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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
Eighteenth-century British chemistry presents the historian with an interesting paradox. As theorists, the British hardly distinguished themselves. Joseph Black, the foremost professor of chemistry during the second half of the century and a man of great intellectual ability, began his career with a brilliant paper on pneumatic chemistry and then promptly abandoned the world of published research. Skillful investigators such as Stephen Hales and Joseph Priestley made many important discoveries, but the theories they offered as interpretations of their observations created as many difficulties as they resolved. Although British chemists hypothesized with gusto, the aethers and phlogistons they invoked to explain chemical phenomena lacked intellectual as well as physical gravity and historians of chemistry have not yet succeeded in clarifying the relationship between this welter of ideas and Lavoisier's successful recasting of chemical theory during the final decades of the century. Despite the inadequacy of its theoretical concepts, however, philosophical chemistry flourished in Great Britain during the eighteenth century. Although the absence of a unifying theory led to a rather undisciplined pattern of growth, the number of chemists actively studying philosophical problems certainly increased. Why did so many natural philosophers become interested in such a theoretically impoverished subject, and why, after two generations of intense investigation and reflection, were they unable to formulate an adequate general theory?
An earlier version of this paper was read in December, 1973 at the joint annual meeting of the History of Science Society and the American Historical Association. I am grateful to Keith Baker and Frederic L. Holmes, who served as commentators at that original session, and to Nathan Sivin for suggesting ways in which this paper could be improved.
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43 For a thorough discussion of the Newtonian-Stahlian debates, see Thackray, Atoms and Powers.
44 As Cullen told his students, “the chemical principles really [are] mixts.…[Although] they appear to be simple & perhaps the first degree of mixture, & [although] they are really the elements of compounds in Stahl's sense, & tho by chemical resolutions we do not arrive at the real & most simple elements of all bodies, yet it is useful to know the principles of compounds”: Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh, MSS. C. 15, 1, fol. 16 r&v.
45 Ironically, although the theories of attraction and repulsion employed by British chemists derived almost nothing from practice, James Watt made considerable use of Black's research on a related topic, namely heat, while performing the experiments which led him to the discovery of that most significant of all eighteenth-century improvements, the separate condenser for the steam engine: cf. Cardwell, D.S.L.. From Watt to Clausius (London, 1971), ch. 2Google Scholar; A. L. Donovan, ”Towards a Social History of Technological Ideas: Black, Joseph, Watt, James and the Separate Condenser Proceedings of ihe University of Illinois International Symposium on the History and Phitosophy of Technology (Urbana, forthcoming).Google Scholar
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