This paper discusses fourteen letters that Heinrich Will (1812-1890), Justus Liebig's (1803-1873) successor at the University of Giessen, sent to Robert Warington (1807-1867), the chemical operator at Apothecaries' Hall in London, between 1842 and 1854. The correspondence illuminates a range of topics related to the development of the British chemical community in mid-Victorian Britain - its organisations, networks, and commercial opportunities, as well as offering insights into the importance of family, friendship, and collegiality in sustaining scientific careers. Studying such an exchange of material and textual knowledge helps to further understand how science was organised and ideas disseminated in a key period for institutional development in chemistry.
Robert Fludd was a thinker full of contradictions. He is famous for his theosophical system and for his experimental chymical constructions as well as for his Galenic medical practices. Furthermore, Fludd had his works published in luxurious folio formats by the publisher Johann Theodor de Bry, and the spectacular etchings and many of the engravings in his books were executed by Matthäus Merian the Elder. Fludd's elaborate explanations of these images reveal him to be a natural philosopher who expressed his thoughts graphically. To what extent, however, were the ideas for the images, and the images in Fludd's books themselves, his own? A discussion of preserved textual and image sources suggests that Fludd can indeed be understood as a chymical thinker and practitioner who contributed to the visual and artisanal episteme of his time. This article demonstrates this interpretation by using both well-known sources and the recently rediscovered, lavishly illustrated, master copy, Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg Frankfurt am Main, MS lat. qu. 15, which served as a template for the section De technica microcosmi historia of Fludd's main work Utriusque cosmi historia.
This paper examines the identification of chemical elements using mineral analysis, focusing on the controversy surrounding the "tantalum metals" between 1801 and 1866. Of these metals, only tantalum and niobium are still recognised as elements today; the discovery claims of columbium, pelopium, ilmenium and dianium were all retracted or refuted. Despite the theoretical and institutional changes that chemistry underwent during this time, the debates on the tantalum metals point towards a continuity in the identification of metals. For most of the nineteenth century, chemists continued to use the same types of analytical procedures as their mid-eighteenth-century predecessors. These analytical methods enabled the identification of metals based on the chemical behaviour of their compounds, without requiring their isolation in the form of simple substances (that is, as metals). Accordingly, the central questions in all of the debates on the tantalum metals were the correct identification of the properties of compounds and the elimination of impurities, rather than the simplicity of the new metals. The story of the tantalum metals therefore illustrates the fact that, despite the definition of chemical elements as simple substances, the discovery of new (metallic) elements only rarely coincided with the isolation of new simple substances.
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