Humphry Davy: Analogy,Priority, and the “true philosopher”

This essay explores how Davy fashioned himself as, what he called in his poetry, a “true philosopher.” He defined the “true philosopher” as someone who eschewed monetary gain for his scientific work, preferring instead to give knowledge freely for the public good, and as someone working at a higher level than the mere experimentalist. Specifically, Davy presented himself as using the method of analogy to reach his discoveries and emphasised that he understood the “principle” behind his findings. He portrayed himself as one who perceived analogies because he had a wider perspective on the world than many others in his society. The poem in which he describes the “true philosopher” offers us Davy’s private view of this character; the essay then demonstrates how Davy attempted to depict his own character in this way during critical moments in his career.     

Historical account: Francis William Aston: the man behind the mass spectrograph

Francis William Aston was among the most accomplished physicists of the 20th century. A Nobel laureate and Fellow of the Royal Society, his research career spanned four decades. During this time, he provided experimental proof for the existence of isotopes of many of the chemical elements and recorded their masses using several, hand-built mass spectrographs. A rather private man who lived alone in Trinity College for much of his adult life, Aston remains a somewhat elusive and mysterious figure. This biography attempts to shed some more light on the man, including his character and his personal life, and particularly how his life was shaped by his childhood, environment and education. It contains previously unpublished material and photographs and complements the biographies of Hevesy and Thomson, following Aston's death, and that by Squires detailing the construction and performance of his mass spectrographs at the Cavendish Laboratory. It is published at a timely juncture, some 100 years after Aston's first arrival at Cambridge.     

Philippe Landrieu (1872–1926), un chimiste engagé dans la politique expérimentale

From Jean-Baptiste Dumas to Chaïm Weizmann and to Margaret Thatcher, including Alfred Naquet, Marcelin Berthelot, Auguste Scheurer-Kaster, Stanislao Cannizzaro, Frédéric Joliot etc., there are few chemists who, at one time or another, have not been tempted to enter politics. Philippe Landrieu is certainly one of the lesser known of this group, even if he had a laudatory Obituary in both the Bulletin de la Société chimique de France, and La Nouvelle Revue socialiste. The events in which he was involved, the utopias for which he was searching, his double career, and his scientific work, nothing was ordinary in his busy life. This Note, as well as placing him in the social history of the last century, will also recall his work as a chemist, and the unresolved problems in which he was interested.     

Liebig,his university professor Karl Wilhelm Gottlob Kastner (1783-1857) and his problematic relation with romantic natural philosophy

The chemist and physicist K. W. G. Kastner is almost unknown today, even though during his lifetime he was among the most respected of German physical scientists. Only the fact that Justus Liebig studied and did his doctorate with him seems to be of (small enough) interest today. Kastner's life and career are shown to be extremely worth analyzing since, like Liebig himself, he succeeded in making his way from being a pharmacist to becoming a university professor. He published numerous textbooks as well as journals, he had a great number of students and he was a popular lecturer. In striking contrast to this are the negative statements of his student Liebig about Romantic Natural Philosophy and about Kastner himself, despite his being of crucial importance for Liebig's career as a teacher and mentor. These critical statements, for which a variety of explanations are known, markedly prejudiced Kastner's reputation for posterity.     

Adventures of a fluorine chemist at DuPont

Fluorine chemist William J. Middleton (Bill) describes his career at DuPont, including some of his discoveries, a few anecdotes and a little of his poetry.     

“Agricultural Chymistry is at present in it's infancy”: The Board of Agriculture,The Royal Institution and Humphry Davy

In this paper I sketch the institutional interactions between the Board of Agriculture and the Royal Institution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This includes analysing the composition of memberships and committees of both bodies in which, inter alia, I challenge Morris Berman's account of their institutional relations. A key figure was Humphry Davy who, because of his career ambitions, occupied a slightly uncomfortable position as Professor of Chemistry to both organisations. Davy's lecture notebooks and his subsequent publication Elements of Agricultural Chemistry reveal that he drew almost all his direct knowledge of the subject from Britain and Ireland. Yet, despite such parochial shortcomings that might be expected of an infant science at time of war, the popularity of his book, particularly in North America, provided continuity between the end of the Board of Agriculture in 1822 and the start of the impact of Justus Liebig's work in the 1840s.     

François-Marie Raoult: Past and Modern Look

The academic and research career of Raoult is an example of success against the odds. He was born into a family of modest means and made his academic career far from Paris, the center of scientific power and means. He did his research on the behavior of solutions in general, and electrolytes in particular, before the concepts of molecular association, salt dissociation, and molecular structure had been established. In spite of this, by precise experimental work and brilliant intuition he made fundamental and everlasting contributions to thermodynamics. Raoults results are discussed against the scientific background of his time and then reanalyzed using current thermodynamic ideas.     

Frederick Thomas Trouton: The Man, the Rule, and the Ratio

Trouton was a multifaceted theoretician and experimentalist who left his name in several fields. Here, his many contributions to science are described and analyzed with particular emphasis on Troutons rule and its further development, his contributions to rheology (Troutons ratio), and the famous Trouton—Noble experiment, which is related to the absolute movement of the Earth through the æether.Chemists and chemical engineers are familiar with Trouton through the rule that carries his name. Troutons rule states that at the normal boiling temperature the entropy of vaporization is constant. They are generally unaware of his rich contributions in other scientific areas, such as rheology, osmotic pressure, and physics. Here we describe his personal life and career, his scientific achievements, and, in particular, how his rule has been further developed by others.     

Partington: The Missing Part

Abstract

J. R. Partington (1886–1965) was a prolific author, making major contributions in physical chemistry and history of chemistry. He spent most of his career teaching chemistry at Queen Mary College, University of London. Retiring to Cambridge in 1951, much of his time was devoted to writing the biographically and bibliographically rich A History of Chemistry. Three volumes were published by Macmillans from 1961 to 1964, with the first part of volume four appearing posthumously in 1970. This paper considers the reasons why its second part, though planned and partly written, was never published. The evidence is contained in an archive of papers in the Science Museum Library, and amongst the correspondence of Joseph Needham, who struck up a close relationship with Partington. Prominent historians who were involved in Macmillans’ eventual decision not to complete the series, either directly or indirectly, included William Brock, Allen Debus, June Fullmer, Frank Greenaway, Geoffrey Lewis, Robert Multhauf, Walter Pagel, Harry Sheppard, Nathan Sivin, William Smeaton, and Needham himself.     

Alchemical Patronage and the Making of an Adept: Letters of Michael Sendivogius to Emperor Rudolf II and His Chamberlain Hans Popp

Based on four extant letters the famous Polish alchemist Michael Sendivogius wrote to Emperor Rudolf II and his first chamberlain Hans Popp between 1597 and 1602, this paper adds to a growing body of revisionist scholarship on alchemy in Rudolfine Prague. Unlike most of his many rivals – including luminaries such as John Dee and Michael Maier – who hoped for the Emperor's patronage in vain, Sendivogius officially became a courtier at the imperial court in 1594. As such he was in the privileged position of having access to the Emperor and his close advisors. The surviving correspondence shows how the Pole successfully balanced his alchemical promises against Rudolf's expectations for a number of years. The fact that even Sendivogius found it difficult to translate imperial patronage into ready money suggests that Emperor Rudolf II was considerably more circumspect and less gullible than the widespread cliché suggests. Fully contextualised by all available sources on Sendivogius' early career, the four letters emerge as important documents regarding the Polish adept and alchemical patronage in Rudolfine Prague. They also shed new light on the circumstances which led to the writing and publication of Sendivogius' famous treatise De lapide philosophorum (Novum lumen chymicum).     

吴学周的个体选择与时代际遇

吴学周院士(1902～1983)是我国著名的物理化学家、分子光谱研究的开拓者。吴学周1928年11月赴加州理工学院学习电化学,随后转向分子光谱学,并于1931年获得博士学位。回国后,他加入中研院化学研究所,继续从事分子光谱研究。全面抗战爆发后,吴学周受命将化学所由上海迁至昆明,保存了我国初具规模的化学研究事业。在这一过程中,吴学周的科学生涯也发生了转变。基于“老科学家学术成长资料采集工程”所存日记及相关档案,通过对吴学周早期求学及工作经历的梳理,讨论在当时复杂的社会环境下,吴学周在不同阶段面临的机遇及其作出的个人选择,并藉此窥视科学家个体命运与时代之间的张力。     

On the early history of field emission including attempts of tunneling spectroscopy

Field emission is certainly one of the oldest surface science techniques, its roots reaching back about 250 years to the time of enlightenment. An account of very early studies and of later work is given but mostly restricted to Leipzig and to pre-Müllerian investigations. Studies of field emission from metal tips were carried out in the 18th century by Johann Heinrich Winkler who used vacuum pumps built by Jacob Leupold, a famous Leipzig mechanic.

A short account of the career of Winkler will be given and his field emission experiments are illustrated.

Field emission was investigated again in Leipzig much later by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld who worked on the improvement of X-ray tubes. He coined the terms ‘autoelektronische Entladung’ of ‘Äona-Effekt’ in 1922, and developed degassing procedures which are very similar to modern ultra-high vacuum processing. A pre-quantum mechanical explanation of the field emission phenomena was undertaken by Walter Schottky. Cunradi (1926) tried to measure temperature changes during field emission.

Franz Rother, in a thesis (1914) suggested by Otto Wiener, dealt with the distance dependence of currents in vacuum between electrodes down to 20 nm. His habilitation in 1926 was an extension of his early work but now with field emission tips as a cathode. We might look at his measurements of the field emission characteristics in dependence on distance as a precursor to modern tunneling spectroscopy as well.     

The productive scientific career of Charles Pedersen (October 3, 1904–October 26, 1989)

Charles Pedersen's career is reviewed from the time of his early life in Korea and Japan and scientific training in the United States to the present. His 42-year research career was practically and scientifically productive, leading finally to a share of the Nobel prize in chemistry for 1987. Commercially significant accomplishments included a large improvement in the yield of tetraethylead antiknock and discovery of the first oil soluble agents for inhibiting catalytic effects of copper in degradation of petroleum products and rubber. This led to a study of the interactions of metals with chelating agents and the resultant effects on oxidation reactions, thence to the behavior of peroxides and their reactions with substrates. He also discovered the antiknock activity of ferrocene. While studying the effects of ligands on the catalytic behavior of vanadium he discovered the crown compounds and their ability to include alkali metal ions. He devoted the last years of his career to elaborating their chemistry.Taken in part with permission fromCurrent Topics in Macrocyclic Chemistry in Japan, E. Kimura (ed.), Hiroshima University School of Medicine, Hiroshima, 1987.     

Nicolae Teclu (1839-1916) A pioneer of flame spectroscopy

A brief account is given of Teclu's career and his contributions as a pioneer of the study of flames.     

Donald L.D. Caspar (1927–2021)—pioneer of virus structures

Structural Chemistry - Donald L.D. Caspar (1927–2021) devoted his career to understanding the structure of viruses. He interacted with leading structural scientists of his time and...     

Humphry Davy and the Problem of Analogy

Analogy, the comparison of one set of relations to another, was essential to Humphry Davy’s understanding of chemistry. Throughout his career, Davy used analogical reasoning to direct and to interpret his experimental analyses of the chemical reactions between substances. In his writing, he deployed analogies to organise and to explain his theories about the relations between physical processes and between the properties of different chemical elements and compounds. But Davy also regularly expressed two concerns about analogical comparison: first, that it was founded not on the rational interpretation of facts but on imaginative speculation; and second, that it was a kind of rhetoric, the persuasiveness of which depended not on material evidence but on misleading figures of speech. This article discusses the influences that informed Davy’s ambivalent assessment of the value of analogy, and it examines the distinct yet overlapping ways in which this assessment was expressed in his notebooks, his lectures and treatises on chemistry, his philosophical writings, and his poetry.     

Two chemists in two Koreas

Taikyu Ree (1902-92) and Seung Ki Li (1905-96) were the most famous and influential scientists in twentieth-century Korea. Trained at Kyoto Imperial University during the Japanese occupation period (1910-45), both followed parallel career paths until 1945 but after that year those paths began to diverge. In 1948 Taikyu Ree moved to the University of Utah where he ran an informal graduate programme to train Korea chemists during the 1950s and 1960s. He became a model scholar in pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. In 1950 Seung Ki Li moved to North Korea where he succeeded in industrialising a new synthetic fibre from polyvinyl alcohol. He became a popular hero who demonstrated the utility of science. His success also helped Kim Il Sung, North Korea dictator, to consolidate his political ideology of Self-Reliance. Despite their different career patterns in very different circumstances, they shared something common; apolitical views and commitment to their work. An investigation of the careers of these two chemists illustrates the interwoven scientific, ideological and economic developments of South and North Korea during the second half of the twentieth century.     

Paracelsus,a Transmutational Alchemist

A scholarly consensus has long held that in redefining alchemy, Paracelsus rejected metallic transmutation. I show here, however, that for most of his career Paracelsus believed that it was possible to change one metal into another, and even late in his short life he did not break with that view. Furthermore, in certain places in his works he also represented himself, occasionally directly and more often obliquely, as a practical transmutationist. Because Paracelsus not only acknowledged that metallic transmutations were theoretically possible but also claimed to have carried them out in practice, we must regard him as (among other things) a transmutational alchemist. As such, he had more in common than historians have generally admitted with both his medieval predecessors and his posthumous followers. The Paracelsian alchemists of the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not wrong to situate Paracelsus within the alchemical tradition, nor to connect their own goldmaking interests to his.