THE CHEMICAL

REVOLUTION
HSS102 HISTORY OF SCIENCE
 INTRODUCTION
• Unlike the historiographical attention to physical and life sciences, the history of Chemistry
was often ignored by historians of science. Until recently, the Chemical Revolution was the
Cinderella of ‘scientific revolutions’ in the discipline of the history of science.
• There are several reasons for this comparative neglect. What is considered chemical today
originated in variety of different contexts and places. Alchemists, apothecaries (i.e. those who
prepared and sold medicines and drugs), doctors, dyers and metal workers all engaged in
activities that we might now think of as having to do with the origins of Chemistry. This made
the story of a unified history of Chemistry with definitive origins difficult.
• Secondly, until recently, historians of science have regarded themselves as historians of ideas.
From this perspective, practical sciences such as Chemistry have often simply seemed less
worthy of historical attention. Physics and Biology have had their big philosophical ideas.
There seem to be no clear equivalents in the history of Chemistry.
• In general, the Chemical Revolution is squarely located in the life and activities of French
Chemist Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) during the 18th century. However, there were
predecessors like Robert Boyle (1627-1691), Paracelsus (1493-1541), Georg Stahl (1659-1734)
who regarded themselves as committed to the New Science.
 CHEMISTRY UNREFORMED?
• Alchemy and metallurgy were practiced actively during the 16 th and 17th centuries. The
practitioners regarded themselves as being at the forefront of the New Science during the
16th and 17th centuries.
• The aim of their science was to understand the hidden relationship between natural
substances and to find a key that would allow the transmutation of one element into another.
Apothecaries and doctors were interested in the medicinal properties of substances.
• Medical reformers like Paracelsus (1493-1541), the Swiss alchemist and physician was keen to
develop new theories of matter that would contribute to medicinal application of substances.
He pioneered the use of chemicals and minerals in medicine. He also suggested the
biochemical theory of digestion. He used chemistry and chemical analogies in his teachings to
medical students. He called his new practice iatrochemistry.
• Similarly, the Dutch chemist and physician Joan Baptiste van Helmont (1580-1644) introduced
many new ideas and methods in chemistry. He is considered as the founder of Pneumatic
Chemistry, the practice of the 17th century aimed at understanding the physical property of
gases and how they relate to chemical reactions and composition of matter.
 CHEMISTRY UNREFORMED?
• Michael Sendivogius (1566-1636), Polish alchemist to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II
claimed to be able to transmute elements into one another and to have particular mystic
insights into the operations of nature. His alchemical practice involved purification and
creation of various acids, metals and other chemical compounds. He is the author of Novum
Lumen Chymicum (New Chemical Light, 1604) among other works.
• The works of Michael Sendivogius was read widely including by Isaac Newton who
investigated alchemy as part of his grand scheme to recover systematically the lost
knowledge of the ancients.
• Alchemists developed a range of techniques and equipment designed to investigate the
properties of different substances. They also developed an arcane language and symbolism to
hide their knowledge of such matters from the uninitiated.
• Numerous publications on alchemy in Latin and German were published under the name
Basil Valentine during the 17th century. They have been translated into many European
languages, including English, French, Russian and others. Alchemical tracts such as
Triumphant Chariot of Antimony (1604) emphasized the medicinal properties of substances.
This was the main concern of apothecaries and doctors investigating the properties of matter.
 CHEMISTRY UNREFORMED?
• Joan Baptiste van Helmont conducted experiment in which he demonstrated the growth of
plants into tree as a result of absorbing water. He was a keen observer of nature. Helmont
argued that digestion was aided by a chemical reagent or “ferment” within the body. He
proposed and described different stages of digestion.
• The Italian metallurgist Vannoccio Biringuccio (1480-1539) produced a manual titled From
Pyrotechnics. He established metal casting factories and his book From Pyrotechnics
explained the foundry practice. Further, the work dealt with the details of mining practice,
the extraction and refining of numerous metals, alloys such as brass and compounds used in
foundries and explosives. De la Pirotechnia is one of the earliest technical manuscripts to
survive from the Renaissance.
• Robert Boyle (1627-1691), the Anglo-Irish natural philosopher carried out chemical
experiments as a way of trying to understand the fundamental mechanical properties of
matter. In his book Sceptical Chymist (1660), Boyle dismissed Aristotle, Paracelsus and
Helmont theories of matter in favour of corpuscular perspective. One of Boyle’s aims in
embracing the mechanical philosophy as an explanation for chemical phenomena was to
make chemistry itself part of natural philosophy. He is considered to be the founder of
chemistry and pioneer of modern experimental method.
 PNEUMATIC CHEMISTRY
• During the 18th century, the pneumatic chemistry or the chemistry of gases gained
prominence. Before the 18th century, the air was usually taken as a single substance, one of
the four Aristotelian elements. 18th century chemists started to discover different kinds of air
with varieties of chemical properties and effects.
• Investigating the chemical properties of air was an 18th century innovation. There were
natural philosophers like Stephen Hales, Joseph Black who argued in their writings based on
experiments that air was chemically active.
• The key figure in 18th century pneumatic chemistry was the English chemist Joseph Priestly
(1733-1804). In 1774, he published Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air
that earned him his stature as a chemist. What did Priestly do in this work? Based on the
earlier ideas and works of Stephen Hales and Joseph Black, Priestly established the existence
of a number of different kinds of air each with specific properties. The two examples from his
investigations are nitrous oxide and oxygen. Building on the ideas of German chemist Georg
Ernst Stahl (1659-1734) on Phlogiston, Priestly argued that different kinds of air had a range
of chemical properties depending on the quantity of phlogiston they contained. Priestly
argued that the best kinds of airs for human life were those that contained the least
phlogiston.
 PNEUMATIC CHEMISTRY
• Some of the followers of Joseph Priestly extended his theory to
medicine. Thomas Beddoes (1760-1808), the English physician and
Oxford professor of chemistry felt that Priestly’s discoveries could
provide the basis for a new system of medicine. Beddoes
established the Pneumatic Institute in Bristol in order to execute
his theories about the medical benefits of breathing different airs
to practical use. Beddoes hired Humphry Davy to carry out
experiments on the chemical and medicinal properties of the
various kinds of air. The concern of the chemists of the time was
not confined purely to theory but put the knowledge into practical
use.
JOSEPH PRIESTLEY AND BERTHELOT’S VIEW
• ‘There have been few, if any, revolutions in science so great, so
sudden and so general, as the prevalence of what is now usually
termed the new system of chemistry, or that of the Antiphlogistians,
over the doctrine of Stahl, which was at one time thought to have
been the greatest discovery that had ever been made in the
science’. Priestley, Experiments and Observations Relating to the
Analysis of Atmospherical Air, 1796, p. 35.
• This view of the Chemical Revolution was given its definitive modern
form at the end of the nineteenth century, when the chemist and
historian of chemistry Marcelin Berthelot used the occasion of the
Académy des Sciences’s centenary celebrations of the French
Revolution to eulogize Lavoisier as the father of modern chemistry
 PHLOGISTON VERSUS OXYGEN
• Who should be considered the discoverer of the gas Oxygen?
• Carl Scheele, a Swedish chemist who during early 1770s succeeded in
isolating “free air” through a variety of methods.
• Joseph Priestly who isolated a new air in 1774 and his identification of it as
dephlogisticated air in 1775.
• Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier who repeated Priestly’s experiments and
redesignated the air as Oxygen in 1776.
• Lavoisier (1743-1794) by 1770s was a highly respected French chemist and a
member of French Academy of Sciences, a learned society founded in 1666 by
Louis XIV. He was born in a wealthy family of the nobility in Paris. His scientific
interest were generated in his school days in Paris. Although he studied Law
subsequently he never continued the profession but devoted his intellectual
energies in science. He showed interest in Geology and chemistry. In 1768,
Lavoisier was appointed as a member in the Academy of Sciences.
 PHLOGISTON VERSUS OXYGEN
• During the late 1760s, Lavoisier was particularly interested in the chemistry of the air and the
role it played in combustion and the isolation of metals from their ores (calxes). Calx is a
substance formed from an ore or mineral that has been heated.
• Combustion: rapid chemical combination of a substance with oxygen, involving the
production of heat and light. A chemical reaction between a fuel and an oxidant – the
atmospheric air that produces oxidized often gaseous products.
• Phlogiston theorists argued that metals were a combination of a calx and phlogiston. During
combustion, phlogiston from the fire combined with calx to produce a metal.
• By about 1770, Lavoisier was convinced that the air must play some role in the reaction. He
claimed in his communication to the French Academy of Sciences that the basic process
taking place during combustion was the combination of the burning substance with aerial
matter and that this accounted for the fact that substances increased in weight on
combustion. By 1775, having come across Joseph Priestly’s account of dephologisticated air,
Lavoisier refined his account that it was the dephologisticated air, which he called Oxygen
that played the key role in combustion.
 PHLOGISTON VERSUS OXYGEN
• In Introducing Oxygen, Lavoisier abandoned the phlogiston theory. In its place he offered a
comprehensive new theory based around oxygen. Lavoisier wanted his explanation of oxygen
to be the basis of a new and unified chemical system.
• An important feature of Lavoisier’s attempt to reform chemistry was the way in which he
developed a whole new chemical language using his new theory. In 1782, Lavoisier along with
fellow chemists published the Methods of Chemical Nomenclature in which they described a
new way of naming chemicals on the basis of the oxygen theory. Elements, oxides, acids,
metals, gases were formulated afresh.
• Whether it is defining oxides, acids, metals or salts the basis of evaluation centred around
Oxygen. This new system embodied Lavoisier’s chemical theories. By adopting it, chemists
were indicating their acceptance of the Oxygen theory.
• Lavoisier’s new system faced resistance and controversy although it was accepted by
chemists soon. The supporters of phlogiston theory like Joseph Priestly never accepted it.
Henry Cavendish, another English chemist remained convinced of the superiority of
phlogiston’s theory.
 PHLOGISTON VERSUS OXYGEN
• In France, Lavoisier’s system gained prominence. For a new
generation of natural philosophers in France, the keys to progress
in science were quantification and accurate measurements.
• Lavoisier’s insistence on carefully weighing the ingredients and
products of chemical reactions and his insistence that the changes
in weight provided the crucial evidence for what went on in such
reactions fit in well with the concern for quantification in wider
philosophical system.
• Lavoisier’s efforts to reform the language of chemistry and his
insistence on the comprehensive system of chemistry mixed well
with broader French philosophical concerns.
 CHEMISTRY REFORMED?
• Was Lavoisier’s new Chemistry quickly and universally adopted? Although Lavoisier’s theory
was adopted comparatively quickly and comprehensively, there were further reforms made
in Chemistry during the 19th century in the works of Humphry Davy (1778-1829) and John
Dalton (1766-1844).
• Humphry Davy’s experiments undermined the idea that acidity was due to the presence of
oxygen. He identified chlorine and succeeded in isolating iodine. His electrical experiments
involved isolating sodium and potassium and thus introduced a new field electrochemistry.
• English chemist John Dalton made revisions to Lavoisier’s understanding of element. He set
out to give the elements a real, physical existence. The atomic theory of chemical elements
entail that each element had a unique atom associated with it. He set out to try to define the
relative weights of the atoms of the different elements. In the first part of his New System of
Chemical Philosophy (1808), Dalton used the assumption about the ways in which atoms
combined together to make different elements to calculate the relative atomic weights of
Lavoisier’s different elements.
 CONCLUSION

• Was there a Chemical Revolution during the late 18th century? It is difficult to sustain a notion
that chemistry during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was somehow left out of the
Scientific Revolution. The ideas and practices of Boyle or Paracelsus may seem peculiar to us
now but there is no evidence that they were considered peculiar back then.
• The practitioners were widely recognized by their contemporaries as important contribution
to the New Science. Chemists such as Joseph Priestly or Joseph Black were viewed as having
made important contributions to natural philosophy as well as chemistry.
• Historians recognize that chemists before Lavoisier made decisive contributions.
• Lavoisier’s reforms of chemistry had a major impact. His rejection of the phlogiston theory
was decisive and his introduction of quantitative methods and careful measurement set new
standards of accuracy in chemical analysis.
• On the other hand we have also noticed that Davy and Dalton were trying to establish their
won systems of chemistry.