The Fontana History of Chemistry
The Fontana History of Chemistry, which draws extensively on both the author’s own original research and that of other scholars world wide, is conceived as a work of synthesis. Nothing like it has been attempted in decades.Beginning with the first tentative chemical explorations where primitive technology and techniques were deployed, Dr Brock proceeds via the alchemists’ futile, but frequently profitable, efforts to turn lead into gold to recount the emergence of the modern discipline of chemistry as fashioned by Boyle, Lavoisier and Dalton. He provides a particularly generous critical account of chemical developments during the last 150 years, emphasizing the roles of purity, analysis and synthesis, the exploration of reaction mechanisms, and the industrialization of chemical change, while also weighing up just how chemistry has been taught and disseminated.While brilliantly successful in explaining and exploiting chemical change, modern chemistry - in academy and factory alike - with its recondite language and symbolism and its associations with pollution and danger, prompts more fear than excitement in the uninitiated bystander. This book seeks to enlighten that bystander: to assess links between theory and practice, to reveal recurrent cycles and themes, and to encourage a heightened awareness of the human dimensions of the chemical sciences which might in turn promote a better public understanding of chemistry and the modern chemical and phamaceutical industries..
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FONTANA HISTORY OF CHEMISTRY
(Editor: Roy Porter)
THE FONTANA HISTORY OF
CHEMISTRY
William H. Brock
CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE FONTANA HISTORY OF SCIENCE
1 On the Nature of the Universe and the Hermetic Museum
The Demise of Alchemy and its Literary Tradition
Boyle’s Physical Theory of Matter
The Vacuum Boylianum and its Aftermath
4 A New System of Chemical Philosophy
The Origins of Dalton’s Theory
5 Instructions for the Analysis of Organic Bodies
The Supply of Apparatus and Chemicals
Liebig, Organic Analysis and the Research School
7 On the Constitution and Metamorphoses of Chemical Compounds
The Establishment of Quantivalence
Kekulé and the Theory of Chemical Structure
The Triumph of Structural Theory
8 Chemistry Applied to Arts and Manufactures
10 On the Dissociation of Substances Dissolved in Water
Electrochemistry from Faraday to Arrhenius
The Reception of the Ionic Theory
Frankland’s State-sponsored Chemistry
Twentieth-century Developments in Teaching
William Crookes, Chemical Editor
13 The Nature of the Chemical Bond
Spreading the Electronic Theory
14 Structure and Mechanism in Organic Chemistry
The Lapworth-Thiele-Robinson Tradition
The Michael-Flürscheim- Vorlãnder Tradition
The Electronic Theory of Organic Reactions
Organizing the Structure of Organic Chemistry
The Spread of Physical Organic Chemistry
15 The Renaissance of Inorganic Chemistry
Sidgwick’s Electronic Interpretation of Co-ordination Chemistry
Australian and Japanese Chemistry
Co-ordination Chemistry in Australia
‘Chemical Industry, Upheld by Pure Science Sustains the Production of Man’s Necessities’, frontispiece to A. Cressy Morrison, Man in A Chemical World: the service of chemical industry (London & New York: Scribner’s, 1937) Reproduced courtesy of Scribner’s, Collier Macmillan, New York
Academic study of the history of science has advanced dramatically, in depth and sophistication, during the last generation. More people than ever are taking courses in the history of science at all levels, from the specialized degree to the introductory survey; and, with science playing an ever more crucial part in our lives, its history commands an influential place in the media and in the public eye.
Over the past two decades particularly, scholars have developed major new interpretations of science’s history. The great bulk of such work, however, has been published in detailed research monographs and learned periodicals, and has remained hard of access, hard to interpret. Pressures of specialization have meant that few survey works have been written that have synthesized detailed research and brought out wider significance.
It is to rectify this situation that the Fontana History of Science has been set up. Each of these wide-ranging volumes examines the history, from its roots to the present, of a particular field of science. Targeted at students and the general educated reader, their aim is to communicate, in simple and direct language intelligible to non-specialists, well-digested and vivid accounts of scientific theory and practice as viewed by the best modern scholarship. The most eminent scholars in the discipline, academics well-known for their skills as communicators, have been commissioned.
The volumes in this series survey the field and offer powerful overviews. They are intended to be interpretative, though not primarily polemical. They do not pretend to a timeless, definitive quality or suppress differences of viewpoint, but are meant to be books of and for their time; their authors offer their own interpretations of contested issues as part of a wider, unified story and a coherent outlook.
