The Meeting to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Society was held in London, at the Royal Institution, Albermarle Street, on Friday, 19 November 2010. The programme was:
“The History of the History of Chemistry”
Tour of the Royal Institution by Professor Frank James
Meeting
Professor Bill Brock “Exploring Early Modern Chymistry: The first decade of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry”
Professor Frank James “The Two Cultures and the History of Chemistry”
Dr Marcos Martinón Torres “Recent Developments in the History of Alchemy”
Professor Marco Beretta “History of Chemistry in Europe”
“The Good Old Days” Panel Discussion Professor Maurice Crosland, Professor Colin Russell and Professor David Knight
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Reception in the Royal Institution Museum
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Public Lecture by Professor Simon Schaffer “The Unfortunate Chemist – Tribulations of Chemical Philosophy in an Age of Revolution”
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Dinner at the Royal Institution’s Restaurant, Time and Space
You may look at more pictures from the event here.
The History of the History of Chemistry
A meeting to celebrate the 75th Anniversary of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry was held in London at the Royal Institution on 19th November 2010
The day began with a tour, led by Professor Frank James, of the Science in the Making Exhibition of the recently refurbished Museum of the Royal Institution.
Dr Robert Anderson, the Society’s Chairman, opened the meeting by welcoming the seventy members and other historians of chemistry from Europe, Canada and the USA. He noted that 2010 was not only the 75th anniversary of SHAC, but also the 180th anniversary of the publication in 1830 in London of Thomas Thomson’s famous History of Chemistry, probably the first book of its kind devoted to our subject. Dr Anderson reported that, in addition to holding this meeting, the Society was also marking its anniversary by depositing its archives at the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford. They were currently being catalogued, a process which had revealed a lack of photographs of the Society’s activities that it was planned to remedy at this meeting. He thanked the Managers of the Royal Institution and also Professor Frank James for making it possible to hold this anniversary meeting in the singularly appropriate setting of the RI.
Professor Bill Brock, University of Leicester
“Exploring Early Modern Chymistry: The first decade of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry”
Although SHAC had celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1986, a scrutiny of the fragmentary pre-war archives in 2007 revealed that it had really been founded in November 1935 when its first Council was named and publicised. Nevertheless, due to the inefficiency of its first Secretary, no members’ meeting was called until 25 November 1936. Prof. Brock outlined the context of the Society’s formation, namely the wave of interest in the archaeology of Egyptian, Greek, Indian and Chinese cultures during the 1920s and 1930s, the development of the history of science as a discipline during the same decades, the popular and scientific interest in Rutherford and Soddy’s “newer alchemy” of atomic physics, and the long-standing minority interest of the middle classes in theosophy and other occult movements.
The Society’s initiators were Gerard Heym, Frank Sherwood Taylor, James R. Partington and Douglas McKie. Prof. Brock explained the origins of the title Ambix for the Society’s journal, first issued in May 1937, and its division of chronological responsibilities with the Annals of Science that McKie and others founded in 1936. The industrial chemist, philanthropist and Egyptologist, Sir Robert Mond, became the Society’s first (and only) President in 1936 and supported the Society financially. Consequently, when he died unexpectedly in October 1938 there was a financial crisis. Partington believed SHAC could only solve its problems by widening its remit to include the whole of the history of chemistry and chemical industry – a suggestion not adopted until 1975. SHAC’s continuation was further compromised in March 1939 when Taylor resigned the editorship. SHAC was effectively forced to wind up that summer. However, when war ended in 1945, Taylor, who had become Curator of the Oxford Museum of History of Science, called a meeting of the pre-war Council to re-establish the Society. Almost immediately there was a serious personality clash between Partington and Taylor over the editorial control of Ambix. Their dispute over the potential obscenity of one of Taylor’s articles led to Partington’s resignation from the Society in March 1946. He did not rejoin until 1961, after Taylor’s death. SHAC was also faced by new threats to its existence from the creation of the British Society for the History of Science in 1947 and from the launch of the annual Chymia in 1948. Fortunately, with subsidies from the Royal Society and ICI, the Society tottered on. With the move to new and cheaper printers in 1957, SHAC finally began to achieve stability. Prof. Brock concluded by drawing attention to the fascinating personal views of leading post-war Council members such as Heym, Taylor, Kurt Josten, Henry Stapleton and Stephen Mason as they struggled to understand the implications of nuclear physics for the study of alchemy.
Professor Frank James, The Royal Institution
“The Two Cultures and the History of Chemistry”
Drawing on his biographical studies of Dr Marie Boas Hall (1919-2009) and Professor A Rupert Hall (1920-2009), Prof. James showed that, from his schooldays in Leicester, Prof. Hall had become associated with a network of historians and scientists at the centre of what would become the ‘two cultures’ debate. At Christ’s College, Cambridge, he was part of C P Snow’s group. Hall became in 1948 the first curator of the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in Cambridge; his first student, Derek De Solla Price, examined the instruments and apparatus collection at the Cavendish Laboratory. Price came under the patronage of its Director, Sir William Bragg, who had wide-ranging interests in art and three-dimensionality and who encouraged his physics students similarly to think more broadly and attend lectures on the humanities. Bragg had previously involved Snow in recruiting scientific personnel for war work projects, fictionalized in The New Men, though Snow himself had little experience of industry. It was possibly during this phase that the phrase ‘the two cultures’ was coined.
Prof. James pointed out that these individuals produced a remarkable set of ‘mega texts’ in the 1950s and early 1960s that would be influential well beyond the academy: Rupert Hall’s The Scientific Revolution (1954), C P Snow’s The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) and Derek De Solla Price’s Little Science, Big Science (1963). (It was Kuhn who had introduced Marie Boas to Rupert Hall in 1951). James showed that this nexus of works coincided with a movement for the teaching of the humanistic relations of science and encouraged the growth of the history of science by means of the establishment of a number of posts, including in 1962 the chair at Imperial College London, whose first incumbent was Rupert Hall. Prof. James concluded by reflecting on various ways in which the two cultures debate had functioned in our field and in broader society.
Dr Marcos Martinón Torres, Institute of Archaeology, University College London
“Recent Developments in the History of Alchemy”
From the perspective of his interest in archaeological science and material culture, Dr Martinón-Torres pointed to an exponential growth in the number of publications with the word ‘alchemy’ in their titles over the last decade. Comparing the decade of the 1960s with that of the ‘noughties’, he noted a shift from a geographical emphasis on Asian and oriental topics, focusing on language/technology, religion/folklore and philosophy/psychology, to a geographical emphasis on European topics, focusing on wider cultural and literary themes. In the earlier period, alchemy was defined by contraposition to chemistry, whereas by the later period that notion had been challenged by historians such as William Newman and Lawrence Principe who deployed the term ‘chymistry’ for what was formerly called ‘early chemistry’ reserving the term ‘chemistry’ for developments after the mid-18th century.
Turning to alchemy as craft practice, Dr Martinón-Torres pointed to more fluid boundaries of analysis. From the perspective of material culture studies, he referred to Dr Robert G. W. Anderson’s article “The Archaeology of Chemistry” and to a lack of studies of chemical equipment, though more resources were coming to light, and called for the repetition of experiments supplemented by the use of modern techniques such as the scanning electron microscope. Other recent historiographical trends were the examination of patronage and business practices. He also pointed to examples of work on specific areas of practice, such as the alchemy of glass. As with other fields, the study of the history of alchemy, too, is benefitting from the rapid growth of electronic resources. Outside the academy, interest stimulated by the ‘Harry Potter’ effect should not be overlooked.
Professor Marco Beretta, University of Bologna
“The Changing Role of History in the Identity of Continental Chemistry”
In a wide-ranging paper, Professor Beretta focused on continental histories of chemistry, pointing out that not all 19th-century works were Whiggish. Furthermore, the association of chemistry with industry influenced writing on the history of chemistry. He began his analysis with the work of Jean-Baptiste Dumas in 1837, whose philosophy of chemistry strove for general principles of science and focused on those who challenged Aristotle. Dumas made use of primary sources and initiated the input of manuscripts. Ferdinand Hoefer’s Histoire de la Chimie of 1842 drew on a humanistic background to investigate the complexity of interrelationships. That is, he saw alchemy and practical craft traditions as important. Michel Eugène Chevreul, meanwhile, argued that the history of chemistry should introduce the reader to a classification of key ideas. Hermann Kopp’s two-volume work of 1843 ostensibly presented past theories ‘objectively’. The approach in volume 1 was biographical, while that in volume 2 was to focus on monographic themes, rejecting nationalism and giving little cultural or geographical contextualization. Cannizzaro’s historical work of 1858 proclaimed the atom to be a closed subject and was not only ideological, but proclaimed that the history of chemistry had important intellectual and pedagogical roles. In the second half of the nineteenth century, histories of chemistry could be seen to have two purposes: firstly to defend either theory or national traditions; or to concentrate on primary sources. Prof. Beretta also pointed to a German philological tradition of editing texts in the history of chemistry, culminating in Ostwald’s Classiker from 1889, which enabled the more systematic use of primary sources and followed in the tradition of Dumas.
Prof. Beretta pointed to the influence of Hélène Metzger who argued before the Second World War that scientific progress was an unsatisfactory category of historiographical analysis; that is, that science needed to be understood in the context of the broader history of ideas. Lavoisier’s bicentenary in 1943 stimulated major celebrations including an exhibition of primary sources and the material culture of Lavoisier’s work. Experiments were repeated using original instruments, something which influenced the young Maurice Daumas to change from his career as a chemist to researching the history of scientific instruments in France. The Second World War left the history of chemistry in continental Europe in a poor state, with relatively few studies in the 1950s and 1960s. Prof. Beretta concluded by pointing out that history of chemistry returned to the spotlight in the 1990s because of its value for applied science and suggested that chemistry’s diversity gave it a unique role in the history of science. He called for comparative studies with other specialities and expansion to other domains.
“The Good Old Days” Panel Discussion with Professor Maurice Crosland, Professor Colin Russell and Professor David Knight
The ‘Three Professors’ reflected on their varying paths to the history of chemistry. All had started as undergraduate chemists. Russell and Crosland both made the transition to the history of chemistry via the important part-time MSc course at University College London under Douglas McKie, who was mentioned earlier in the day as a founder of SHAC. Prof. Crosland also paid tribute to the late Dr Bill Smeaton who carried the history of chemistry forward at UCL with such distinction and was a pivotal member of the Society, serving as Hon. Treasurer for more than 25 years and eventually as Chairman. Prof. Knight made the transition while still an undergraduate at Oxford, taking the Part II in the history of chemistry, a route followed by quite a few people at the meeting. Knight suggested that his early work on Davy followed rather ‘automatically’ from the fact that his Part II supervisor was Harold Hartley.
All three became professional academic historians of chemistry at a time when the history of science was a growth area in the academy, but held posts in very different contexts. Russell joined the fledgling Open University as an historian of science within the Arts Faculty and eventually expanded the subject into a History of Science Department there. Knight joined the Philosophy Department of Durham University at what he called the ‘high point of logical positivism’, so they needed a philosopher and historian of science. Crosland began his history of science career at Leeds, also in a department with philosophers, and later headed up a new department at the University of Kent at Canterbury.
Prof. Russell stressed the value of group research in historical work, as well as scientific work. Prof. Knight stressed the importance of not forgetting the great works of our predecessors. Prof. Crosland made a related point in stressing the importance of what we might call historiographical tolerance – to differ in view from other historians should not be to rubbish what has gone before.
Public Lecture by Professor Simon Schaffer, University of Cambridge
“The Unfortunate Chemist – Tribulations of Chemical Philosophy in an Age of Revolution”
‘Chemistry is often associated with misfortune’ began Professor Schaffer, who went on to suggest that ‘Optimism is the chief virtue of the chemist’, citing the still potent notions of the elixir and transmutation.
The lecture focused on public chemistry in England in the late 18th century, a period when journalism dominated public debate. Requiring more study by historians, he argued that journals of the time can be consulted as maps of cultural context in England. Chemistry featured largely in such publications at a time when it was associated with revolution, but did not have a clear disciplinary identity in the sense of public recognition. Prof. Schaffer looked at the case of James Price, FRS MD, who claimed that he had found a white powder that could convert mercury into gold. Richard Kirwan, wrote how Price meant ‘nothing more than to make country folk stare’, but the Gentleman’s Magazine used the incident as a means of criticising the Royal Society and University of Oxford. When a group of witnesses from the Royal Society travelled to Price’s home in Surrey to observe his experiment, he stepped to one side, drank prussic acid and died. The whole episode, and the accompanying correspondence and comment, reveal much about the management of reputation in public print and how easily the reputation of English institutions such as the Royal Society and Oxford University could be questioned by a public chemical demonstration.
Prof. Schaffer also related the cases of two lesser-known figures, John Elliott, an apothecary who had worked in Cheapside and who was tried at the Old Bailey in 1787 for an attempted shooting, and Robert Harrington, a member of the Corporation of Surgeons. Both men had published treatises claiming that the sun was inhabited, and, by exploring the relationship between their work and their reputations, Prof. Schaffer argued that whether and how chemistry was understood, and how practitioners publicized their work and constructed their reputations, should be seen as a matter for the social history of plausibility. He also highlighted how the cases illustrated the instability, vulnerability and manipulability of public chemistry during this period and the importance of the role of publicity in defining what counted as a philosopher chemist. Prof. Schaffer concluded by calling for an expansion of the ‘cast list’ of past scientists and an examination of a wider, more public theatre to consider how reputation is made. He also drew attention to the importance of ‘sites of chemistry’ in these studies, something which will receive further investigation at the forthcoming series of conferences sponsored by SHAC.
The public lecture was preceded by a reception in the Royal Institution Museum and followed by a dinner at the Royal Institution’s Restaurant, Time and Space. The day was brought to a close with a few words from SHAC’s Chairman, Robert Anderson, and a toast to the Society from the science writer and SHAC member, Philip Ball.
Gerrylynn Roberts and Anna Simmons
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