Transforming Matter: A History of Chemistry from Alchemy to the Buckyball

228 Pages·2001·1.78 MB·English

by  Trevor H. Levere

 
 
 
  
 
Mott T. Greene
and Sharon Kingsland
Series Editors
Transforming Matter
A History of Chemistry
from Alchemy to the Buckyball
Trevor H. Levere
    
  
© 2001 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2001
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Johns Hopkins University Press
2715 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363
www.press.jhu.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Levere, Trevor Harvey.
Transforming matter : a history of chemistry from alchemy to
the buckyball / Trevor H. Levere.
p. cm. — (Johns Hopkins introductory studies in the
history of science)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8018-6609-X (acid-free paper) — ISBN 0-8018-6610-3
(pbk. : acid-free paper)
1. Chemistry—History. I. Title. II. Series.
QD11 .L45 2001
540´.9—dc21 00-011487
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
1 First Steps: From Alchemy to Chemistry? 1
2 Robert Boyle: Chemistry and Experiment 14
3 A German Story: What Burns, and How 28
4 An Enlightened Discipline: Chemistry as Science and Craft 39
5 Different Kinds of Air 51
6 Theory and Practice: The Tools of Revolution 66
7 Atoms and Elements 80
8 The Rise of Organic Chemistry 94
9 Atomic Weights Revisited 107
10 The Birth of the Teaching-Research Laboratory 121
11 Atoms in Space 136
12 Physical Chemistry: A Discipline Comes of Age 152
13 The Nature of the Chemical Bond 165
14 Where Now, and Where Next? New Frontiers 182
Suggested Further Reading 201
Index 209
Acknowledgments
This book owes much to the undergraduate and graduate students in lecture
courses on the history of science and in seminars on the history of chemistry
at the University of Toronto over many years of teaching. I am also much in-
debted to friends and colleagues. I would especially like to thank Lawrence
Principe, William Brock, David Farrar, Anthony Fernandez, and Brian Baigrie
for their comments on drafts of this book. I have cheerfully and gratefully
adopted many of their suggestions. They have saved me from numerous er-
rors, suggested the inclusion of several important topics, and helped me at
many points to make arguments clearer. Juliana McCarthy at the Johns Hop-
kins University Press was most helpful and efficient at every stage of produc-
tion.
Introduction
Chemistry today is fascinating and far ranging. We know something about the
chemistry of the stars, distant crucibles where elements are formed. We know
much about the chemistry of life—in biochemistry, complexity and richness
are at their peak, supported by elegant and often simple concepts and models.
There are just over a hundred kinds of chemical atoms, corresponding to the
different kinds of chemical elements, but their possible and actual combina-
tions are so many as to seem infinite. In only the past thirty years, the list of
known compounds has grown by seven and a half million, which represents
almost a tenfold increase in that short interval of time. Complexity, richness,
and an economy of means give chemistry its intellectual appeal; utility and ap-
plication, its universal relevance. Chemistry in medicine, agriculture, and in-
dustry and in its effects on the environment has transformed the conditions of
life for our species, and for countless other species as well. Many of the neces-
sities for our crowded planet are made possible by the applications of chem-
istry. Many of the problems that we have created while providing those neces-
sities are also tied to chemistry, and so too will be their solutions. We make
choices, perceive needs, and create social and political structures in which we
use, wittingly and unwittingly, the science of our day.
Although chemistry has been important for millennia in its practical ap-
plication to the needs and luxuries of human life, the discipline has not always
been called chemistry. It has existed in very different forms, and in very differ-
ent relations to neighboring sciences and crafts, in a flux that only accelerated
as the years passed. The goals and concepts of a Chinese or Arabic alchemist
of antiquity or the Middle Ages differed greatly from those of a chemist of the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment, just as the aims and ideas of nineteenth-
century research chemists were different from those of their predecessors and
successors.
Chemistry has, historically, been in constant flux, both in its self-image and
in relation to other disciplines that sought to co-opt or absorb it. It has had its
sects, its rivalries, and many dead-ends. But from antiquity to the present, there