Chivalrous Chemistry

In Science as Public Culture (1992), Jan Golinski argued that Humphry Davy’s career was “substantially responsible” for allowing chemistry to emerge “with greatly enhanced esteem and respectability” from the “crisis” of the 1790s, when it had become associated with the radical politics of the chemists Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) and Thomas Beddoes (1760–1808). In this paper, I will flesh out the transformation noted by Golinski of chemistry into a respectable discipline under Davy’s tenure at the Royal Institution. The dissociation of chemistry from radical politics was achieved through the influence of Davy’s upper-class, female-audience at the Institution. Davy’s audience wanted chivalry, therefore Davy made his chemistry chivalrous. To borrow from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s (1772–1834) assessment of his friend in 1804, Davy was “more and more determined to mould himself upon the age in order to make the age mould itself upon him.”     

New Studies on Humphry Davy: Introduction

This special issue of Ambix brings together eight new studies on Humphry Davy together with an appreciation of the life and work of David Knight, much of whose scholarship was devoted to understanding Davy. Taken together they provide a much richer and more nuanced account of aspects of Davy’s life, showing how he and his work fitted into the very complex and difficult social, cultural and political contexts of the opening decades of the nineteenth century. Taking as our starting point Thomas Carlyle’s 1829 critique of modern science, in this introduction we weld together the themes that emerge from these papers, many of which ground their results in the project to publish Davy’s Letters. This project has provided evidence that helps us critique the disciplinary boundaries that led to Davy becoming seen mostly as a chemist, while his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge has generally been categorised as a poet. Such boundaries are now breaking down fruitfully as these essays all illustrate in their different ways. A consequence of the new understandings being produced, is that we need to consider anew what constitutes chemistry and chemists, how reputations and commemorations are constructed, the role of audiences (especially women) in developing knowledge and the use of language and literature, which, among other things, are key elements linking chemistry with other parts of society and culture. Davy provides an excellent location by which to address the historical issues involved, giving us an opportunity to balance carefully these and other components (such as human agency) in understanding how knowledge is constructed.     

Michael Faraday's Contributions to Archaeological Chemistry

The analysis of ancient artefacts is a long but largely neglected thread within the histories of archaeology and chemistry. This paper examines Michael Faraday's contributions to this nascent field, drawing on his published correspondence and the works of his antiquarian collaborators, and focusing in particular on his analyses of Romano-British and ancient Egyptian artefacts. Faraday examined the materials used in ancient Egyptian mummification, and provided the first proof of the use of lead glazes on Roman ceramics. Beginning with an assessment of Faraday's personal interests and early work on antiquities with Humphry Davy, this paper critically examines the historiography of archaeological chemistry and attempts to place Faraday's work within its institutional, intellectual, and economic contexts.     

Robert Hare's Theory of Galvanism: A Study of Heat and Electricity in Early Nineteenth-Century American Chemistry

As a professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, Robert Hare actively shaped early American science. He participated in a large network of scholars, including Joseph Henry, François Arago, and Jacob Berzelius, and experimented with and wrote extensively about electricity and its associated chemical and thermal phenomena. In the early nineteenth century, prominent chemists such as Berzelius and Humphry Davy proclaimed that a revolution had occurred in chemistry through electrical research. Examining Robert Hare’s contributions to this discourse, this paper analyzes how Hare’s study of electricity and the caloric theory of heat led him to propose a new theory of galvanism. It also examines the reception of Hare’s work in America and Great Britain, highlighting the contributions of early American chemists to the development of electrochemistry.     

James Smithson on the Calamines: Chemical Combination in Crystals

The three mineral species that constitute the common “calamines,” or non-sulphurous ores of zinc, were first definitively identified in 1803 by the British chemist and mineralogist James Smithson. The present article proposes a close exegesis of Smithson’s argument, which has not previously been studied in any detail. His reasoning integrated chemical, natural historical, and crystallographic considerations, and illustrates important features of the practice of mineral chemistry at this time. Whereas zinc ore was an essential component of the rapidly expanding brass industry, the context for Smithson’s work was not commercial, but rather that of mineral collecting and natural history. Appreciating this fact, and the role of crystallography within this setting, helps to shed light on the interesting theoretical speculations about chemical combination that he included in the paper. Smithson’s ideas about chemical combination were informed by a structural way of thinking about materials, and his argument illustrates some of the ways that crystallog-raphy influenced chemistry in this period.     

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.     

“The Fitness of Their Union”: Travel and Health in the Letters of Humphry and Jane Davy

The letters of Humphry Davy and his circle, to be published shortly, shed new light on his marriage to Jane Apreece. This paper examines the journeys undertaken by the couple, together and separately, with particular attention to the therapeutic benefits they sought from travel. I argue that their increasingly divergent itineraries reflected a growing understanding that Humphry and Jane had different humoral temperaments or constitutions, leading them to seek different climatic conditions to cure their ailments. While Jane’s temperament was classified as melancholic, requiring her to travel to warmer and sunnier climes during the English winter, Humphry’s was believed to be sanguine, meaning he had to avoid excessive heat along with stimulating food and drink. He relied on classical ideas about individuals’ different humoral constitutions, and the therapies appropriate to them, while measuring atmospheric variables to determine the best places to restore his health. The Davys’ letters reveal the beliefs about bodily differences and atmospheric conditions that shaped their therapeutic travels.     

Paneth’s epistemology of chemical elements in light of Kant’s Opus postumum

Friedrich Paneth’s conception of “chemical element” has functioned as the official definition adopted by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry since 1923. Paneth maintains a distinction between empirical and “transcendental” concepts of element; furthermore, chemical science requires fluctuation between the two. The origin of the empirical-transcendental split is found in Immanuel Kant’s classic Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787). The present paper examines Paneth’s foundational concept of element in light of Kant’s attempt, late in life, to revoke key distinctions made in his Critique, including that of regulative and constitutive functions of reason. In a section of his Opus postumum devoted to the “Transition from the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science to Physics,” Kant bends his philosophical system to address the newly emerging sciences of matter of his time. Specifically, he tried, without success, to develop the transcendental ground for microscale motions of bodies encountered in physical, electrical and chemical processes. Paneth’s discussion of chemical element does not take the Opus postumum into account, which is why it begins with a rejection of Kant’s rejection (in his earlier writings) of chemistry’s status as science. I make the case that Paneth’s definition of element effectively maintains something very like Kant’s critical separation of regulative and constitutive principles, while a advancing the concept of chemical science.     

Philosophy of chemistry as intercultural philosophy: Jaap van Brakel

After a brief biography of Jaap van Brakel we set out his appropriation and use of the distinction between the manifest image and the scientific image of the world. In a certain sense van Brakel gives priority to the manifest image as the ultimate source of meaning in chemical discourses. He does not take sides in the debate about nominal and real essences, twin earths and so, but presents a compromise. As an active practitioner of the chemical arts he emphasises the indispensability of models as a main tool for chemical thinking. We then turn to van Brakel’s interest in forging an intercultural point of view in which philosophy of chemistry plays an important part.     

David Marcus Knight (1936–2018): An Appreciation

The article is a biography of the historian of science, David M. Knight. It contains reminiscences of the author's relations with Knight while he was a postgraduate at Oxford and thereby conveys an impression of the state of history of science in Britain in the 1960s. It offers a conspectus of Knight's prolific literary activity and teaching career at the University of Durham. His love of chemistry and admiration for the work of Sir Humphry Davy is emphasised.     

“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.     

构建 “三三三”混合式课堂教学新模式*——以“原子结构”类比模型的建构为例(Ⅱ)

根据优化的无机化学“原子结构”教学设计,运用一系列直观具体的原子结构类比模型,开展了“三三三”混合式课堂教学改革。通过比较改革前后的教学效果及问卷调查结果,发现试点班学生的主动性、积极性和参与性有明显提高,教学改革达到了预期效果。结果表明,在课堂中渗透类比思维,是帮助学生理解抽象概念和理论的有效方法。     

元素周期律的共同发现者:尤利乌斯∙洛塔尔∙迈耶尔

德国化学家尤利乌斯·洛塔尔·迈耶尔与俄国化学家德米特里·伊万诺维奇·门捷列夫各自独立且几乎同时发现了化学元素周期律,并因此共同获得了英国皇家学会的戴维奖章。然而,迈耶尔在元素周期律上的贡献却没有得到应有的关注。适逢国际化学元素周期表年,特撰此文记叙迈耶尔的生平与化学贡献,以纪念这位化学史上的伟大先驱。     

Composites Based on Polytetrafluoroethylene and Detonation Nanodiamonds: Filler–Matrix Chemical Interaction and Its Effect on a Composite’s Properties

Specific properties of PTFE composites filled with ultradisperse detonation diamonds (UDDs) with different surface chemistries are studied. It is found for the first time that filler in the form of UDDs affects not only the rate of PTFE thermal decomposition in vacuum pyrolysis, but also the chemical composition of the products of degradation. The wear resistance of UDD/PTFE composites is shown to depend strongly on the UDD surface chemistry. The presence of UDDs in a PTFE composite is found to result in perfluorocarbon telomeres, released as a readily condensable fraction upon composite pyrolysis. The chemical interaction between PTFE and UDDs, characterized by an increase in the rate of gas evolution and a change in the desorbed gas’s composition, is found to occur at temperature as low as 380°C. It is shown that the intensity of this interaction depends on the concentration of oxygen-containing surface groups, the efficiency of UDDs in terms of the composite’s wear resistance being reduced due to the presence of these groups. Based on the experimental data, a conclusion is reached about the chemical interaction between UDDs and a PTFE matrix, its dependence on the nanodiamond surface chemistry, and its effect on a composite’s tribology.     

高中生“芳香烃”心智模型的测评及其教学启示*

采用二阶式纸笔测验以及半结构化访谈法对高中生持有的“芳香烃”心智模型进行测评,并重点分析了学生建构的与“芳香烃和苯的同系物的概念”“芳香烃的结构”“苯及其同系物的化学性质”等概念群相关的缺陷模型。研究发现学生建构的有关“芳香烃”缺陷模型包括3大类共计11种;学生对有机物空间结构的想象力和建构能力较为薄弱;学生对“有机化合物结构内基团之间相互作用对其化学性质的影响”认识不足,“性质结构”模型不完善;学生建构的有机化学的心智模型尚不具备整体性。     

Davy Takes to the Hills: Dialogic Enquiry and the Aesthetics of the Prospect View

I discuss some of the versions of scientific enquiry used and promoted by Davy, arguing that his self-fashioning as a “genius” and “hero of science” in the years 1801–1820, paralleling the self-fashioning of his friend Wordsworth, created a public persona that tended to occlude a practice of group enquiry to which, however, he publicly returned in his last years – significantly revising it so that it became a dialogic form of writing. This form, I suggest, construed knowledge not as the production of facts – or elements – by inductive method and controlled experiment, but as a conversational process between trusted peers, in which it is not just possible but fundamental to express doubt. Requiring no absolute commitment to a single view, dialogic exploration embraced uncertainty to engender new questions and ambivalence to generate new modes of enquiry.     

James D. Watson 88—the discovery of the double helix was an iconic event in structural chemistry

The ingenuity of James D. Watson and Francis Crick, the convergence of the advances in X-ray crystallography, the accumulated knowledge of structural chemistry, and the breakthroughs in chemical methods of analysis led to the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. The discovery catapulted Watson to a career that helped DNA and the applications of the knowledge about its structure triumph in biomedical sciences. Watson’s eighty-eighth birthday is an occasion to have a look at his path to success, his personality, and assess his legacy.