Ursula Klein

Tools and modes of representation in the laboratory sciences

Introduction. 1. Chemical Atomism and the Evolution of Chemical Theory in the Nineteenth Century A.J. Rocke. 2. The Creative Power of Paper Tools in Early Nineteenth-Century Chemistry U. Klein. 3. An Early History of Alexander Crum Browns Graphical Formulas C. Ritter. 4. Conventionalities in Formula Writing P. Laszlo. 5. Paper Tools and Fictional Worlds: Prediction, Synthesis and Auxiliary Hypotheses in Chemistry P.J. Ramberg. 6. Aspects of Paper Tools in the Industrial-Academic Context: Constitutions and Structures of Aniline Dyes, 1860-1880 C. Reinhardt, A.S. Travis. 7. Molecular Models and the Articulation of Structural Constraints in Chemistry E. Francoeur. 8. Paper Tools and Molecular Architecture in the Chemistry of Linus Pauling M.J. Nye. 9. Graphic Representations of the Periodic System of Chemical Elements B. Bensaude-Vincent. 10. The Periodic Table: The Ultimate Paper Tool in Chemistry E. Scerri. 11. A Principle Written in Diagrams: The Aufbau Principle for Molecules and its Visual Representations, 1927-1932 B.S. Park. 12. Fedoroffs Translation of McClintock: The Uses of Chemistry in the Reorganization of Genetics E. Grosholz. 13. Mathematics, Representation and Molecular Structure R.F. Hendry. 14. Affinity, Additivity and the Reification of the Bond S.J. Weininger. Index.

Technoscience avant la lettre

I argue and demonstrate in this essay that interconnected systems of science and technology, or technoscience, existed long before the late nineteenth century, and that eighteenth-century chemistry was such an early form of technoscience. Based on recent historical research on the early development of carbon chemistry from the late 1820s until the 1840swhich revealed that early carbon chemistry was an experimental expert culture that was largely detached from the mundane industrial worldI further examine the question of the internal preconditions within the expert culture of carbon chemistry that contributed to its convergence with the synthetic-dye industry in the late 1850s. I argue that the introduction of new types and techniques of organic-chemical reactions and organic substances in this experimental expert culture, along with the application of chemical formulae as paper tools for modeling reactions as well as the chemical constitution and structure of substances, enabled academic chemists to make specific, novel contributions to chemical technology and industry in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Artisanal-scientific Experts in Eighteenth-century France and Germany

The eighteenth century was an age of expanding and diversifying state bureaucracies. In France and the German states new administrative departments were founded in order to promote trade and manufacture, as were public institutions to provide technical and scientific education. Leading state officials turned to academies of science and savants for support of their reforms. They hired savants as permanent officials or temporary consultants and inspectors for key economic sectors such as mining and metal production, textile dyeing, and transportation infrastructure, and they further sought the help of savants in order to educate knowledgeable officials and workmen. Implementing savants’ technical expertise, natural knowledge, epistemic values and discipline in the state bureaucracy, these leading officials aspired to build a modern state that guaranteed technological innovation and social progress. These practical movements in the French and German state bureaucracies joined with a multifaceted discourse on technical knowledge, the useful sciences and public service, embedded in scientific academies, mining schools, engineering colleges, and learned and economic societies, as well as in the cameralist (or mercantilist) and Enlightenment literature of the time. Despite numerous local differences, the Enlightenment and cameralist discourse and practical reform movements in the state bureaucracies ranged from France to Prussia, Saxony, the Habsburg monarchy and well beyond the boundaries of France and German-speaking countries to other mercantilist states on the European continent. In this milieu a distinct social figure or a whole range of slightly nuanced figures was flourishing, which is the subject of this special volume: the artisanal-scientific expert. The eighteenth-century artisanal-scientific experts supported by the mercantilist state were truly hybrid figures. Among them were mathematicians, chemists, mineralogists, botanists, and explorers of the Earth, who were members of scientific academies and other learned societies, authors of scientific books and papers, public lecturers and teachers, mostly in the newly founded engineering colleges and technical schools. These men were thus socially recognized as savants or Naturforscher. At the same time they were also technical experts who possessed technical knowledge about mining, military engineering, civil architecture, forestry, gardening and agriculture, dyeing and calico-printing, the manufacture of glass and porcelain and so on. Living in both an academic and an industrial world, and further participating in the world of state bureaucracy, they personally spurred the circulation of knowledge and objects between these worlds. Persons who intimately combined natural and technological inquiry with certain occupations in industry and commerce were by no means a novelty of the eighteenth ANNALS OF SCIENCE, Vol. 69, No. 3, July 2012, 303 306

Experiments at the Intersection of Experimental History, Technological Inquiry, and Conceptually Driven Analysis: A Case Study from Early Nineteenth-Century France

The paper examines differences of styles of experimentation in the history of science. It presents arguments for a historization of our historial and philosophical notion of experimentation, which question the common view that experimental philosophy was the only style of experimentation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It argues, in particular, that experimental history and technological inquiry were accepted styles of academic experimentation at the time. These arguments are corroborated by a careful analysis of a case study, which is embedded in a comparative historical overview.

The Creative Power of Paper Tools in Early Nineteenth-Century Chemistry

Chemical formulas, such as H2O for water or C2H60 for alcohol, were introduced by the Swedish chemist Jacob Berzelius in two articles published in 1813 and 1814.2 From the late 1820s onward, Berzelian formulas began to spread, at first in organic chemistry, then in increasingly different forms in other chemical domains. The various epistemic functions of this sign system have been largely ignored by historians and philosophers of science. To date, we have no detailed analysis of their application in chemical practices. In many historical overviews, Berzelian formulas are mentioned, but only to characterize them as precursors of structural and stereochemical formulas that do not deserve much. attention in their own right.3 There are various reasons for this neglect. Many historians of science conceive of Berzelian formulas as representations of an atomic theory which was much better represented by verbal language or by Daltonian diagrams. Others have claimed that they were surrogates for names, and expressed sheer empirical findings, namely stoichiometric and volumetric laws. In both cases, Berzelian formulas figure as a passive medium for pre-existing knowledge. For example, the French philosopher Francois Dagognet wrote about them: The first mode of writing, which merely translated speech by applying letters and vocal symbols, hardly offers any advantage (in comparison with spoken chemistry which it perpetuates)... this stenography will occupy or invade chemistry during the first half of the nineteenth century until that moment (rather near) when its insufficiencies will become obvious. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it was mainly preached by Berzelius who established the rules of its application.4

Savant officials in the Prussian mining administration.

Summary In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Prussian State supported savants who combined learned inquiry into nature with technical work. Members of the physical and mathematical classes of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences were involved in State projects such as surveying for the construction of canals, chemical analysis of Silesian iron, production of porcelain and of beet sugar. Some of these men were truly ‘hybrid’ experts living both in the worlds of State-directed manufacture and academic natural inquiry. Among these savant experts there was a particular sub-group that is at the centre of this paper: mining officials who were also recognized as mineralogists, geologists and chemists. The paper describes and analyses the training and the varied technical and scientific activities of these ‘savant officials’. At the centre of attention are the travels of inspection of the mineralogist and mining official Carl Abraham Gerhard (1738–1821) in the late 1760s. I argue that Gerhards travels of inspection were at the same time geological travels and that savant officials like Gerhard made a significant contribution to the fledgling science of geology.

Chemical experts at the Royal Prussian Porcelain Manufactory

Abstract The royal porcelain manufactories in eighteenth-century Continental Europe were sites of production that implemented chemistry in three different areas: manufacture of porcelain paste, preparation of pigments for ornamenting porcelain and construction of furnaces along with choice of fuel for firing porcelain. This paper provides evidence for the Royal Prussian Porcelain Manufactory in Berlin being a site of chemistry by studying the activities of its so-called Arcanisten, laboratory workers (Laboranten) and chemists between 1787 and 1795. It pays particular attention to the questions of who implemented chemistry and how this was done.

The Prussian Mining Official Alexander von Humboldt

Summary From summer 1792 until spring 1797, Alexander von Humboldt was a mining official in the Franconian parts of Prussia. He visited mines, inspected smelting works, calculated budgets, wrote official reports, founded a mining school, performed technological experiments, and invented a miners’ lamp and respirator. At the same time he also participated in the Republic of Letters, corresponded with savants in all Europe, and was a member of the Leopoldine Carolinian Academy and the Berlin Gesellschaft Naturforschender Freunde. He collected minerals, made geognostic observations, performed chemical and physiological experiments, read the newest scientific journals, and prepared and published texts on mineralogy, geognosy, chemistry, botany and physiology. Humboldt did his scientific investigations alongside his administrative and technical work. This raises the question of whether there were fruitful interactions between Humboldts technical-administrative work and (parts of) his natural inquiry. I argue that the mining official Humboldt was a late eighteenth-century figure of hybrid savant-technician. Mines and smelting works provided numerous opportunities for studies of nature. Humboldt systematically used inspection tours for mineralogical and geognostic observations. He transformed mines into chemical laboratories, and he transferred knowledge and material items from his natural inquiries in mines to academic institutions. The main objective of this paper is to illuminate the persona of savant-technician (or scientific-technological expert) along with Humboldts mixed technological and scientific work during his term as mining official.

Depersonalizing the Arcanum

The more formal education and training of technical experts was a characteristic feature of industrialization in continual Europe. Apart from the creation of new kinds of teaching institutions, it also involved the social establishment of new attitudes concerning craft secrecy. Until 1787, the arcanists and laboratory workers of the Royal Prussian Porcelain Manufactory kept their expertise a personal (or private) secret. The subsequent depersonalization of the arcanum and its transformation into the property of the Manufactory was part of the Prussian state’s strategy to promote a new type of technical expert. This new expert would be adapted to the high degree of division of labor in modern manufactories. He would be knowledgeable, as well as willing to cooperate, to share knowledge, and to provide long-term service to the state. In the decades around 1800, “scientists” (Naturforscher) played an important role in educating and training the new type of technical experts.

In the Thick of Organic Matter

Between summer 1806 and spring 1808 the French chemist Louis Jacques Thenard (1777–1857) performed a series of experiments with ethers. At the time, ethers had already a history. The properties of pure ether, prepared from spirit of wine and sulfuric acid, were first described in an article by the German chemist August S. Frobenius, published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1730. As Frobenius had commercial interests, he kept the method of preparation secret. Together with his English colleague Godfrey Hanckwitz he wanted to sell pure ether as a novel, most effective remedy. But immediately after Frobenius’ publication several British, French and German chemists and apothecaries set out to reproduce pure ether, and in 1741 Cromwell Mortimer made the production process public. Twenty years later, chemists and apothecaries had tested further possibilities of producing ether from spirit of wine and acids other than sulfuric acid, such as nitric acid, muriatic acid (today hydrochloric acid), and acetic acid. Hence the article “ether,” published in Pierre Joseph Macquer’s famous dictionnaire de chimie, mentioned different ethers, such as “ordinary” or “vitriolic ether,” “nitric ether,” “acetic ether” and so on (Macquer 1766, 1:455–470). By the end of the eighteenth century the two chemical teachers of Thenard, Antoine-Francois Fourcroy and Louis N. Vauquelin, undertook collaborative efforts to explain the formation of ordinary ether. Since the operation yielded many byproducts of ether, and since sulfurous acid was one of the byproducts, many chemists believed that ordinary ether resulted from the oxidation of alcohol (contained in spirit of wine) by sulfuric acid; according to this understanding the sulfurous acid was the reduction product of sulfuric acid. This explanation was congruent with chemists’ more general views about the action of strong mineral acids on organic substances. For example, in his chemical textbook Fourcroy pointed out that strong acids “engender a profound alteration of plant materials. When they are power-