Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
S. Abbruzzese
1. Ancient Technologies
From very remote times, people have been using
techniques and processes which we would call chemical, involving careful control, as part of a craft or art
passed from father to son, mother to daughter, or
master to apprentice. Indeed the word chemistry is
supposed to come from an ancient Egyptian word
chem meaning earthy: the Arabic denite article Al
was added to yield our alchemy, and dropped to give
chymistry and then by 1700, chemistry. Early
technologies, culminating in triumphs such as the
making of porcelain and Japanese swords, include
features we would regard as magical; but since the
4. Laoisiers Reolution
Lavoisier (174394) was a wealthy man, prominent in
the privatized tax system of France; his spare time he
devoted to chemistry, in a splendidly equipped laboratory. Becoming a member of the Royal Academy
of Sciences, the small salaried body charged with
scientic research, he resolved to reform the language
and theory of chemistry. As in Carl Linnaeus botany,
names should be international, clear, and free from
changeable theory: while phlogiston should be replaced
as incoherent. Stahl saw phlogiston emitted in burning;
Lavoisier by contrast (in a classic paradigm shift) saw
something absorbed from the air, leading to an
increase in weight. He drew upon the work of Joseph
Priestley (17331804), who had isolated vital or
eminently respirable air in a British tradition of work
on gases. Lavoisier christened this substance oxygen
(Greek, sour) because he believed that it was also
responsible for acidity (generalizing from analyses of
nitric and sulfuric acids). Water was a compound of
oxygen with another gas, hydrogen: such elements
were the basis of chemistry, rather than the hypothetical corpuscles which might concern physicists, or
the Earth, Water, Air, and Fire with which Priestleys
friend Thomas Jeerson (17431826) structured his
book on Virginia. In 1794 Lavoisier was executed as a
tax proteer during Robespierres Reign of Terror,
while the left-wing views of Priestley (who continued
to disagree with him over phlogiston) led to his exile in
Pennsylvania. But their new and exciting chemistry
survived and prospered (Bensaude-Vincent and Abbri
1995, Knight and Kragh 1998).
6. A Mature Science
J. J. Berzelius (17791848) in Sweden used the unsystematic Davys insight to create a structure for
chemistry, dualism, based on the idea that every
compound had a positive and a negative part. He also
picked up John Daltons idea that each element was
composed of atoms, identical to each other and
dierent from those of other elements: Berzelius
arranged these in an electrochemical series from
oxygen, the most negative, to potassium. The number
of elements known steadily grew through the century
with improvements in chemical analysis.
Berzelius trained a number of chemists by having
them to stay in his house, where Anna the housekeeper
washed up dishes and asks. But in the 1820s Justus
Liebig (180373) at the University of Giessen launched
Bibliography
9. The Status of Chemistry
Davy and Liebig (Rossiter 1975) wrote famous books
on agricultural chemistry, and in the nineteenth
century chemical fertilizers and pesticides were unequivocally welcomed in a Europe of food shortages.
Lavoisier improved French gunpowder, and later
chemists produced high explosives making possible
engineering achievements and also formidable weapons. All these things were seen as benets. National
1662
D. Knight
Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-08-043076-7