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British Chemistry and the Concept of Science in the Eighteenth Century*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Arthur Donovan
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Extract

Eighteenth-century British chemistry presents the historian with an interesting paradox. As theorists, the British hardly distinguished themselves. Joseph Black, the foremost professor of chemistry during the second half of the century and a man of great intellectual ability, began his career with a brilliant paper on pneumatic chemistry and then promptly abandoned the world of published research. Skillful investigators such as Stephen Hales and Joseph Priestley made many important discoveries, but the theories they offered as interpretations of their observations created as many difficulties as they resolved. Although British chemists hypothesized with gusto, the aethers and phlogistons they invoked to explain chemical phenomena lacked intellectual as well as physical gravity and historians of chemistry have not yet succeeded in clarifying the relationship between this welter of ideas and Lavoisier's successful recasting of chemical theory during the final decades of the century. Despite the inadequacy of its theoretical concepts, however, philosophical chemistry flourished in Great Britain during the eighteenth century. Although the absence of a unifying theory led to a rather undisciplined pattern of growth, the number of chemists actively studying philosophical problems certainly increased. Why did so many natural philosophers become interested in such a theoretically impoverished subject, and why, after two generations of intense investigation and reflection, were they unable to formulate an adequate general theory?

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , Summer 1975 , pp. 131 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1975

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Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this paper was read in December, 1973 at the joint annual meeting of the History of Science Society and the American Historical Association. I am grateful to Keith Baker and Frederic L. Holmes, who served as commentators at that original session, and to Nathan Sivin for suggesting ways in which this paper could be improved.

References

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2 Hales, Stephen, Vegetable Staticks: Or, An Account of some Statical Experiments on the Sap in Vegetables: Being an Essay towards a Natural History of Vegetation. Also, a Specimen of An Attempt to Analyze the Air, By a great Variety of Chymio-Staticul Experiments (London, 1727)Google Scholar; Priestley, Joseph, Experiments and Observations on different Kinds of Air, and other Branches of Natural Philosophy, connected with the Subject, 3 vols. (Birmingham. 1790).Google Scholar

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6 There were, of course, British chemists who were not primarily interested in the Newtonian challenge or the other large philosophical issues which troubled theoretical chemists, and clearly their contributions to the chemical knowledge of the century were not negligible. For an excellent discussion of some developments in analytical chemistry, which was closely tied to the influential tradition of medical chemistry, see Holmes, Frederic L., “Analysis by Fire and Solvent Extractions: The Metamorphosis of a Tradition,” Isis, LXII (1971): 129–48.Google Scholar

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25 Smout, T. C., A History of the Scottish People, 1560-1830 (London, 1969), p. 298Google Scholar; the contemporary statement, quoted by Smout, is from Ramsay of Ochtertyre.

26 Keith Baker has made the perceptive suggestion that the chemists' emphasis on improvement may owe a good deal to the sense of purpose it gave to their studies, a sense which earlier scientists such as Newton and Maclaurin had found in the theistic or deistic implications of their studies.

27 On chemistry in the Lunar Society and the Royal Institution, see above, notes 12 and 13; on William Lewis, see Sivin, Nathan, “William Lewis (1708-1781) as a Chemist,” Chymia, VIII (1962): 63–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on Brownrigg, see Russell-Wood, J., “A Biographical Note on William Brownrigg, M.D., F.R.S. (1711-1800),” Ann. Sci., VI (1949): 186–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “The Scientific Work of William Brownrigg, M.D., F.R.S. (171 1-1800),” Ann. Sci., VI (1950): 436–7, VII (1951): 77-94, 199-206Google Scholar; on Black, see Guerlac. op. cit. n. 1 above; on Priestley, see Schofield, Robert E., A Scientific Autobiography of Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) (Cambridge. Mass., 1966)Google Scholar; on Dallon, see Thackray, Arnold, John Dallon (Cambridge, Mass., 1973).Google Scholar

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30 Thomson, I: 69, 596-7.

31 Cf. Cant, R. G., “The Scottish universities and Scottish society in the eighteenth century,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, LVIII (1967): 1953–66Google Scholar; Morrell, “The University of Edinburgh.”

32 Cf. Mackie, J. D., The University of Glasgow (Glasgow, 1954)Google Scholar; SirGrant, Alexander, The Story of the University of Edinburgh During its First Three Hundred Years. 2 vols. (London, 1884)Google Scholar; Horn, D. B., A Short History of the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1967).Google Scholar

33 Thomson. I: 596.

34 GUL. Cullen MSS. no. 40b.

35 Cf. Gillispie, Charles. “The Nalural History of Industry.” Isis, XLVII (1957): 398–407.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 GUL, Cullen MSS. no. 26b; Sivin, pp. 74-7.

37 GUL, Cullen MSS. no. 7. Cullen's friend and colleague Adam Smith also argued that some improvements “came to be by the ingenuity of those men of speculation, whose trade it is not to do anything, but to observe everything; and who, upon that account, are often capable of combining together the powers of the most distant and dissimilar objects”: quoted in Forbes, R. J., “Power to 1850,” in Singer, Charleset al. eds., A History of Technology, vol. IV (London, 1958), p. 150.Google Scholar

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39 Cf. Hume's statement that “while Newton seemed to draw off the veil from some of the mysteries of nature, he shewed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy, and thereby restored her ultimate secrets to that obscurity in which they ever did and ever will remain”: History of England, ch. 71. quoted in Smith, Norman Kemp. The Philosophy of David Hume (London, 1941). p. 58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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41 GUL. Cullen MSS. no. 7.

42 Cf. Holmes The study of magnesia alba presents us with a ease in which a practcal and taxonomic investigation gave rise to a new field of theoretical research. In his case Joseph Black was led from the examination of a peculiar earth of interest to physicians and salt boilers to ihe discovery that atmospheric air is not chemically homogeneous: above, n. 1.

43 For a thorough discussion of the Newtonian-Stahlian debates, see Thackray, Atoms and Powers.

44 As Cullen told his students, “the chemical principles really [are] mixts.…[Although] they appear to be simple & perhaps the first degree of mixture, & [although] they are really the elements of compounds in Stahl's sense, & tho by chemical resolutions we do not arrive at the real & most simple elements of all bodies, yet it is useful to know the principles of compounds”: Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh, MSS. C. 15, 1, fol. 16 r&v.

45 Ironically, although the theories of attraction and repulsion employed by British chemists derived almost nothing from practice, James Watt made considerable use of Black's research on a related topic, namely heat, while performing the experiments which led him to the discovery of that most significant of all eighteenth-century improvements, the separate condenser for the steam engine: cf. Cardwell, D.S.L.. From Watt to Clausius (London, 1971), ch. 2Google Scholar; A. L. Donovan, ”Towards a Social History of Technological Ideas: Black, Joseph, Watt, James and the Separate Condenser Proceedings of ihe University of Illinois International Symposium on the History and Phitosophy of Technology (Urbana, forthcoming).Google Scholar

46 Cf. McKie, Douglas and Heathcote, Niels H. de V., The Discovery of Specific und Latent Heats (London, 1935)Google Scholar; Fox, Robert, “Dalton's Caloric Theory,” in Cardwell, , John Dalton, pp. 187–202.Google Scholar

47 On chemistry and the Positive Philosophy, see Crosland, Maurice, “Comte and Berthollet: A Philosopher's view of Chemistry,” Actes XIIe Cong. Int. Hist. Sci., 1968 (Paris, 1971), VI: 23–8.Google Scholar