinburgh for thirty years, and are known to have spent much time together. To a large extent they shared the same acquaintances and moved in same milieu. Although utterly different in temperament – a contrast which amused their friends – most of their intellectual interests were held in common: Both Hutton and Black were concerned with the practical applications of science. Hutton, renowned as a geologist, was a passionate chemist; Black, influential as a chemist, was an enthusiast mineralogist. Their publications, however, make a startling contrast: the range of subjects in Hutton’s writings was unusually wide while the range of Black’s, though profoundly influential, unusually narrow. The influence of Black on Hutton has been discussed in the work of Arthur Donovan. The influence of Hutton on Black is revealed by an examination of a letter of 1787 and of the Elements of Chemistry. Black wholeheartedly adopted all of Hutton’s theory of the Earth. He agreed with Hutton that the enormous pressures within the Earth would make its chemistry quite different from the chemistry at its surface, the fact that limestone does not disintegrate with subterranean heat being the prime example. With fossils in mind, they carried out together at least one series of experiments to investigate the effects of heat and pressure on sea shells.
A.D. Morrison-Low’s (National Museums of Scotland) paper,”Popularising chemistry: some Scottish lecturers during the 18th and 19th centuries,” surveyed the background to chemistry within the Scottish universities, looking in particular at a number of individuals based in Edinburgh who brought a popular understanding of the subject to a wider public. By the mid 19th century, those who taught chemistry outside the universities had moved from being a more or less ad hoc phenomenon to (like so many other scientific activities at this time) becoming institutionalised. Examples included individuals such as: Henry Moyes, lecturing under the shelter of the larger umbrella of Literary and Philosophical Societies; his successor; William Nicol, for whom the Mechanics’ Institutes served a similar purpose; to individuals, like Thomas Thomson and Andrew Fyfe, who, after starting as extra-mural lecturers, finally obtained university appointments. There were also links between those who lectured and those who supplied chemical apparatus, sometimes combining these in same person. Whether motivated by social, economic or utilitarian reasons, as individuals, they all appear to have loved their subject, and through the love of the subject endeavoured to popularise it, with some considerable success.
Dr Harry Smith’s (H. Payne Associates) paper was entitled “J. F. Macfarlan and the Smith Brothers. The Edinburgh Connection”. Whilst Joseph Black is best known for his chemical research, he continued to practise medicine throughout his life and was for a period the joint editor of the Edinburgh Pharmacopoeia. One of Black’s successors was William Gregory. Before taking his M.D., Gregory had studied the extraction of drugs from plants with Robiquet in Paris. On his return to Edinburgh, he soon developed an improved process for producing purer and less expensive morphine from opium and published his work in 1831. This early research of Gregory soon helped to establish John F. Macfarlan, Thomas and Henry Smith and John Duncan (of Duncan, Flockart & Co.) as the founders of pharmaceutical manufacture in Edinburgh. All three companies which they established expanded throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and were involved in the extraction of many important natural drugs. They amalgamated during the 1960s to form Macfarlan Smith Limited.
John Hudson, Hon Secretary, SHAC Anglia Polytechnic University
‘Friedrich Wöhler and the Göttingen School of Chemistry – A Meeting to Mark the Bicentenary of Wöhler’s Birth’
25 May 2000, Science Museum London
Dr Ernst Homburg’s paper was entitled “Friedrich Stromeyer and the early days of the Göttingen laboratory”. Stromeyer (1776-1835) was Wöhler’s predecessor at Göttingen. First appointed ‘substitute’ professor of chemistry and pharmacy in 1805, within a year he founded his teaching laboratory, and the reputation thus gained helped him to obtain a permanent appointment to the chemistry chair in 1810. Stromeyer’s laboratory became Germany’s most important university-based training centre in chemistry. On four days each week, between 10 and 12 a.m., Stromeyer gave a laboratory course in which students were trained in the basic operations of chemical analysis. On two days his laboratory also was open to students from 2 to 6 p.m. to do their own analytical investigations. A peculiar feature was that on Fridays Stromeyer distributed samples of unknown minerals among his students, which they had to investigate at home, the results being discussed on Monday. From 1817 he gave his practical course twice every semester, to cope with growing student numbers. In 1825, 94 students were working in his laboratory, among them 33 pharmacy students, the rest being mainly students of medicine. Of all German chemistry professors appointed between 1810 and 1840, about twenty received their training under Stromeyer (among them L. Gmelin, E. Mitscherlich and R. Bunsen). Stromeyer’s laboratory was by far the most important chemistry school of the period. Stromeyer himself had considerable ability as an analytical chemist, and is known as the discoverer of the element cadmium. The fact that the majority of his students were following courses in medicine or pharmacy helps us to understand why the fame Stromeyer had among his contemporaries was not communicated to later generations, historians of chemistry included.
Dr Robin Keen gave a paper outlining Wöhler’s life and career. Friedrich Wöhler was born in 1800 at Escherheim, near Frankfurt-am-Main. At school he excelled in Latin, and was sound in Mathematics, but was taught no Science: By the age of eighteen he was doing advanced practical chemistry in the household kitchen, and throughout his life he loved practical work. From Marburg University (1820) he went to Heidelberg (1821) where L. Gmelin encouraged him in laboratory work while he graduated in Medicine (1823). A year working with Berzelius in Stockholm followed. Learning Swedish quickly, he became translator of all Berzelius’s work into German. This took up a great deal of time and energy. He became the focus of a network of Berzelius’s students, including Mitscherlich and H. Rose. His friendship with Liebig followed a controversy over the analytical results for fulminic and cyanic acids (1828). Liebig had wider and different connections but until the latter’s death in 1878 he and Wöhler corresponded frequently, exchanging details of work in progress, chemical news and gossip. In 1832 he moved to Kassel, but transferred to Göttingen in 1835. Like Stromeyer he kept chemistry at Göttingen to the fore, expanding research facilities and student numbers. His fame attracted many foreign students and he continued to lecture till at least 1878 and published a final paper in 1880. Between 1820 and 1880 he published 281 papers on a huge range of topics; after 1850 these were largely inorganic. The correspondence with Berzelius was published in 1901; that with Liebig is eagerly awaited. Many contemporaries remark on Wohler’s integrity, modesty, kindness, and willingness to help individual students. He had many friends and no enemies. He died in 1882 at Gottingen. He was married twice and had six children.
Dr Peter Ramberg’s paper was entitled “Wöhler’s Urea Synthesis and Organic Chemistry: A Reconsideration”. Wöhler’s 1828 preparation of urea has become a classic Experimentum Crucis in the mythology of organic chemistry. It is portrayed as one of the most famous experiments in organic chemistry, refuting the concept of a vital force, and marking when organic chemistry became a science. In his paper, Ramberg looked at the origins of the Wöhler Myth during the first half of the nineteenth century. He outlined the dissemination of the Myth into chemical lectures and textbooks from the late nineteenth century to the present, including modern American texts. Finally, he suggested some reasons for the continued propagation of the Wöhler Myth, including the modern economics of textbook production and the creation and maintenance of a disciplinary identity for organic chemistry. An elaborated version of the paper appears in Ambix, 47 (2000), 170-95.
Prof. Christoph Meinel’s paper was entitled “Communication and Knowledge Production: The Liebig-Wöhler Correspondence”. Meinel gave an overview of the voluminous correspondence between Liebig and Wöhler, and of his own project currently in hand to edit it for publication. The eventual appearance of this correspondence will add very considerably to our understanding of one of the most important partnerships in the history of chemistry.
John Hudson, Hon Secretary, SHAC Anglia Polytechnic University
Preserving the Chemical Memory
23 November 2000, Science Museum London
Peter Morris called his presentation “Chemical Treasurehouses”, and discussed the role of museums in the preservation of the chemical memory. Dr Morris drew the distinction between collections and exhibitions. The vast majority of what is collected is never put on display. The paper focused on collections, as these are crucial to preservation. Initially, the Science Museum existed to display the latest examples of science and technology for the benefit of teachers keeping up with the recent developments. Only gradually did the Keepers begin to sanction the collection of historic objects.. What kinds of objects should be preserved? The most obvious are “iconic” objects, associated with major scientific events or famous scientists. As we get nearer the present-day, matters become more complicated. The concept of a single famous scientist working more or less alone fades to be replaced by a team. The problem of equipment being reused or cannibalised has always been present, but now that equipment is shared by a whole department, the issue of association becomes all the more fraught. Attention has therefore shifted towards collecting examples of generic equipment. This is very tricky as there is potentially no limit to the number of objects that could be collected. Very recently, the Museum has switched from mass collecting to collecting in depth, by acquiring a group of associated objects rather than one instrument on its own and by collecting documentation about the objects and how they were used. As a chemistry curator, Dr Morris explained that he has several current problems. For legal and practical reasons, he can no longer collect radioactive objects or chemicals unless they are of the utmost importance. Another problem is that the Museum is now in competition with used equipment dealers and auctioneers.
Dr Slater’s paper was entitled “Recovering a Usable Past: Oral History and the Chemical Sciences” Dr Slater discussed the process of conducting oral histories, touching on both why and how they should be done. Of three possible ways to reconstruct the past – myth, memory, and history – oral history often partakes more of myth and memory than of history. Nevertheless, these ways of knowing are powerful tools for constructing a usable past. Oral history can be employed to enrich the historical record, generate historical leads, provide new information, and, perhaps most importantly, inform the historical imagination, allowing us to fill the gaps in the record with plausible conjecture and to create coherent narratives. All historical evidence is potentially subjective, arbitrary, biased, or false, but oral history is an interactive process, allowing one to probe and question. The historical actors of our recent past have a profoundly different culture compared to their predecessors. For many reasons, these subjects will leave behind fewer diaries, memoirs, and less extensive personal correspondence than their predecessors. These missing parts of the historical record can be replaced with oral histories, which also supplement more traditional archival collections in practical ways. It is with this in mind that the Chemical Heritage Foundation has conducted more than 200 oral history interviews with chemists, engineers, and chemical business leaders.
Peter Harper, Director of the National Cataloguing Unit for the Archives of Contemporary Scientists at the University of Bath, talked about the NCUACS’s work in preserving chemists’ archives within its wider remit to preserve the archives of distinguished contemporary British scientists. The NCUACS is a processing centre, locating the archives, cataloguing them and handing them over to established archive repositories for permanent preservation and supervised research access. Most of the chemists whose archives have been preserved have been university researchers. The paper gave examples of the types of records in chemists’ archives which documented their personal, professional and public lives. Records of professional life, for example, may document a chemist’s contribution to science or the scientific community as learner, teacher, researcher, director of institute or department, writer, editor, lecturer, conference organiser or speaker, and member of learned society or international scientific organisation. For further information about the work of the NCUACS including lists of the archives of chemists catalogued and places of deposit see: http://www.bath.ac.uk/Centres/NCUACS/.
David Cranstone’s paper was entitled “Eyesore or Ancient Monument – chemical sites as archaeological heritage”. Archaeology was initially mainly about excavation and artefacts, but more recently landscape survey and standing buildings have come to form major parts of archaeology, as it takes up the full meaning of its definition as ‘the study of the past from material (as opposed to documentary) evidence’. The more recent past, including industrial archaeology and the 20th century, is also now very much a part of the subject. Conservation has always been an important part of archaeology – the first Ancient Monuments legislation dates from the 1880s, and nowadays the majority of field archaeology is related either to conservation or to investigations in advance of proposed developments. As a result, every local government area holds, or has access to, a Sites and Monuments Record which aims to hold basic data about all known archaeological sites in its area. However, the coverage of industrial archaeology in these SMRs remains patchy, especially for industries such as Chemicals which have not been a focus of attention from industrial archaeologists. It is hoped that many of those interested in the history of chemistry will contribute to the consultation process about future sites, both in terms of academic content and in terms of sites for shortlisting. This is an important opportunity to secure the preservation of sites relating to chemical production on the industrial scale.
Dr Leaback’s paper was entitled “Experience with Efforts to Project the Memory of Some Epic London Chemistries into the Future”. While the romantic, but hackneyed, ‘Perkin Story’ has been published hundreds of times, very little original work had been carried out on the London background to the important events involved. It emerged that the story concerned was well known among chemists generally, but that there was almost no living memory of it in its original London locations. A corollary of this was that virtually all traces of that story had vanished locally, so that authorities like English Heritage would not erect much-needed Blue Memorial Plaques there. However, a local trust was persuaded to do so. English Heritage was persuaded to erect a Blue Plaque on Hofmann’s Fitzroy Square residence. However J.A.R. Newlands’ birthplace in West Square, Southwark, was not regarded as sufficiently meritorious for a plaque, until the Royal Society of Chemistry agreed to erect one. This has already proved its value educationally. Dr Leaback has recently published what is probably the first account of the 8 years the Faradays lived in Newington, leading to a better understanding of Michael’s attitudes to life and work.
John Hudson
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