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Spring 2007: ‘New Chemical Elements and their Periodicity’
Autumn 2007: ‘Medieval and Early Modern Alchemy’
Autumn 2007: ‘Chymica Acta’
‘New Chemical Elements and their Periodicity’
22 March 2007, Royal Society of Chemistry, London
On Thursday 22 March 2007 the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry held a joint meeting with the Royal Society of Chemistry Historical Group, at the Royal Society of Chemistry, Burlington House, Piccadilly. The meeting entitled New Chemical Elements and their Periodicity attracted over 50 attendees and was timed to coincide with the one hundredth anniversary of Mendeleev’s death, which took place on 2 February 1907. It also celebrated the bicentenary of the isolation of potassium and sodium by Humphrey Davy. It focussed on two underlying themes and the interplay between them. Firstly, the techniques used to effect the characterisation of the elements, for example, electrochemistry, atomic spectroscopy, and radiochemistry, and secondly, the classification of the elements, notably the Periodic Table in its different manifestations.
The first paper was given by Professor David Knight of Durham University and was entitled Davy and the placing of potassium amongst the elements. In 1802, Davy in a lecture declared that metals ‘are possessed of specific gravities superior to those of all other simple substances’. He had taken this term from Lavoisier’s Elements, where potash and soda were not included: in defiance of his criteria, the great man was sure they must be compounds. In 1806 Davy established that electricity decomposes water into oxygen and hydrogen only, and concluded that electricity was identical with chemical affinity, and ‘an essential property of matter’. Water was not in that case the only compound that could be decomposed by electricity. The next autumn, in his research time before the London Season began, he tried to decompose potash. Eventually on 19th October 1807 he succeeded by using the electric current from an enormous battery ‘in a state of intense activity’ to fuse his slightly damp potash. Amid explosions, flames and bright coruscations, globules of ‘alkaligen’ collected around the pole, and could be preserved under naphtha. They looked like mercury, but were so light that they floated on water, decomposing it violently. The other substance given off was oxygen, the supposed generator of acids but evidently a major component of the strongest alkalis. Consulting with friends, Davy concluded that ‘the analogy between the greater number of properties must always be the foundation of arrangement’, and that despite its lightness this was a metal: he named it ‘potasium’, soon amending that to ‘potassium’. Clearly, sodium was a congener; and he went on to assault the alkaline earths, and then the halogens, bringing to light these important ‘families’ of elements.
Professor Frank James of the Royal Institution then spoke on Spectroscopy and the chemical elements in the nineteenth century. In his paper, Professor James discussed the development of spectrochemical analysis in England during the 1860s following the invention of the method by Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff in Heidelberg in 1859. He drew attention to the roles played by earlier spectroscopic researchers, such as William Crookes and John Hall Gladstone, in developing the science after 1859, as well as the role of the London scientific instrument trade. Crookes, in particular, was able to establish his reputation as a serious scientific researcher with his spectroscopic discovery of the chemical element thallium. This, it was suggested, showed contemporaries how credit within the scientific community could be gained and explained the significant number of attempts by other chemists (including A. H. Church, H. C. Sorby, the Dupré brothers and H. C. G. Williams) to discover new chemical elements spectroscopically. However all of these individuals failed, with the exception of the special case of helium (by Edward Frankland and Norman Lockyer), since the spectral observations were found to be spurious for one reason or another. Professor James then suggested that this story should be interpreted within an analytical structure of scientific researchers wishing to gain credit in the scientific community for their work. The new science perhaps received the supreme social accolade in 1865 when August Hofmann lectured on spectrochemistry to Queen Victoria at Windsor.
The third lecture was by Professor Eric Scerri of UCLA, Berkeley, and was entitled Attempts to explain the periodic table from the discovery of triads to the present. Professor Scerri traced the history of the periodic table starting with the views of the ancient Greeks on the elements. He moved onto the work of Lavoisier and pointed out that this stage represented a turning away from regarding the elements as abstract bearers of properties. Two important philosophical principles that contributed to the development of the periodic table, namely triads and Prout’s hypothesis, were discussed in order to show that both ideas were initially refuted but can now be said to have made a ‘come-back’. Moving onto the discovery of the mature periodic system he emphasized that Mendeleev was primarily classifying the elements as bearers of properties rather than as Lavoisier’s simple substances that can be isolated and observed.
The paper then turned to the impact of physics on the periodic table and Professor Scerri argued that although physics has had a profound explanatory impact, it does not explain the periodic system quite to the extent that is usually supposed. Once again the concept of abstract elements made an appearance in the work of Paneth in response to the threats to the periodic system posed by the proliferation of the elements following the discovery of isotopes. He concluded by arguing that chemistry is far more philosophical than is usually believed, such as in the conceptualization of the notion of an element.
The afternoon session began with a paper by Professor William Brock of the University of Leicester and was entitled Radiant Matter Spectroscopy: The Rare Earths Crusade. In 1880 the 48-year old William Crookes moved into a large house in Notting Hill where he erected three laboratories. Together with a new assistant, James Gardiner, and stimulated by Lockyer’s dissociation hypothesis, he embarked on a 25-year long investigation of the rare earth elements. He bombarded rare earth salts with radiant matter (cathode rays) to induce phosphorescence, which he then examined spectroscopically (cathodeluminescence). He was particularly struck by the beautiful phosphorescent spectrum of yttrium. In five dazzling lectures to the Royal Society (1881, 1883), the British Association (1886), the Royal Institution (1887) and the Chemical Society (1888) he argued that yttrium’s spectrum showed that it was composed from various unknown elements, from which he also believed he had evidence for chemical evolution. Using a zigzag periodic system devised by Emerson Reynolds, Crookes developed a pendulum and cooling model to picture how elements had evolved from a primitive protyle. Differences from integral atomic weights and the clustering of similar elements were due, he believed, to the phenomenon of meta-elements.
Although other rare earth specialists were sceptical of Crookes’ speculations, they caused world-wide interest, not least among the Theosophists – a movement that Crookes joined in 1884. Crookes crowned his research in 1898 by claiming the separation of a new element he named Victorium. In fact, as Georges Urbain showed convincingly in 1905, Crookes’ research programme had been doomed from the beginning because pure elements do not produce phosphorescent spectra. His yttrium samples had simply been impure. Crushingly, too, victorium turned out to be gadolinium. The episode is a lively example of how erroneous hypotheses can lead to exciting and fruitful scientific developments.
The fifth paper was delivered by Gordon Woods, retired Head of Science, Monmouth School, and entitledMendeleev and Periodic Tables, 1834-1907. In highlighting the centenary of Mendeleev’s death, Gordon Woods focussed on aspects of the scientist’s life as well as discussing various periodic tables, a collection of which was displayed at the meeting. Gordon began his paper by showing images of contributions to the Periodic Table’s development by J.W. Dobereiner, L. Gmelin, A.E.B. de Chancourtois and J. Newlands. Aged 18 and recently orphaned, Mendeleev started training as a schoolteacher in St Petersburg. Despite missing out on study due to illness he was a top student and he taught briefly in the Crimea before deciding that his future lay in university work.
After attending the Karlsruhe Congress in 1860 with Alexander Borodin he rose rapidly to a chemistry chair in St Petersburg. Finding that no suitable textbooks were available he wrote Osnovy Khimii in 1868. In February 1869 he formulated his periodic system, announced orally at the Russian Chemical Society in that month and published in Zeitscrift für Chemie in March 1869. In 1872 these ideas were developed as a periodic table with groups in columns and where the properties of new elements were predicted. Mendeleev’s ideas became accepted as three of his predicted elements (Gallium, Scandium and Germanium) were discovered within only 15 years. Although Mendeleev acknowledged the work of other scientists in classifying the elements before 1855, he denied any knowledge of the work of later contributors before he produced his 1869 Periodic System in a later edition ofOsnovy Khimii.
As his ideas became more widely accepted Mendeleev’s fame spread. He received several honorary degrees and was awarded the Faraday Medal in 1889. Several years earlier in 1882 he had married a young arts student named Anna Popova. However under her influence he became active in radical student politics and ultimately lost his university post and apartment. Mendeleev’s work spread towards general science consultancy and in 1893 he was appointed Director of the Weights and Measures Bureau in St Petersburg. He died in February 1907, the timing of which meant he narrowly failed to win a Nobel Prize.
The final paper brought the story of the discovery of the elements into the twenty-first century as Simon Cotton of Uppingham School examined The 5f elements and beyond. Early 20th century Periodic Tables placed the elements with Atomic Numbers 89-92 as a 6d transition metal series. However, this was based on limited information, largely about uranium compounds, that emphasised similarity in stoichiometry with compounds of Chromium, Molybdenum and Tungsten, and was not supported in later findings of crystallographers.
With the discovery of Neptunium by Edwin M. McMillan and Philip Abelson, and Plutonium by Arthur C. Wahl, Joseph W. Kennedy, Edwin M. McMillan and Glenn T. Seaborg, both in 1940, the era of nuclear synthesis had arrived. These elements had close similarities to Uranium, and Seaborg proposed his ‘Actinide’ concept in a paper in Chemical Engineering News in 1945. Subsequent actinides were synthesized by multiple neutron capture in a reactor or in a thermonuclear explosion, for example Fermium in 1952, before the bombardment of actinide targets with such as 11Boron and 12Carbon led to Nobelium and Lawrencium, the last actinides in 1961.
Decreasing half-lives led to speculation that heavier elements might not exist, rendered nugatory by the syntheses of elements 104-105 around 1970 using similar routes. The Darmstadt group used ‘cold fusion’ routes employing lighter targets and transition metal projectiles to make elements 107-112 in 1980-1996, whilst syntheses of elements 113-116 and 118 have used the neutron-rich 48Calcium. Some chemical properties are known for the elements as far as 108 (Hassium), which forms a very volatile oxide perhaps analogous to osmium tetroxide. Element 104 (Rutherfordium) strongly resembles Zirconium and Hafnium; so far the elements beyond the actinides appear to be another transition metal series.
Anna Simmons
‘Medieval and Early Modern Alchemy’
Birbeck College, London
For its autumn meeting, the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry held an Alchemy Symposium at Birkbeck College, London. This meeting was organised by Stephen Clucas with the assistance of Peter Forshaw and Anna Simmons. The first paper was given by Jennifer Rampling of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University and was entitled “George Ripley and the Pseudo-Lullian Tradition.” In his History of Magic and Experimental Science, Lynn Thorndike dismissed the works of the fifteenth-century English alchemist, George Ripley, as “very stupid and tiresome reading.” Indeed, Ripley’s alchemy can at times seem bafflingly obscure. Yet we find that his works – including the famous Compound of Alchemy, or ‘Twelve Gates,’ and the Latin Medulla Alchimiae – attracted the attention of some of the keenest minds of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and were repeatedly printed and translated in Britain and on the Continent. Jennifer Rampling’s paper considered some of the ways in which Ripley engaged with his primary authority, pseudo-Ramon Lull, both adopting and adapting doctrines gleaned from this difficult body of work. Through examination of his pseudo-Lullian sources, it revealed how Ripley attempted to reconcile contradictions between different authorities, how he sought to adapt his texts to suit the results of his experimental practice, and why he chose twelve gates for his alchemical castle.
The second paper was given by Barbara Obrist of CNRS, Paris and was entitled “Views on History in Medieval Alchemical Writings.” Her paper addressed the question as to how medieval alchemical texts – that is, texts ranging from the mid-twelfth to the later fifteenth century – conceive the history of alchemy and what place alchemy is being assigned in history.
The fundamental form of presentation of the history of alchemy as a discipline is that of genealogical lines of descent – carnal and spiritual. In this presentation the original paternal figure is invested with the role of ensuring unity of knowledge. The relation between this figure and its disciples is one of genus and species. On an epistemological level, genealogies of knowledge entail the idea of an initial full revelation of knowledge, its (partial) loss and recovery. Fundamentally, the assumption of eternal, immutable truths recovered by sages who are merely passive channels of transmission precludes any idea of progress. Evolution and change of theories of natural and artificial transformation have no place in this type of historical account. The genre itself tends to remain uniform throughout the Middle Ages.
When considered within the frame of the history of salvation, and especially within that of the New Testament, down to the present of writers of alchemical treatises, alchemy is being assigned a particular role. In writings of Franciscan spirituals who claim to have been illuminated by divine grace – especially John of Rupescissa – and of authors that are close to these, alchemy is meant to provide material as well as spiritual means for fighting Antichrist in the last periods of history. In contrast to genealogically construed lines of transmission of knowledge, the introduction of Christocentric and anthropocentric perspectives favours the idea of progress in the sense that human knowledge of natural and artificial transformations is increasingly complete. Yet, it remains limited to that of spiritual perfection, of restoring the nature of man.
The third paper, “Missing Pieces of the Jigsaw: New Evidence about Newton’s Alchemical Sources” was given by John T. Young of the Issac Newton Project at the University of Sussex. The paper derived from research conducted in the course of cataloguing Isaac Newton’s non-‘scientific’ manuscripts. Two chymical documents in Newton’s hand, whose whereabouts had been unknown since 1936, were rediscovered recently. One is a two-folio manuscript which was acquired by Columbia University Library, though it is not yet clear from whom, while the other, a sixteen-folio document, was unearthed in the archive of the Royal Society, who, astonishingly, had bought it in 1939 but had then completely forgotten about it. The two documents turn out to be more closely related to one another than it had been possible to discern from the previously available descriptions of them. In particular, both feature extensive notes on one of Newton’s favourite chymical sources, the singularly obscure and possibly fictitious figure of Johann de Monte Snyders.
The paper began with a brief account of the history of Newton’s archive and the reasons why the non-‘scientific’ papers are now so fragmented and widely scattered around the planet. It then summarised the content and character of the rediscovered documents and the connections between them, before going on to introduce Monte Snyders and the two works published in his name, and to describe and demonstrate Newton’s intense engagement with these texts. John Young concluded with an account of Newton’s own notes on Monte Snyders and of the techniques he employed in attempting to make literal sense of his author’s deliberately obscure and at times almost surreal allegorical accounts of chymical processes. He also tried to assess how far the documents represent Newton’s own work and how far they are copies or abstracts from other sources.
The final paper, “Alchemy meets Cabala: Giovanni Panteo’s Voarchadumia (1530),” was given by Peter Forshaw of Birkbeck, University of London. The Venetian priest Giovanni Agostino Panteo’s first published work was theArs transmvtationis metallicae (Art of metallic transmutation), which appeared in 1519 and his second book, theVoarchadumia was published in 1530. The Ars transmutationis was published with a permit from the Venetian ruling Council of Ten and an edict of Pope Leo X, giving Pantheus the exclusive right of printing the work in the papal states. It is surprising that the Council sanctioned this publication. In 1488 the Council became so concerned about counterfeiting and adulteration of the currency that they prohibited the practice of alchemy.
It seems probable that someone called the existence of the papal decretal and the decree of Venice against alchemists, to the attention of either Pantheus or the Council. Whatever the case, by the time of his second publication in 1530, Pantheus is no longer professing illicit and duplicitious alchemy, but its very opposite, the art of Voarchadumia, which he presents as a ‘Cabala of Metals’, handed down from the ancient biblical ‘hammerer and artificer in every work of brass and iron’, Tubal Cain (Genesis 4:22). When Pantheus calls hisVoarchadumia a ‘Cabala of the Metals’, he was tapping into a subject of immense fascination to many learned minds of the time. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola had introduced the term ‘Cabala’, literally meaning “reception,” “received lore,” or “doctrine received by oral tradition,” into Christian circles with his 900Conclusiones Philosophicæ Cabalisticæ et Theologicæ, submitted to the papacy for debate on religious and philosophical matters in 1486. The Kabbalah was held to be a series of revelations stretching back variously to Moses, Abraham and, for some, even Adam, that had endured in the form of a secret oral tradition, whispered in the ear, passed down over the generations from master to disciple. It’s easy enough to draw a parallel here with medieval alchemy, which likewise placed importance on initiation and the preservation of secrets.
Despite their exasperating lack of explanation, Pantheus’s alchemical or Voarchadumic works evidently enjoyed some success, for they were reprinted in Paris in 1550, and were later included in the most famous and most extensive collection of alchemical texts ever printed, the six-volume Theatrum Chemicum or Chemical Theatre,published by Lazarus Zetzner throughout the seventeenth century. John Dee, Michael Maier, and Jacques Gohory are certainly not alone in showing an interest in Pantheus’s work and it is possible to find references in the writings of many of their contemporaries, particularly among the Paracelsians, including Heinrich Khunrath, Oswald Croll, David de Planis-Campy, and Johann Daniel Mylius, but also other advocates of alchemy, such as Guglielmo Gratarolus, author of Verae Alchemiae (1561), and the distinctly anti-paracelsian Andreas Libavius.
Anna Simmons
‘Chymica Acta’
10 December 2007, University of Oxford
On 10 December 2007 a meeting was held at the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford to launch Frank Greenaway’s Autobiography/Festschrift, Chymica Acta, and to celebrate the deposit of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry’s archive in the Library of the Museum.
In 2007, the curator and historian Frank Greenaway celebrated his 90th birthday. He decided it was time to put pen to paper and write an autobiographical memoir, a very rare genre for museum curators. When his friends heard of this, they proposed that a joint Memoir-Festchrift might be published, interspersing episodes of Frank’s full and fascinating life with essays which bear on his interests.
To celebrate the book’s launch and the deposit of SHAC’s archive at the Museum of History of Science three short papers were delivered. Firstly William Brock, the former Chairman of SHAC, spoke on “The Alchemical Society and its Journal: a Precursor of SHAC.” Although SHAC celebrated its 50 th anniversary in 1986, a more recent scrutiny of the Society’s archives reveals that it was first formed in November 1935. However, it was not the first British society dedicated to the study of the history of alchemy. An Alchemical Society had been founded in London at the end of 1912 by a mixed group of occultists, chemists and historians. In the 19 th century, middle-class Victorians, faced by religious doubts, sought solace in spiritualism, theosophy and all sorts of esoteric clubs based upon the rituals of freemasonry. The publication of Mrs Atwood’s Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery (1850) had led occultists to interpret alchemy as a way of spiritual enlightenment, not as a search for the physical transmutation of matter. On the other hand, the study of radioactivity at the beginning of the 20 th century seemed to make the possibility of elemental transmutations a rational possibility –as a series of experiments made by William Ramsay appeared to suggest. The mission of the new society was to study the works and theories of the alchemists in all their aspects, both physical and spiritual. The society’s driving force was the erudite Regent Street Polytechnic chemist, Herbert Stanley Redgrove, who also edited the Society’s journal. Despite a thriving membership and auspicious beginning, WW1 brought about the collapse of both the society and its interesting journal. Redgrove tried to restart the society with a broader remit in the 1920s, but by appealing only to readers of the Occult Review he failed to attract the attentions of historically-minded chemists like Frank Sherwood Taylor and James R. Partington who independently founded the Society for the Study of Alchemy and Early Chemistry in 1935. Although Redwood, who started a perfumery business in the 1930s, was still alive, he did not join. SHAC’s only occultist was the genial Gerard Heym (1888-1972) who became Hon. Foreign Secretary.
[More details on the Alchemical Society will be found in Mark S. Morrisson, Modern Alchemy: Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory (OUP, 2007) which appeared after the paper was delivered.]
Tony Simcock, Archivist at the Museum of the History of Science, then spoke on “A Dip into the Archive.” Amongst the manuscripts and volumes deposited by the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry are a number of fascinating documents which shed light on the history of the Society from its foundation in 1935. These augment a small collection of items that were already in the Museum’s possession and had belonged to former officers of the Society who worked there, such as C.H. Josten (Treasurer, 1953-56). They also happily cohabit with the papers of prominent members of the Society, Frank Sherwood Taylor and H.E. Stapleton, that are deposited at the Museum.
The manuscripts highlighted by Tony Simcock included letters inviting prospective members to join, the first set of printed rules from 1936 and the first circular announcement sent out to members. A range of administrative papers, letters from members and miscellaneous items such as petty cash books also survive. Interestingly, unlike today, in its early years SHAC had a President, Sir Robert Ludwig Mond (1867-1938), the chemist and archaeologist. Mond helped found the Society and the combination of his death, then the outbreak of the Second World War, almost led to its closure in 1939. Mond’s contribution in the Society’s early years had been vital: he had previously covered a deficit of £150 that had been run up by the Society. Amongst the more amusing items to be found in the archive was an enquiry from India regarding how much the Society would be prepared to give for information on how to prepare the Philosophers’ Stone. The Hon. Secretary at the time replied stating that the Society existed for the publication of original studies, not financial assistance, but he did not miss the chance of encouraging the individuals to join!
Peter Morris then revisited a paper he had given at the 6 th International Conference on the History of Chemistry in Leuven, earlier in the year: “Chemistry in the 21 st Century: Death or Transformation?” The paper examined the probable future of chemistry in terms of its past. Chemistry today looks very different from how it did thirty years ago. In effect it is an alliance between biomedicine and material science. The various professional organisations and journals are scrambling to reposition themselves in terms of the “chemical sciences” rather than chemistry per se. But chemistry has always been shaped by its shifting intellectual, professional and economic alliances. In the eighteenth century, it was the territory between medicine, assaying and metallurgy, and the study of heat – strikingly evocative of the situation today.
Over the last century, the pharmaceutical industry has displaced the dyestuffs industry as the major sponsor of organic chemistry. For two centuries, however, chemistry has retained a strong identity despite these changes. The key questions now are whether the current alliance between biomedicine and materials can hold and whether the term “chemistry” really means anything anymore except as a historical throwback to an earlier period (thus paralleling alchemy in the late 17 th/18 th century). Will chemistry be reinvigorated by the creation of a new identity as “chemical sciences” or will it “decompose” reverting back to its parent sciences of medicine (as biomedicine) and metallurgy (as nanotechnology and materials science)?
Derek Robinson brought the meeting to a close by paying tribute to Frank Greenaway and his contributions to the history of science. Frank was born in South Wales in 1917 and educated at Cardiff High School before proceeding to Jesus College, Oxford, to study chemistry. Graduating at the beginning of the Second World War, he served in the armed forces as an ordnance officer and later became involved in photographic techniques and the training of agents. At the end of the War he taught briefly and then worked for Kodak at Harrow.
In 1949 he was appointed as a curator at the Science Museum, London, one of the world’s greatest museums, but one which was finding it difficult to recover from the War. He was to spend the remainder of his career there, building up the Museum’s strengths, eventually retiring in 1980 as Keeper of the Chemistry Department. This was by no means all that he did: his active disposition led him into all manner of extra-mural activity. He was involved with the Royal Philharmonic Society, the Open University, the Wellcome Trust, the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science (Serving as General Secretary from 1972 to 1977), the Commonwealth Association of Museums, ICOM, the Museums Association and the Royal Institution, where he held the post of Honorary Reader in the History of Science. He was appointed Regents’ Fellow of the Smithsonian Institution and he holds the Boerhaave Medal. It was left to Frank to provide the concluding words for the meeting, thanking the editors and chapter authors of the book, all his family, friends and colleagues present and to set out a few ideas for future work.
Anna Simmons
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