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HISTORY OF CHEMISTRY
HISTORY OF CHEMISTRY
BY Sir EDWARD THORPE , C.B., LL.D., F.R.S. AUTHOR OF “ESSAYS IN HISTORICAL CHEMISTRY,” “HUMPHRY DAVY: POET AND PHILOSOPHER,” “JOSEPH PRIESTLEY,” ETC., ETC. TWO VOLUMES I. From the Earliest Times to the Middle of the Nineteenth Century WITH ILLUSTRATIONS G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS NEW YORK AND LONDON The Knickerbocker Press 1909 Copyright, 1909, by G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS This series is published in London by The Rationalist Press Association, Limited...
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PUBLISHERS’ NOTE
PUBLISHERS’ NOTE
A History of the Sciences has been planned to present for the information of the general public a historic record of the great divisions of science. Each volume is the work of a writer who is accepted as an authority on his own subject-matter. The books are not to be considered as primers, but present thoroughly digested information on the relations borne by each great division of science to the changes in human ideas and to the intellectual development of mankind. The monographs explain how the
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CHAPTER I The Chemistry of the Ancients
CHAPTER I The Chemistry of the Ancients
Chemistry , as an art, was practised thousands of years before the Christian era; as a science, it dates no further back than the middle of the seventeenth century. The monumental records of Egypt and the accounts left us by Herodotus and other writers show that the ancient Egyptians, among the earliest nations of whom we have any records, had a considerable knowledge of processes essentially chemical in their nature. Their priests were adepts in certain chemical arts, and chemical laboratories
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CHAPTER II The Chemical Philosophy of the Ancients
CHAPTER II The Chemical Philosophy of the Ancients
Speculations as to the origin and nature of matter, and as to the conditions and forces which affect it, are to be found, more or less imperfectly developed, in the oldest systems of philosophy of which we have any record. These speculations are not based, in any real sense, upon the systematic observation of natural phenomena. Still, as they appealed to human reason, they must be held to be founded upon experience, or at least not to be consciously inconsistent with it: All the oldest cosmogoni
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CHAPTER III Alchemy
CHAPTER III Alchemy
Although the intellectual tendencies of the Hellenic mind were hardly calculated to favour the development of chemistry as a science, the speculations of the Greeks concerning the essential nature of matter and the mutual convertibility of the “elements” led incidentally to an extension of the art of operative chemistry. This extension resulted from attempts to realise what was the logical outcome of the teaching of their philosophers—viz., the possibility of the transmutation of metals. The ide
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CHAPTER IV The Philosopher’s Stone
CHAPTER IV The Philosopher’s Stone
During the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries the cult of alchemy attained to the dignity of a religion. Belief in transmutation and in the virtues and powers of the philosopher’s stone, in the universal medicine, the alkahest, and the elixir of life, formed its articles of faith. The position it acquired was due to some extent to the attitude towards it of the Romish Church. Many reputable bishops and fathers were professed alchemists; and chemical laboratories, as in the Egyptian t
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CHAPTER V Iatro-Chemistry
CHAPTER V Iatro-Chemistry
The term “iatro-chemistry” denotes a particular phase in the history of medicine and of chemistry. The iatro-chemists were a school of physicians who sought to apply chemical principles to the elucidation of vital phenomena. According to them, human illnesses result from abnormal chemical processes within the body, and these could only be counteracted by appropriate chemical remedies. Although this idea did not originate with him, the chief exponent of this school is commonly said to be Paracels
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CHAPTER VI “The Sceptical Chemist”: The Dawn of Scientific Chemistry.
CHAPTER VI “The Sceptical Chemist”: The Dawn of Scientific Chemistry.
The latter half of the seventeenth century was a remarkable period in the history of the intellectual development of Europe. At that time nearly every department of human knowledge seemed to have become permeated by an eager spirit of scepticism, inquiry, and reform. The foundation of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, the Accademia del Cimento of Florence, the Academie Royale at Paris, the Berlin Academy, all within a few years of each other, was significant of the tim
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CHAPTER VII Phlogistonism
CHAPTER VII Phlogistonism
Even before the appearance of The Sceptical Chemist there was a growing conviction that the old hypotheses as to the essential nature of matter were inadequate and misleading. We have seen how the four “elements” of the Peripatetics had become merged into the tria prima —the “salt,” “sulphur,” and “mercury”—of the Paracelsians. As the phenomena of chemical action became better known, the latter iatro-chemists—or, rather, that section of them which recognised that chemistry had wider aims than to
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CHAPTER VIII Lavoisier and La Révolution Chimique
CHAPTER VIII Lavoisier and La Révolution Chimique
We have seen how chemistry made a new departure during the political upheaval which occurred in this country about the middle of the seventeenth century. It acquired a new impetus and took a fresh course during the political cataclysm which overwhelmed France and alarmed Europe towards the close of the eighteenth century. The instigator and leader of this second revolution in chemistry was Lavoisier, one of the most distinguished men of his age, and himself a victim of the political fury of his
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CHAPTER IX The Atomic Theory
CHAPTER IX The Atomic Theory
The opening years of the nineteenth century were made memorable by the promulgation of the atomic theory by John Dalton. The enunciation of this theory, which affords a simple and adequate explanation of the fundamental laws of chemical combination, marks an epoch in the history of chemistry. It may be desirable to trace, as briefly as possible, the successive steps which led up to the generalisation which more than any other has served to stamp chemistry as an exact science. That matter was dis
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CHAPTER X The Beginnings of Electro-Chemistry
CHAPTER X The Beginnings of Electro-Chemistry
The first year of the nineteenth century is further memorable on account of the invention of the voltaic pile, and by reason of its application by William Nicholson and Sir Anthony Carlisle to the electrolytic decomposition of water. This mode of resolving water into its constituents made a great sensation at the time, mainly because of the extraordinary method by which it was effected. It afforded an independent and unlooked-for proof of the compound nature of water by a method altogether diffe
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CHAPTER XI The Foundations of Organic Chemistry
CHAPTER XI The Foundations of Organic Chemistry
As the horizon of chemistry widened and its operations extended, it became necessary to treat its subject-matter methodically. Accordingly attempts were made in the various systematic treatises which began to appear in the seventeenth century to group its facts into an orderly and rational arrangement. One of the earliest of such systematic treatises was the Cours de Chimie of Nicolas Lemery, published in 1675. Although this work was styled by Boerhaave “a tumultuary mass of pharmaceutical proce
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CHAPTER XII The Rise of Physical Chemistry
CHAPTER XII The Rise of Physical Chemistry
Physics and Chemistry are twin sisters—daughters of Natural Philosophy; like Juno’s swans, coupled and inseparable. Physics is concerned with the forms of energy which affect matter; chemistry with the study of matter so affected. Each, then, is complementary to the other. Philosophers of old drew no practical distinction between them, at least as regards their own studies. Men like Boyle, Black, Cavendish, Lavoisier, Dalton, Faraday, Graham, Bunsen, were pioneers “on a very broad gauge,” pushin
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Relating to the Period Covered by Vol. I.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Relating to the Period Covered by Vol. I.
Agricola, Georg. De Re Metallica. Agricola, Georg. Vom Bergwerck XII. Bücher darinn mit schöner Figuren , etc. Alembic Club, Publications of the. W. Clay, Edinburgh. Beddoes, Thomas. Chemical Essays of Scheele. Murray, London, 1786. Berthelot, Marcellin. La Chimie des Anciens et du Moyenâge. Steinheil, Paris, 1889. Berthelot, Marcellin. La Révolution Chimique. Félix Alcan, Paris, 1890. Berthollet, C. L. Essai de Statique Chimique. Firmin Didot, Paris, 1803. Birch, Thomas. Life of Boyle. Millar,
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HISTORY OF CHEMISTRY
HISTORY OF CHEMISTRY
BY Sir EDWARD THORPE C.B., LL.D., F.R.S. AUTHOR OF “ESSAYS IN HISTORICAL CHEMISTRY,” “HUMPHRY DAVY: POET AND PHILOSOPHER,” “JOSEPH PRIESTLEY,” ETC., ETC. TWO VOLUMES II. From 1850 to 1910 WITH ILLUSTRATIONS G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS NEW YORK AND LONDON The Knickerbocker Press 1910 Copyright, 1910 by G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS This series is published in London by The Rationalist Press Association, Limited The Knickerbocker Press, New York...
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PUBLISHERS’ NOTE
PUBLISHERS’ NOTE
A History of the Sciences has been planned to present for the information of the general public a historic record of the great divisions of science. Each volume is the work of a writer who is accepted as an authority on his own subject-matter. The books are not to be considered as primers, but present thoroughly digested information on the relations borne by each great division of science to the changes in human ideas and to the intellectual development of mankind. The monographs explain how the
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CHAPTER I State of Chemistry in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century
CHAPTER I State of Chemistry in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century
In the preceding volume an attempt was made to outline the significant features in the development of chemistry, as an art and as a science, from the earliest times down to about the middle of the last century. Since that time chemistry has progressed at a rate and to an extent unparalleled at any period of its history. Not only have the number and variety of chemical products—inorganic and organic—been enormously increased, but the study of their modes of origin, properties, and relations has g
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CHAPTER II The Chemical Elements Discovered since 1850
CHAPTER II The Chemical Elements Discovered since 1850
In 1850 the number of substances generally recognised as chemical elements, in the sense in which that term was first employed by Boyle, was sixty-two. Two members—viz., the pelopium of Rose and the ilmenium of Hermann—were, however, subsequently shown to be identical with metals already known. At the present time (1910) the number of the chemical elements definitely recognised as such is eighty-two. In 1850, as now, they were broadly classified as metals and non-metals, although it was felt the
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CHAPTER III The Inactive Elements: Radium and Radio-Activity
CHAPTER III The Inactive Elements: Radium and Radio-Activity
Argon , helium , krypton , neon , and xenon belong to the group of the so-called inactive elements, and constitute what are known as the rare gases of the atmosphere. The existence of these bodies is of great theoretical value and few discoveries of recent times have exacted more interest and curiosity. Twenty years ago it was generally assumed that practically all that was to be known concerning the composition of atmospheric air had been ascertained. Priestley and Cavendish had recognised that
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CHAPTER IV ATOMS AND MOLECULES: ATOMIC WEIGHTS AND EQUIVALENTS
CHAPTER IV ATOMS AND MOLECULES: ATOMIC WEIGHTS AND EQUIVALENTS
It has already been pointed out that the discovery by Gay Lussac, and independently by Dalton, that gases combine in simple proportions by volume, and that the volume of the gaseous product, measured under comparable conditions of temperature and pressure, stand in simple relation to the volumes of the constituents, seemed to most of Dalton’s contemporaries, but not to Dalton himself, to afford strong evidence of the validity of his explanation of the essential nature of chemical combination. It
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CHAPTER V The Molecular Theory of Gases
CHAPTER V The Molecular Theory of Gases
The more obvious physical phenomena of gases were, of course, well known by the middle of the nineteenth century; and the so-called gaseous laws—the laws of Boyle, Dalton, and Gay Lussac—were universally accepted by chemists and physicists at that time as fundamental. That the first two laws were only approximations to truth in a mathematical sense was also well known; and the experimental labours of Regnault and Magnus had not only established limits within which they were inexact, but had, to
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CHAPTER VI The Periodic Law
CHAPTER VI The Periodic Law
In an anonymous essay “On the Relation between the Specific Gravities of Bodies in their Gaseous State and the Weights of their Atoms,” published in Thomson’s Annals of Philosophy in 1815, the attempt was made to indicate certain consequences which seem to follow from Dalton’s law of gaseous volumes, as generalised by Gay Lussac. The author of this essay was subsequently discovered to be a medical student named William Prout, noteworthy as having been one of the first to point out the suggestive
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CHAPTER VII Valency
CHAPTER VII Valency
Chemical formulæ, from the time of Berzelius onwards, have been regarded as rational expressions—that is, they serve to represent the relations and analogies of the substance they are employed to designate, and indicate in the simplest and at the same time the most comprehensive manner the chemical changes in which the substances take part. In the words of Gerhardt, those formulæ are “the best that make evident the greatest number of such relations and analogies,” and that serve to express the g
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CHAPTER VIII The Chemistry of Aromatic Compounds
CHAPTER VIII The Chemistry of Aromatic Compounds
The suggestions of Couper and Kekulé that an explanation of the properties of chemical compounds should be sought in the nature and mutual affinities of their constituent elements rather than of their radicals were not wholly accepted at the time they were first made. Speculative ideas have to justify themselves by facts. The value of an hypothesis depends upon its usefulness and expediency, and on its power of indicating the lines of future inquiry. How far it is inductively sound and deductive
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CHAPTER IX Stereo-Isomerism: Stereo-Chemistry
CHAPTER IX Stereo-Isomerism: Stereo-Chemistry
The first gropings in the search for light on the inner structure of molecular groupings may be said to date from Biot’s work on polarisation. In 1815 Biot, a pupil of Malus, made the remarkable discovery that a number of naturally occurring organic compounds— e.g. , sugar, tartaric acid, oil of turpentine, camphor, etc., are optically active —that is, rotate the plane of polarisation in one direction or the other. The property had previously been observed in quartz, and was assumed to be connec
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CHAPTER X Organic Synthesis: Condensation: The Synthesis of Vital Products
CHAPTER X Organic Synthesis: Condensation: The Synthesis of Vital Products
In its widest sense, the term “synthesis,” as used in organic chemistry, means the building-up of carbon compounds, either from their constituent elements or from groups of differently constituted molecules. At one period this term was confined to cases in which the organic compound was prepared from inorganic materials, or from combinations which themselves could be formed from their elements; but latterly it has lost, in large measure, this restricted signification. At the same time, the attem
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CHAPTER XI On the Development of Physical Chemistry since 1850
CHAPTER XI On the Development of Physical Chemistry since 1850
Chemistry and physics are each complementary to the other: that region of inquiry in which they mutually overlap is known as physical chemistry . Its beginnings are practically contemporaneous with those of chemistry itself. Its main development has occurred, however, during the last twenty-five years. Certain of its leading features have been referred to already in connection with the establishment of the fundamental principles of chemistry, the explanation of the so-called gaseous laws, the co
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Relating to the Period Covered by Vol II. Alembic Club, Publications of the. W. Clay, Edinburgh. Arrhenius, Svante. Theories of Chemistry. Translated by T. Slater Price. Longmans, 1907. Beilstein’s Handbuch der Organischen Chemie . Nine vols. Leopold Voss, Hamburg, 1901–1906. Bischoff’s Materialen der Stereochemie . Vieweg and Son, Brunswick, 1904. Bischoff and Walden’s Handbuch der Stereochemie . H. Beckhold, Frankfort-on-the-Main, 1894. Cain, J. C., and Thorpe, J. F. Synthetic Dyestuffs and In
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A History of the Sciences
A History of the Sciences
Each volume is adequately illustrated, attractively printed, and substantially bound. 16mo. Each, net, 75 cents. By mail, 85 cents. 12 illustrations History of Astronomy By George Forbes, M.A., F.R.S., M.Inst. C.E. Formerly Professor of Natural Philosophy, Anderson’s College, Glasgow I thank you for the copy of Forbes’s History of Astronomy received. I have run it over, and think it very good indeed. The plan seems excellent, and I would say the same of your general plan of a series of brief his
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