Siegfried R. From Elements to Atoms: A History of Chemical Composition

American Philosophical Society. 2002. 286 p.

BOOK was first conceived, and some portions written, for the students in the class of history of chemistry that I was teaching during the I980s following the retirement of Aaron J. Ihde at the University of Wisconsin. My aim in teaching these chemistry and pre-med senior students was to enlarge their understanding of the nature of chemical science and explain how the concepts they were leaing in their chemistry classes came to be. It is both to those students and to Aaron Ihde that I owe the inspir-ation for this attempt to present a simple, readable account of how in the eighteenth century chemical composition slowly abandoned the centuries-long tradition of metaphysical elements of EARTH, AIR, FIRE, and WATER, or the Paracelsanv ariation of MERCURY,SU LPHUR, and SALT.B y the end of the eighteenth century, chemical composition had become expressible in terms of operationally defined material simple bodies made verbally explicit by Lavoisier's successful new chemistry, wherein the elements were defined as any body not yet shown to be compound. Just twenty years af-ter Lavoisier, John Dalton introduced the concept of atomic weight unique to each simple body, from which came the mode quantitative structure of chemical composition. Hence the story of the movement of chemical theory from metaphysical ELEMENTS to operationally-functional ATOMS.

Contents

The Seventeenth Century: Chemistry Comes of Age
Robert Boyle: The Sceptical Chymist
The Stagnation of Chemical Theory: 1675-I750
The Development of the Idea of Neutral Salt
An Historiographic Digression: Phlogiston
How Air Retued to Chemistry: A Brief History of Air 1600-1750
The Retu of the Four Elements
French Chemistry circa I760
The Marriage of Air and Phlogiston
Lavoisier and the Anti-Phlogistic Doctrine
A Compositional Nomenclature
A Comparative View of the Phlogistic and Anti-Phlogistic Philosophies
Assimilation and Anticipation
John Dalton and the Chemical Atomic Theory