Compound Histories

i
Compound Histories
Lissa Roberts and Simon Werrett, 2018|doi 10.1163/9789004325562_001

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC License.
For use by the Author only | 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV

ii
Cultural Dynamics of Science
Editors
Lissa Roberts (Science, Technology and Policy Studies (STePS), University of

Twente, The Netherlands)
Agust Nieto-Galan (Centre dHistria de la Cincia (CEHIC) & Facultat de
Cincies (Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona, Spain)
Oliver Hochadel (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientficas, Instituci
Mil i Fontanals, Barcelona, Spain)
Advisory Board
Miruna Achim (Universidad Autnoma MetropolitanaCuajimalpa,

Ciudad de Mxico, CDMX)
Warwick Anderson (University of Sydney)
Mitchell Ash (Universitt Wien)
Jos Ramn Bertomeu-Snchez (Universitat de Valencia)
Paola Bertucci (Yale University)
Daniela Bleichmar (University of Southern California)
Andreas Daum (University of Buffalo)
Graeme Gooday (University of Leeds)
Paola Govoni (Universit di Bologna)
Juan Pimentel (CSIC, Madrid)
Stefan Pohl (Universidad del Rosario, Bogot)
Arne Schirrmacher (Humboldt Universitt zu Berlin)
Ana Simes (Universidade de Lisboa)
Josep Simon (Universidad del Rosario, Bogot)
Jonathan Topham (University of Leeds)
VOLUME 2
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cds

iii
Compound Histories
Materials, Governance and Production, 1760-1840
Edited by
Lissa L. Roberts
Simon Werrett
LEIDEN | BOSTON

iv
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Cover illustration: The Dissolution, or The Alchymist producing an Aetherial Representation.

An alchemist using a crown-shaped bellows to blow the flames of a furnace and heat a glass vessel in
which the House of Commons is distilled; satirizing the dissolution of parliament by Pitt. Coloured
etching by J. Gillray, 1796. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London. Library reference:
ICV No 11565. CC BY 4.0 (The title of the work situated below the etching is removed).
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Title: Compound histories : materials, governance, and production, 1760-1840
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Europe--History--18th century. | Chemical engineering--Europe--History--19th century. | Chemistry,
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Contents
Contents v
Contents
Acknowledgmentsvii
List of Illustrationsix
Notes on Contributorsxi
Introduction: A More Intimate Acquaintance1

Lissa L. Roberts and Simon Werrett
Part 1
Materials and Material Objects
1 Household Oeconomy and Chemical Inquiry35

Simon Werrett
2 The Case of Coal57

Lissa L. Roberts and Joppe van Driel
3 Capturing the Invisible: Heat, Steam and Gases in France and Great
Britain, 1750-180085
Marie Thbaud-Sorger
4 Spreading the Revolution: Guytons Fumigating Machine in Spain.

Politics, Technology, and Material Culture (1796-1808)106
Elena Serrano
5 Arsenic in France. The Cultures of Poison During the First Half of the
Nineteenth Century131
Jos Ramn Bertomeu Snchez
Part 2
Chemical Governance and the Governance of Chemistry
6 Relations between the State and the Chemical Industry in France,

1760-1800: The Case of Ceruse 161
Christine Lehman

vi Contents
7 Between Industry and the Environment: Chemical Governance in

France, 1770-1830184
Thomas Le Roux
8 Renegotiating Debt: Chemical Governance and Money in the Early

Nineteenth-Century Dutch Empire205
Andreas Weber
9 How to Govern Chemical Courses. The Case of the Paris cole de

pharmacie During Vauquelins Direction, 1803-1829226
Sacha Tomic
Part 3
Revisiting the History of Production
10 Teaching Chemistry in the French Revolution: Pedagogy, Materials

and Politics 251
Bernadette Bensaude Vincent
11 The Subversive Humphry Davy: Aristocracy and Establishing

Chemical Research Laboratories in Late Eighteenth- and Early
Nineteenth-Century England269
Frank A.J.L. James
12 Wholesale Pharmaceutical Manufacturing in London, c.1760 c.1840:

Sites, Production and Networks289
Anna Simmons
13 Chemical Glasgow and its Entrepreneurs, 1760-1860311

John R.R. Christie
14 Relations between Industry and Academe in Scotland, and the Case of

Dyeing: 1760 to 1840333
Robert G.W. Anderson
Bibliography of Secondary Sources 355

Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments vii
Acknowledgments
This volume is the result of a collaborative project, built on the support and
participation of a number of institutions and valued colleagues. It is a pleasure
to acknowledge them here. Without a grant from the Netherlands Organization
for Scientific Research (NWO) to fund the research network that gave rise to
this book, our collaboration would have remained a dream. Bringing together
colleagues from across Europe and the United States was an expensive propo-
sition; a number of institutions and organizations supplemented our NWO
grant, providing both financial and material support. A word of thanks to the
Wellcome Trust, Society for History of Alchemy and Chemistry (SHAC), Maison
Franaise Oxford University, Catholic University of Leuven, Museo Galileo
(Florence), Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin), Thyssen
Foundation, European University Institute (Florence), Regione Toscana,
Museum Boerhaave (Leiden), Teylers Museum (Haarlem) and the Chemical
Heritage Foundation (Philadelphia).
While all the members and fellow travelers of our research network also
deserve thanks for their support and contributions, I would like to single out a
few colleagues for special thanks. Following our inaugural meeting in Oxford
in 2012, Geert Vanpaemel offered to host our first workshop in Leuven in 2013.
His hospitality was essential to the meetings overwhelming success. Simon
Werrett followed suit by hosting a one-day workshop in London later that year.
In early 2014, Elena Serrano spearheaded the funding and organization of our
next workshop at MPI in Berlin. Following a small gathering in Oxford three
months later that focused on how to incorporate digital methods into our
project, a larger group met that autumn in Florence, thanks to the amazing
hospitality of Stphane Van Damme and Marco Beretta. It was then my plea-
sure to host our networks final workshop in Haarlem and Leiden in June 2015.
Present there was Ernst Homburg, whose advice throughout our project was
invaluable. Whatever success we have achieved would not have been possible
without the generous efforts of these colleagues, for which great thanks are in
order.
The project is especially indebted to John Perkins. He was my initial partner
and network co-organizer. Despite increasing ill health, he tirelessly shared his
dedication and enthusiasm, which inspired us all. Though he finally felt unable
to contribute an essay to this volume, his encouragement and sage advice have
been unmissable. For that reason, it is an honor and privilege to dedicate this
volume to him.

viii Acknowledgments
Finally, I want to acknowledge what an enormous pleasure it has been to

work with Simon Werrett as my co-editor. Simon is the perfect partner: kind,
generous, patient and brilliant. I think we made a good team.
Lissa L. Roberts
July 2017

List of Illustrations
List Of Illustrations ix
List of Illustrations
Figures
3.1 Anon., Trade Card of Scanegatty, Machine Inventor and Demonstrator of

Physics Apparatus, c. 177589
3.2 Balloons92
4.1 A large disinfection apparatus for military hospitals and other public
spaces110
4.2. Sketch of the large version of Guytons disinfection apparatus as published in
the Semanario de Agricultura y Artes dirigido a los Prrocos110
4.3 A portable version of Guytons disinfection apparatus111
4.4 Sketch of the portable version of Guytons disinfection apparatus as published
in the Semanario de Agricultura y Artes dirigido a los Prrocos111
4.5 Fumigating machines made in Paris alongside those made in Madrid120
4.6 Fumigating machine for objects124
4.7 Fumigating machine for people124
4.8 Ideal Lazaretto. Memoria125
5.1 Lamiti dun Grand Chimiste nest pas un Bienfait des Dieux (The favor of a
great chemist is not a gift from the gods). Hand-colored lithograph caricature
by Honor Daumier (1841)152
6.1 Areas of white lead and ceruse privileges granted in 1780 and 1787 and locations
of ceruse manufactures, 1780-1794168
6.2 Valentino, Nouveau procd pour fabriquer le blanc de plomb et la cruse sans
faire usage du vinaigre (New process for manufacturing white lead and ceruse
without using vinegar)172
7.1 Jacques Franois Demachy, Art du distillateur deaux fortes etc. Laboratoire
pour les eaux fortes (The art of distilling aqua fortis, etc. Laboratory for aqua
fortis), Description des arts et mtiers (Paris, 1773), Part 2, Plate 1, Figure 2187
8.1 Sample of paper money with the value of one colonial guilder212
8.2 Sample of new colonial guilder produced at the mint in Utrecht in 1814 or
1815212
8.3 Balance used for the weighing of coins, eighteenth century219
8.4 Mineralogical map by Thomas Horsfield, ca. 1816220
12.1 Ground Plan of Apothecaries Hall, including the Trading Premises, 1771300
12.2 Plan of Hall laboratories taken from The Origin, Progress, and Present State of
the Various Establishments for Conducting Chemical Processes, and Other
Medicinal Preparations, at Apothecaries Hall (London: R. Gilbert, 1823)301
13.1 Section of David Smith, Plan of the City of Glasgow and its Environs, 1828320

x List Of Illustrations
Tables
2.1. Coal mines exploited for fertilizers (des mines de terre de houille)79
8.1 Chart comparing the fine metal content of silver coins involved in Goldbergs
reform program222
9.1 The coles directors and the professors of chemistry and pharmacy228
9.2 The coles various suppliers of chemicals244
9.3 The coles various suppliers of utensils245
9.4 The coles suppliers of instruments245
10.1 Berthollets Chemistry Course at the cole normale de lAn III264
Graphs
6.1 Request for a privilege: decision-making route181

9.1 Evolution of the coles accounts238
9.2 Evolution of the coles chemical & pharmacy courses expenditures241

Notes
Notes On on Contributors
Contributors xi
Notes on Contributors
Robert Anderson
is president and CEO of the Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia. He
previously served as director of the National Museums of Scotland (1984-92)
and the British Museum (1992-2002). He is currently a fellow of Clare Hall,
Cambridge and chairperson of the Society for the History of Alchemy and
Chemistry (SHAC). His publications include The Correspondence of Joseph
Black (London, 2012) and The Cradle of Chemistry: The early years of chemistry
at the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 2015).

is a philosopher, historian of science and technology, and emeritus professor at
Universit Paris 1 Panthon-Sorbonne. Her research topics span from the his-
tory and philosophy of chemistry to materials science and nanotechnology.
Among her publications are History of Chemistry (with I. Stengers, 1997);
Lavoisier. Mmoires dune rvolution (1994); Chemistry. The impure science,
(with J. Simon, 2008); and Fabriquer la vie. O va la biologie de synthse (2011).
Jos Ramn Bertomeu-Snchez

is director of the Institute for the History of Medicine and Science (University
of Valencia). His research has been focused on the history of science educa-
tion, material culture of science and other topics related to nineteenth-century
chemistry in France and Spain. He has also published on the history of forensic
medicine. His current project is about the emergence of scientific policing in
twentieth-century Spain. His last book is La verdad sobre el caso Lafarge
(Barcelona, 2015).
John R.R. Christie

is a historian of science and medicine who spent much of his career in the
History and Philosophy of Science Department at the University of Leeds. He
has worked latterly at the University of Oxford, and at the Max Planck Institut
fr Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin. His main area of research concerns
Scottish and English cultures of science and medicine, with a particular focus
on chemistry, during the period of the Enlightenment.
Joppe van Driel

received his PhD from the Department of Science, Technology and Policy
Studies (STePS), University of Twente, the Netherlands. He is currently revising

xii Notes On Contributors
his cum laude dissertation, The Filthy and the Fat: Oeconomy, chemistry and
resource management in the age of revolution, for publication as a monograph.
His dissertation and a number of related publications focus on the history of
chemistry and resource management during the period of the Industrial
Revolution.
Frank A.J.L. James

is Professor of the History of Science at the Royal Institution and University
College London. His has written widely on nineteenth-century science and
technology and their social and cultural contexts. He edited The Correspond
ence of Michael Faraday (London, 2011), wrote Michael Faraday: A very short
introduction (Oxford, 2010) and is currently studying Humphry Davys practical
work. He has been President of both the Newcomen Society and the British
Society for the History of Science.
Thomas Le Roux
works at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS France) in Paris.
His work deals with the impact of early industrialization on the environment
from 1700 to 1850. He is currently working on a comparative history of indus-
trial nuisances between Paris and London, as well as on the history of occu-
pational health, industrial accidents, and mining.
Christine Lehman
formerly taught physics and chemistry. She is the author of a Ph.D. dissertation
entitled Gabriel-Franois Venel (17231775): Sa place dans la chimie franaise du
XVIIIe sicle, which she defended at Paris X-Nanterre University in 2006. She
published the transcription of Venels chemistry course taught in the year 1761
(Dijon 2010). Her main research interest is eighteenth-century chemistry.
Lissa L. Roberts
is Professor of Long-Term Development of Science and Technology at the
University of Twente, the Netherlands, and has published widely on subjects
including the history of chemistry, scientific instruments, steam engines, the
history of the senses and global history. Her recent publications include
Accumulation and Management in Global Historical Perspective (special issue
of History of Science, 2014) and Practicing Oeconomy During the Late Eighteenth
Century (special issue of History and Technology, 2014).

Notes On Contributors xiii
Elena Serrano
received a PhD from Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona for her dissertation
Science for Women in the Spanish Enlightenment (2012), which she is currently
revising for publication as a book. In 2012-2015 she was postdoctoral fellow at
the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin where she currently
coordinates the project Convivencia: From the Iberian Pennsula to Global
Dynamics (500-1750). Her research focuses on the interplay between knowl-
edge, politics, societies, material culture and gender.
Anna Simmons
is an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Science and Tech
nology Studies at University College London. Her research and numerous
publications explore various aspects of the history of British chemistry
and pharmacy from c.1700 onwards, including the wholesale production of
pharmaceuticals and the origins of the pharmaceutical industry, with a par-
ticular focus on the laboratories and pharmaceutical trade at the Society of
Apothecaries.
Marie Thbaud-Sorger
is permanent Researcher at the C.N.R.S in History of Science and Technology,
Centre Alexandre Koyr, Paris. She published several books on early balloon-
ing, including Larostation au temps des Lumires (Paris, 2010, awarded by the
Acadmie franaise). Through the study of artifacts and innovative objects that
induce a new relationship with nature in urban contexts, her research explores
inventive practices in eighteenth-century Europe, at the crossroad of knowl-
edge of materials, market activities, social reform and technological hazards
management.
Sacha Tomic
is Researcher at the Universit Paris 1 Panthon-Sorbonne. His work focuses on
the history of chemistry in France during the long nineteenth century, with
special attention to teaching and practices of academic chemistry, the rela-
tionships between chemistry and other disciplines, and the professionalization
of chemistry in industrial society (expertise, chemical hazards, legal chem
istry). He is the author of numerous studies, including Comment la chimie a
transforme le monde. Une histoire en sept tableaux (Paris, 2013).
Andreas Weber
is an assistant professor in the department of Science, Technology and Policy
Studies (STePS) at theUniversity of Twentein the Netherlands. He is currently

xiv Notes On Contributors
finishing a monograph that examines the historical relationship between

science and colonial governance through the lens of everyday materials. He is
also involved in a digital humanities project, Making Sense of Illustrated
Handwritten Archives, directed toward developing search capability for illus-
trated archival material.
Simon Werrett
is the author of Fireworks: Pyrotechnic arts and sciences in European history
(University of Chicago Press, 2010). Since 2012 he has been a member of the
Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London.
He is currently working on a book entitled Thrifty Science, an exploration of
ingeniously improvised experiments performed in domestic settings in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and their value for thinking about the
sustainability of science today.

Introduction
Introduction: RobertsAcquaintance
A More Intimate and Werrett 1
Introduction: A More Intimate Acquaintance

Lissa L. Roberts and Simon Werrett
Power, transformation, promise, subjugation: terms that might easily be

invoked to describe the decades between 1760 and 1840. Together they point
toward the multi-faceted developments through which Europe took on its
modern character and dominant position in the world what this volume
refers to as compound histories. Simultaneously linked to the Baconian dic-
tum that knowledge is power and the brute facts of power-driven conquest
and exploitation, this period is characterized by the historical tensions through
which the promise of progress and subjugation of regions and resources
around the world fed off and gave rise to social, political, economic, cultural,
scientific, technological and environmental transformations. It was a time
marked by the interactive appearance of new, janus-faced forms of political
organization, scientific and technological capabilities, social and economic
configurations: the growth of democracy coupled with empire; increasing abil-
ities to harness the material world and its forces for productive ends coupled
with destructive wars and environmental degradation; opportunities for great
wealth creation coupled with new strains of poverty and deprivation.
It is this complex weave and the question of what binds its threads together
that continue to make the age of revolution so intriguing to historians.1 While
there is certainly no single answer to this question, which requires insights
drawn from multiple subdisciplines of history, the contention undergirding
this volume is that one key element has been insufficiently explored and inte-
grated into the larger picture of historical development. Rather than baldly
state what that is, let us turn to a voice from the period itself. In 1805 John
Playfair, Edinburgh professor of natural philosophy, wrote:
Nature, while she keeps the astronomer and the mechanician at a great
distance, seems to admit [the chemist] to a more intimate acquaintance
with her secrets. The vast powers which he has acquired over matter, the
astonishing transformations which he effects, his success in analysing
almost all bodies, and in reproducing so many, seems to promise that he
1 E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson,
1962).


2 Roberts And Werrett
shall one day discover the essence of a substance which he has so thor-
oughly subdued.2
Playfair viewed chemistry as the foremost scientific agent of the terms we have
identified as defining this period of history. The growing powers chemists exer-
cised over the material world, he declared, were leading to its subjugation,
yielding astonishing transformations and the promise of understanding and
absolute control. Though Playfair limited his remarks to the relations between
humans and the material world, he and countless others recognized and
engaged with chemistry in ways that brought the material and social realms
together. Through their manipulative interactions with an increasing range of
materials, chemists and chemistry left their mark virtually everywhere: increas-
ing agricultural yields, expanding the range and scale of industrial production,
extending the reach and precision of governance programs and practices,
spearheading social improvement and public health. But so too did they con-
tribute to environmental degradation through the unbridled exploitation of
resources and aggravated industrial pollution, as well as to unsafe labor condi-
tions and misery, the ferocity of warfare and the rapacious practices of empire.
The purpose of this volume is to raise broader attention to the position that
chemistry was once recognized to hold as an active component of the great
economic, social, and political developments of the period 1760-1840. It aims to
do two things. First, by exploring the historically intertwined realms of produc-
tion, governance and materials, it places chemistry at the center of processes
most closely identified with the construction of the modern world. This
includes chemistrys role in the interactive intensification of material and
knowledge production; the growth, direction and management of consump-
tion; environmental changes, regulation of materials, markets, landscapes and
societies; and practices embodied in political economy. Second, the volume
moves away from a narrative structured by a revolutionary break at the end of
the eighteenth century and the primacy of innovation-driven change. Instead
it aims to highlight the continuities and accumulation of less momentous
changes that framed historical development over time and across the various
spheres (the academic world, manufactures, public health and medicine, gov-
ernmental administration, civil society and agriculture) in which chemists and
chemistry operated.
Standard historical surveys tend to ignore eighteenth and early nineteenth-
century chemistry at best mentioning Lavoisier and the Chemical Revolution
or to subordinate it to physics and the mathematical sciences. Mechanization
and quantification are often privileged as prime movers of historical change,
2 John Playfair, Biographical Account of Hutton, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
5 (1805): 39-99, on 74.

Introduction: A More Intimate Acquaintance 3
joined (finally) by chemistry in a second industrial revolution during the final

decades of the nineteenth century.3 Switching from generalities to the more
detailed practices of governance and production in the period 1760 to 1840,
however, reveals a different story. This volume recognizes chemistry as broadly
integrated in daily life, as essential to industrial development and agricultural
improvement, and as fundamental to the governance of both society and the
environment.
Crucial to such discussions is the question of who was a chemist. Should
this label be applied only to those attached to universities and scientific acad-
emies or to a broader range of actors who engaged in chemical practices? If
the latter, apothecaries, mining officials, manufacturers, inventors and oth-
ers should and have been investigated as part of the history of chemistry.4
Historians have recently asserted the existence of chemical experts, who
served as consultants or held administrative and management positions.5
This has brought the history of chemistry into closer contact with the history
of governance (the stimulation and management of both public and private
enterprises), a central theme of this volume. Attention to the ambiguous leg-
acy of chemist-consultants heightens our awareness of chemistrys equivocal
hold on public authority. Sometimes identified as arbiters of product purity
and with improving public health and welfare, chemists were also viewed with
distrust for representing the interests of industry and furthering environmen-
tal degradation.6
The expanding franchise of chemical practitioners reflects another critical
change in how the history of chemistry is and should be examined. Historians
3 Tore Frangsmyr, J.L. Heilbron, and Robin E. Rider, eds., The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth
Century(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Pat Hudson, The Industrial Revolution
(London: Bloomsbury, 2014); Daniel Roche, Encyclopedias and the Diffusion of Knowledge,
Mark Goldie, Robert Wokler, eds., The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political
Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 172-194 on 175; But see Archibald and
Nan Clow, The Chemical Revolution: A contribution to social technology (London: Batchwork
Press, 1952; John Graham Smith, The Origins and Early Development of Heavy Chemical Industry
in France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).
4 Hjalmar Fors, The Limits of Matter: Chemistry, mining and enlightenment (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2015); David Philip Miller, James Watt, Chemist: Understanding the origins of
the steam age (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009); Jonathan Simon, Chemistry, Pharmacy
and Revolution in France, 1777-1809 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013).
5 Ursula Klein, Chemical Experts at the Royal Prussian Porcelain Manufactory, Ambix 60
(2013): 99-121.
6 See Thomas Le Roux contribution to this volume; idem., Chemistry and Industrial and
Environmental Governance in France, 1770-1830, History of Science 54 (2016): 195-222;
Christopher Hamlin, The City as a Chemical System? The chemist as urban environmental
professional in France and Britain, 1780-1880, Journal of Urban History 33 (2007): 702-728.

of chemistry are increasingly interested in the materials and material objects

with which chemists interacted. Beyond a focus on the instruments, vessels
and tools that furnished chemistry laboratories and workplaces, this includes
chemistrys involvement in the histories of diverse materials through experi-
mentation, consultation, regulation, and production improvement.7 Materials
and material objects were critical sites where chemistry met with governance
and production between 1760 and 1840. Insofar as chemists could claim to
manage the powers of airs, acids, minerals, metals, dyes and waters, so could
they determine the habits, practices, and positions of those who engaged with
these materials as manufacturers, regulators or consumers. When publicly rec-
ognized, chemists knowledge and skill provided a platform for their claims of
authority and expertise, which warranted their interventions in matters of gov-
ernance. The essays in this volume work to identify such stances, positioning
chemistry at the heart of the organization of social order.
To achieve these aims, this volume is divided into three sections.The first
accentuates materials and material objects, along with the resources they pro-
vided chemical practitioners for building and exercising knowledge and
expertise. The entangled nature of the social and material is also evident in the
second section, on chemical governance, whereby chemists became involved
in both the governmentally sanctioned and privately organized management
of resources, people and environments. Finally, drawing on lessons from these
two sections, the third revisits the classic theme of production, understood to
include material and knowledge production, as well as their relation.
Given the centrality of materials and material objects to chemistry, attending

to materiality as a key element of its history is bound to be a frutiful approach.8
The traditional historiography of the Chemical Revolution certainly spoke of
substances (phlogiston, calxes, oxygen, caloric) and instruments (the ice calo-
rimeter, the balance), but too often in relation to the development of revo-
lutionary ideas and concepts. Explorations that focus on their materiality have
much to tell us about the details and consequences of chemical practice, which
linked chemistry to broader historical developments.9 Happily, historians are
7 Ursula Klein and Emma Spary, eds., Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe:
Between market and laboratory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
8 Tom Ingold, Materials Against Materiality, Archeological Dialogues 14 (2007): 1-16.
9 John G. McEvoy, The Historiography of the Chemical Revolution: Patterns of interpretation
in the history of science (London: Routledge, 2010), 23-52; But see Lissa Roberts, The Death

increasingly engaging with materials qua materials. Historians of early modern

alchemy have used experiments and restagings to assess the particulars of
alchemical recipes and procedures.10 Scholars have long recognized the impor-
tance of instruments, and archaeology is now shedding light on historical
chemical and alchemical instrumentation.11 Catherine M. Jackson has ana-
lyzed how glassware altered nineteenth-century chemistrys laboratory
practices and possibilities.12 Historians have also expanded the repertoire of
what counts as a chemically relevant material object by considering practitio-
ners interactions with a variety of commodities and substances.13
There is still, however, much to do. While there are now many histories of
particular instruments and some distinct substances and spaces, we need to
reflect more deeply on how to frame our inquiries. How should we approach
the materiality of the substances and objects that populated and moved
between the spaces in which historians are interested? Can we identify the
broader practical and conceptual regimes of which these socio-material trans-
formations were a part? How can we approach this subject without an a priori
assumption that chemistrys development during this period depended on the
introduction of innovative instruments and devices?14
of the Sensuous Chemist: The new chemistry and the transformation of sensuous tech-
nology, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 4 (1995): 503-529.
10 Pamela H. Smith at al, The Making and Knowing Project <http://www.makingandknow
ing.org/> accessed March 16, 2016; Lawrence M. Principe, Apparatus and Reproducibility
in Alchemy, Frederic L. Holmes and Trevor H. Levere, eds., Instruments and Experimenta-
tion in the History of Chemistry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 55-74.
11 Trevor H. Levere, The Role of Instruments in the Dissemination of the Chemical Revolu-
tion, Endoxa 19 (2005): 227-242; Frederic L. Holmes, Eighteenth-century Chemistry as an
Investigative Enterprise (Berkeley, CA: Office for History of Science and Technology, Uni-
versity of California at Berkeley, 1989); Jan Golinski, Precision Instruments and the
Demonstrative Order of Proof in Lavoisiers Chemistry, Osiris 9 (1994): 30-47; Lissa Rob-
erts, A Word and the World: The significance of naming the calorimeter, Isis 82 (1991):
199-222; Marcos Martinn-Torres, Inside Solomons House: An archaeological study of
the old Ashmolean chymical laboratory in Oxford, Ambix 59 (2012): 22-48; Simon Werrett,
Matter and Facts: Material culture in the history of science, Robert Chapman and Alison
Wylie, eds., Material Evidence: Learning from archaeological practice (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2014), 339-352.
12 Catherine M. Jackson, The Wonderful Properties of Glass: Liebigs Kaliapparat and the
Practice of Chemistry in Glass, Isis 106 (2015): 43-69.
13 Klein and Spary, eds., Materials and Expertise (see note 7).
14 See Werretts forthcoming Thrifty Science: Making the most of materials in the history of
experiment.

To take the last first, chemical practitioners between 1760-1840 were just as
likely to use ready-to-hand objects in adapted spaces as to introduce new and
specialized instruments and dedicated spaces for experiment. Adaptibility,
bricolage and repair were hallmarks of chemical practice. As Simon Werrett
discusses in this volume, many chemical practitioners set up laboratories in
their homes where they adapted tea cups, saucers, clay pipes, gun barrels and
household furniture to chemical ends.15 Even Lavoisier, famous for using new
and prohibitively expensive instrumentation, sometimes cobbled together
experimental set-ups from objects originally intended for other purposes; his
epoch-making demonstration of the decomposition of water, for example, fea-
tured an adapted gun barrel. In practice, chemistry relied at least as much on
adaptation, knowedge of lutes and luting, awareness of the most appropriate
amalgam, and artisanal proficiency, as it did on theory.
Considering chemists as innovators, bricoleurs and reparateurs is not only
apt because they were sometimes one and sometimes the other. Innovation,
bricolage and repair often went hand in hand. As Elena Serrano illustrates in
this volume, novel instruments and devices were often hybrid compositions of
new and recycled or innovative and mundane components. This was espe-
cially the case when novel apparatus were commodified for wider distribution;
simplified use and repair were important considerations when designing for a
broader public.
This sort of adaptive design and use was often discussed in terms of oecon-
omy. Manuals on household management or domestic oeconomy circulated
since the sixteenth century, promoting a balance between excess and conser-
vation, saving and expense, using the old and investing in the new.16 This was
not only a call for thrifty management for its own sake. Oeconomy was widely
taken to cover a broader set of meanings and practices by the mid-eighteenth
century. Alongside material and financial considerations, oeconomy spoke to
the virtues of order, prudence and moral responsibility.17 Exploring the mean-
ings and practices associated with the words contemporary uses reveals how
actors at the time framed their understanding of and engagement with the
world around them.
15 Simon Werrett, Recycling in Early Modern Science, British Journal for the History of
Science, 46 (2013): 627-646.
16 Karen Harvey, The Little Republic: Masculinity and domestic authority in eighteenth-cen-
tury Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
17 Lissa Roberts, Practicing Oeconomy During the Second Half of the Long Eighteenth Cen-
tury: An introduction, History and Technology 30 (2014): 133-148.

Whether linked to the human or animal body, private households, the state,
nature, or chemistry, oeconomy spoke to the maintenance of a well-balanced
order. Often associated with improvement, oeconomy pointed to productiv-
ity, but never in exclusive terms of maximizing material production and profit.
Invariably, it also carried a moral connotation, placing the improvement of
agricultural and manufacturing yields in the context of stimulating steward-
ship of material and social resources whether within the individual, regional
or national household.18 This variously entailed tying educational programs
to the goals of cameralist administration; integrating programs of experi-
ment, communication and engagement aimed at public education with the
improved production of domestic goods; bringing education and practice
together to stimulate the circulation and use of rural waste products and
industrial leftovers to further production in both agriculture and manufactur-
ing; and tying educational programs for chemical practitioners to the ideals of
good citizenship.19
The ideals and practices of oeconomy receded from their once prominent
position in European cultural, institutional and political realms by the mid-
nineteenth century. It is beyond the bounds of this study to explain why or
fully how this occurred. But surely the mismatch between oeconomys idyllic
projections of balance and order and the often disruptive circumstances that
marked the years 1760-1840 were involved. War, political upheaval, the growth
of manufactures and social displacement constantly challenged the idealized
harmonies of enlightened society. Scales of operation were transformed in the
armed forces, the civil service, and in industry.20 While domestic, artisanal
modes of production continued, and while agriculture remained the largest
employment sector until at least 1850, industrial manufactures grew, urban
populations burgeoned and peoples traversed regions and continents en
18 Joppe van Driel, The Filthy and the Fat: Oeconomy, Chemistry and Resource Manage-
ment in the Age of Revolution, PhD Thesis, University of Twente, 2016.
19 Christophe Meinel, Reine und angewandte Chemie, Berichte zur Wissenschaftsge-
schichte 8 (1985): 25-45; Andre Wakefield, Police Chemistry, Science in Context 13 (2000):
231-267; Elena Serrano, Making Oeconomic People: The Spanish Magazine of Agriculture
and Arts for Paris Rectors (1797-1808), History and Technology 30 (2014): 149-176; Joppe van
Driel, Ashes to Ashes: The stewardship of waste and oeconomic cycles of agricultural and
industrial improvement, 1750-1800, History and Technology 30 (2014): 177-206; Le Roux,
Chemistry and Governance (see note 6); Lissa Roberts, P.J. Kasteleyn and the Oeco-
nomics of Dutch Chemistry, Ambix 53 (2006): 255-272.
20 John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, money and the English state, 1688-1783 (London,
1989); Anna Simmons (this volume) discusses how changes of scale affected chemical
production.

masse.21 The ranks of chemical practitioners, often trained in newly auto-

nomous laboratories, swelled accordingly. Changing scales and approaches to
materials, production and governance, were undoubtedly tied up with chang-
ing attitudes and practices. The challenge is to explore and understand these
connections and their consequences without the taint of teleology.
This requires rethinking the historical relationship between oeconomy and
oeconomic practices, on one hand, and interpretive categories drawn from
economics and economic history, on the other.22 Given the performative
impact and results of oeconomic formulations and activities, it is misleading
to dismiss oeconomy as a cultural conceit of elite amateurs, a doomed project
or rhetorical side-show to economic development. Neither was oeconomy a
proto-concept that gave way to economic analysis as the latters concepts
matured during the early nineteenth century.23 Such views move between [1]
distinguishing between oeconomy as a cultural expression and economics as
expressive of real world activities and [2] isolating oeconomy as a concept
and placing it under a larger rubric of economic concepts, which is teleologi-
cally structured by a movement toward modern economic organization and
understanding. The first privileges economics as reflective of material reality;
the second grants it conceptual priority, implying that economic (re-) concep-
tualization is a key motor of historical change.
This volume refuses both these options, arguing instead for a non-teleologi-
cal perspective. By the mid-nineteenth century governing attitudes, policies
(including colonial policies and taxation regimes) and practices in western
Europe instantiated the market, social welfare and nature as distinct realms of
conceptualization, activity and governance. But this development which
carved out a space for interacting with material and human resources in strictly
calculative terms of economic value, cordoned off from issues of moral or envi-
ronmental responsibility was neither inevitable nor the result of a conceptual
change. It arose in a historical landscape whose contours evolved over time as
humans interacted with specific material substances and objects in various
contexts of conceptually and administratively governed production, con-
21 Rondo Cameron, A New View of European Industrialization, The Economic History

Review 38 (1985): 1-23, 6.
22 Timothy Mitchell, Rethinking Economy, Geoforum 29 (2008): 1116-1121.
23 Henry Lowood, Patriotism, Profit, and the Promotion of Science in the German Enlighten-
ment (New York: Garland Press, 1991); Margaret Schabas and Neil Di Marchi, Introduction
to Oeconomies in the Age of Newton, Margaret Schabas and Neil Di Marchi, eds., Oecon-
omies in the Age of Newton. Annual Supplement to History of Political Economy 35 (2003):
1-13; Margaret Schabas, The Natural Origins of Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2005), 1-21.

sumption and use sociomaterial interactions often mediated by chemists

and chemistry.24
But if historical change is a consequence of sociomaterial interaction, we
need to understand what that entails, both in general historiographical and
specific historical terms. Contributions to this volume offer a variety of
approaches to this subject, as they explore histories of specific materials and
material objects between 1760-1840. Lissa Roberts and Joppe van Driel tackle
the case of coal in their essay, generally identified as the energy source that
fueled the industrial revolution.25 Demonstrating that coals identity was actu-
ally far from settled at the time, they argue for understanding material identities
and the values associated with them as historically open rather than onto-
logically fixed.
Scholars such as Hans-Jrg Rheinberger and Karin Knorr Cetina have made
similar claims in their discussions of epistemic things and epistemic objects,
emphasizing the epistemic openness of objects but only in the context of
experimental investigation.26 Rheinberger thereby distinguishes between
epistemic objects and stable, technical objects that may define the boundary
conditions of further epistemic objects. Knorr-Cetina contrasts the epistemic
openness of objects that undergo scientific research with the stability of com-
modities, instruments and everyday things.27
Simon Werretts investigation of household chemistry in which ready-to-hand
objects were pressed into experimental and productive service problematizes
the distinction between research objects epistemic openness and the stability
of technical and everyday objects. Making do with impromptu equipment
24 William Ashworth, Between the Trader and the Public: British alcohol standards and
the proof of good governance, Technology and Culture 42 (2001): 27-50; Joppe van Driel
and Lissa Roberts, Circulating Salts: Chemical governance and the bifurcation of nature
and society, Eighteenth-Century Studies 49 (2016): 233-63; Joppe van Driel, The Filthy
and the Fat (see note 18).
25 E.A. Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2010).
26 Hans Jrg Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things (Palo Alto: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 1997); Karin Knorr Cetina, Objectual Practice, T.R. Schatzki, K. Knorr Cetina,
& E. von Savigny, eds., The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (New York: Routledge,
2001), 184-197; Cyrus Mody and Michael Lynch, Test Objects and other Epistemic Things:
A History of a Nanoscale Object, British Journal for the History of Science 43 (2010): 423-
458.
27 Hans-Jrg Rheinberger, A Reply to David Bloor: Toward a Sociology of Epistemic Things,
Perspectives on Science 13 (2005): 406-10, 407; Knorr-Cetina, Objectual Practice, p.84 (see
note 26).

involved a process of learning about what works. Which materials reacted

with experimental substances and were therefore unusable in experimental
setups? What was the best way to seal a make-shift container?28 Roberts and
Van Driels discussion of the history of coal reveals further that the openness
of commodities, instruments and everyday things is not only epistemic. The
identities of materials and material objects are as much a matter of what they
do as of what we know about them. But what they can do is neither simply a
question of some essential capability or characteristic, nor only of human use.
Philosopher Annemarie Mol writes, [O]ntology is not given in the order of
things [] instead, ontologies are brought into being, sustained, or allowed to
wither away in common, day-to-day, sociomaterial practices.29 As represented
by Elena Serranos discussion of affordance in her essay, our goal is to portray
material identities and claims of agency in ways that recognize the historical
interplay between the specificities of materials and material objects and the
contexts in which they were investigated and put to work.30
The isolation and identification of qualitatively distinct airs or gases form
a central focus of histories of the Chemical Revolution.31 In her essay, Marie
Thbaud-Sorger goes beyond considering them as epistemic objects to the
question of how they became manipulable commodities that firmly attached
chemistry to both the increasing commodification of society and the specta-
cles that celebrated this transformation. Substances such as coal and airs also
linked chemistry to processes such as urbanization and (initially oeconomic)
concerns over public health, which emerged as foci of governance in the period
1760-1840. Aiming to operate at a scale of whole populations, evolving regimes
of cleanliness and hygiene, health and security depended on massive material
investments and the disciplining of large populations. Key to this process was
the construction of urban architectures enabling the circulation of clean air
and water and the elimination of foetid smells and poisonous miasmas.32
28 Adele Clarke and Joan Fujimura, eds., The Right Tools for the Job (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1992).
29 Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple: Ontology in medical practice (Raleigh, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2002), 6; Ingold, Materials, p.1 (see note 8).
30 Affordance refers to those functional and relational aspects of technology that frame but
do not determine the possibilities for action in relation to an object. Brian Rappert,
Technologies, Texts, and Possibilities: A reply to Hutchby, Sociology 37 (2003): 565-80,
566.
31 Jan Golinski, Chemistry, Roy Porter, ed., The Cambridge History of Science: Volume 4,
eighteenth-century science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 375-396.
32 Thomas Markus, Buildings & Power: Freedom and control in the origin of modern building
types (London: Routledge, 1993), 146-158; Christopher Hamlin, State Medicine in Britain,

Chemists played a central role in such activities as experts on spa waters

and urban water and gas supplies, as overseers of ventilation projects, and
through fumigation practices using new chemical substances.33 Elena Serrano
explores one such case, focusing on how newly designed fumigating machines
were used to combat disease in France and Spain at the beginning of the nine-
teenth century. Importantly, these machines simultaneously transported a
recently isolated air and new knowledge claims that explained it. They also
embodied reformulated modes of governance that, mediated by chemical
experts, transferred direct responsibility for public health from government
agencies to the individual behavior of citizens who were charged with using
such contraptions.34 But material concerns were as crucial as the role played
by chemists. For operating on a transnational scale, as this project did, neces-
sitated adaptation; simplified designs and cheaper materials enabled the
machines mass manufacture.
Jos Ramon Bertomeus exploration of arsenic in the 1830s and 40s offers
one more example of how focusing on materials exposes the non-teleological
co-construction of sociomaterial identities. His essay draws attention to the
efforts waged in these decades to identify the notorious poison arsenic. If
oeconomy tolerated or even valued material ambiguities and open-ended
capacities for repurposing and re-use, the economic and social orders emerg-
ing by the late 1830s depended on various institutions manufactories, govern-
ment laboratories, law courts, public health bureaus that required specific
definitions and identities. Institutional attempts to know and thereby govern
materials and their use nonetheless continued to be plagued by ambiguities of
material definitions and application. The definition of arsenic, its presence
and properties, thus emerged alongside the identities of chemical practitio-
ners, productive sectors, uses and institutions that engaged with it, determining
the agency of all the actors involved.
Dorothy Porter, ed., The History of Public Health and the Modern State (Amsterdam;
Atlanta, GA: Rodolpi, 1994), 132-164.
33 Matthew D. Eddy, The Sparkling Nectar of Spas; or, mineral water as a medically com-
modifiable material in the province, 1770-1805, Klein and Spary, eds., Materials and Exper-
tise, 283-292 (see note 7); Christopher Hamlin, A Science of Impurity: Water analysis in
nineteenth-century Britain (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990); Leslie
Tomory, Progressive Enlightenment: The origins of the gaslight industry, 1780-1820 (London;
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
34 Simon Schaffer, Measuring Virtue: Eudiometry, enlightenment and pneumatic medi-
cine, Andrew Cunningham and Roger French, eds., The Medical Enlightenment of the
Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 281-318.

What, then, was chemistry in the period 1760 to 1840? This sections focus on
materials and material objects positions chemistry at the intersection of grad-
ual yet impressive shifts in production, governance and their relationship.
Chemistry flourished through its ability to use materials and multiply their
varied affordances, but the manifestations, management and meaning of this
ability gradually changed. An initially oeconomic orientation associated with
household management and its prudent (re-) use of ready-to-hand objects and
instruments posited the inseparably social and moral character of material
order. By the late 1830s, the sociomaterial challenges of shifting scales and mul-
tiplying and increasingly various fruits of chemical production simultaneously
fed and responded to efforts to govern them. Now against a view of materials
as open-ended and capable of continuous revision, manufacturing along
with various governance practices (often mediated by chemists and chemical
expertise) that regulated and taxed its materials, processes and products
divided phases of production and consumption, seeking to fix the identity of
material objects as commodities. Chemical practitioners operated in a grow-
ing number of contexts, assessing the properties of materials and their
suitability to manufactures, developing novel products and processes, and pro-
viding credit and controls for unfamiliar products. Managing this complex
state of affairs increasingly relied on two mutually reinforcing loci of gover-
nance. One was situated in the specifying processes of governmental legislation
and courtroom adjudication. The other resided in the organization and con-
ceptualization of market oriented practices that translated social and material
interplay into calculations and models, masking their multifaceted interac-
tions as they transformed them.
The division of labor and specialization demanded by these processes and
their requirement of strict definitions and identities proved a double-edged
sword. On one hand they afforded chemistrys growing autonomy, professional
identity and recognized expertise. On the other, they narrowed understand-
ings of material and social identities to the point where their complex
intersections and mutual constitution seemed to disappear. What remained
was a sense not of interpenetrating oeconomies of materials, production and
governance, but of separate spheres of agriculture, industry, chemistry, and
government. Composing separate historical narratives of these spheres then
served to reinforce their boundaries, raising chimerical puzzles over how one
influenced the other.

Chemical Governance and the Governance of Chemistry
Our focus on chemical governance might seem odd or anachronistic at first.

In current parlance, it is understood either as a form of corporate governance,
whereby chemical manufacturers assume responsibility for construing and
policing their own ethical performance, or related more generally to the man-
agement of hazardous chemicals.35 Almost invariably, chemical governance is
currently invoked in relation to the environmental impact of chemicals used in
specific industrial contexts. Behind this configuration is a specific neo-liberal
rationality that calculates good governance in terms of transaction costs,
bracketing it off from other relations seen as involving externalities whose
consequences might call for governmental response or as extra-governmental
concerns best left up to social and corporate organizations or the market.
Michel Foucault and others have called on us to step back and recognize the
historical character of this regime whose beginning, they argue, was in the
period covered by this volume.36 Such a move frees us from considering chemi-
cal governance like governance more generally as formed or constrained by
the currently reigning rationality, warranting instead the historicization of its
conceptualization and practices. This requires an umbrella definition of chem-
ical governance that stands above the ways in which specific historical regimes
framed it. Here we define it as entailing the privately initiated or government
sanctioned employment of chemists and their practices to stimulate or inhibit
productive activities and manage resources, people, activities, environments,
and their relations, in accordance with specific norms and goals. The essays in
this volume zero in on the historical specificities of chemical governance and
how they evolved during the period 1760-1840.
It helps to recognize that governance was an actors category during this
period. A survey of uses between 1760 and 1840 shows a cluster of related
meanings. Governance referred to the duties of governing; that is, the manage-
ment of a socio-political unit, institution or individual estate, often with a
paternal character and directed toward improvement.37 It spoke to the influ-
ence one had over anothers life and behavior, but could also involve exercising
35 Henrik Selin, Global Governance of Hazardous Chemicals: Challenges of multilevel man-

agement (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010); Lissa Roberts, Exploring Global History Through
the Lens of History of Chemistry: Materials, identities and governance, History of Science
54 (2016): 335-361, on 350-356.
36 Michel Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, Cours au Collge de France 1978-1979 (Paris:
Gallimard Seuil Haute tudes, 2004).
37 William Bridle, A Narrative of the Rise and Progress of the Improvements Effected in His
Majestys Gaol at Ilchester (Bath: Wood, Cunningham and Smith, 1822).

control over materials; chemists, for example, were said to exercise governance
over fire.38 Finally, by analogy to divine governance, it entailed the mainte-
nance of material and social order for the public good.39
Attention to chemical governance in this volume highlights the ways in
which chemists and chemical practices were integral to a broad range of sig-
nificant governance processes between 1760 and 1840. Though much more
work needs to be done, the biographies of leading figures such as Lavoisier,
Guyton de Morveau and Jean-Antoine Chaptal point to how the practices and
institutions of chemical knowledge production in France were intertwined
with industrial and administrative developments.40 So too has recent work on
artisanal-scientific experts who served throughout Europe as administrative
officials, consultants and inspectors for various state agencies involved with
the stimulation and management of sectors such as mining, metal production,
agriculture, porcelain manufacture and textiles been helpful on a more inter-
national scale.41
The essays here identify chemical governance as a practice that goes beyond
individual case studies. The essays by Christine Lehman and Thomas Le Roux
explore the history of chemical governance in relation to the French states
regulation of chemical industry up to 1830. Through an examination of requests
for state support in the production of cruse (white lead or compounds con-
taining it), Lehman concentrates on how processes of chemically mediated
governance helped steer industrial production, complicating claims about
innovation along the way. Far from simply a matter of developing knowledge
and practices in a drive to improve the quality, quantity and/or profitability of
production, French chemists who served as consultants and administrators
found their mediations situated within a complex web of interests. Producers
seeking state support might be driven by the desire to protect a manufacturing
process, capture a geographically based market or outflank a competitor. The
demands of various ministries directed attention toward often-irreconcilable
38 Jean Franois Clment Morand, LArt dexploiter les mines de charbon de terre (Paris: Sail-
lant et Nyon, 1768-1779), vol. 2, 1192, 1195, 1255; Basil Valentine, The Stone of Fire, in Fran-
cis Barrett, The Lives of Alchemystical Philosophers (London: Macdonald and Son, 1815),
232-236, on 233.
39 The Book of Common Prayer (Oxford: T. Wright and S. Gill, 1771).
40 Charles Gillispie, Science and Polity in France: The revolutionary and Napoleonic years
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004)
41 Ursula Klein, ed., Artisanal-Scientific Experts in Eighteenth-Century France and Germany,
special issue of Annals of Science 69 (2012): 303-433; Bruno Belhoste, La Formation dune
technocratie. Lcole polytechnique and ses lves de la Rvolution au Second Empire (Paris:
Belin, 2003), esp.75.

questions of international competition, domestic commerce and social con-

siderations. The state was far from monolithic. The formulation of chemically
based advice and administrative decisions was thus always a matter of negoti-
ating between various interests.42
Such negotiations, of course, were always situated in specific contexts. The
social, political, commercial and financial dislocations associated with the
French Revolution and Napoleonic era framed the pursuit of and changes in
governance processes in France while highlighting the constitutive role of
chemists and chemistry. As Le Roux shows for the formation of regulatory poli-
cies and practices concerning the environmental impact of chemical industry
there, the abolition of both traditional corporations ranging from artisanal
guilds to the Acadmie des sciences and the institutional apparatus responsible
for governance during the ancien rgime framed an intensification of longer-
term historical developments that as Tocqueville first pointed out were
transforming France from a corporate to a modern state.43 Wartime exigencies
and increasing international competition, coupled with domestic dislocation
and change, simultaneously intensified demand for the products of chemical
industry and a greater need to adjudicate between the operational require-
ments of industrial production and the publics experience of its environmental
consequences. It was in this context that chemists were called upon to help
encourage industrial development, as well as to determine and compare the
relative values of productivity and public health and welfare.
The determination and comparative measurement of value in relation to
the interactive triad of industrial development, public welfare and environ-
mental sustainability were inevitably bound to competing norms and issues of
trust that often remained untranslatable into objective numbers.44 One
answer to the persistence of qualitatively heterogeneous issues was provided
by the evolution of new analytical categories through which to define, orga-
nize and judge chemically construed phenomena.45 Beyond the development
of new nomenclatural and instrumentally mediated practices, Le Roux argues,
this entailed reconfiguring the legally sanctioned definitions and boundaries
42 Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 2002); Lissa Roberts, Accumulation and Management in Global His-
torical Perspective: An introduction, History of Science 52 (2014): 227-246, 238.
43 Alexis de Tocqueville, LAncien rgime et la rvolution (Paris: Michel Lvy Frres, 1856).
44 Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers: The pursuit of objectivity in science and public life
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
45 On classification as a form of governance, see Steve Woolgar and Daniel Neyland, Mun-
dane Governance: Ontology and accountability (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015),
55-77.

between harmfulness and harmlessness a process in which chemists played

a key role. More fundamental still, chemists throughout the period covered by
this volume were intimately involved in a process whereby the marketplace,
society and nature became reified as essentially distinct categories through
the very governance practices that were established to police their hybrid
interactions.46
It needs to be stressed that the history of chemical governance was an open-
ended one neither simply the consequence of a battle of ideologies such as
mercantilism or cameralism versus liberalism, nor directed toward any partic-
ular teleological end. Rather chemical governance and the effects with which
it was associated are best understood by tracing how it evolved out of largely
mundane processes. This approach is especially promising for places such as
Sweden, Prussia and the Austrian Empire where the states regulation of min-
ing and industry relied on chemical expertise. A number of recent studies have
emphasized the role of hybrid experts, who brought a marriage of chemical
and bureaucratic training and experience to the performance of their duties.47
We still need more fine-grained studies of their daily activities, however, to
inform longer-term histories of industrialization in these lands. In place of
studies that turn to the influence of Baconian empiricism, Newtonian phys-
ics or rationalist inquiry to explain the transformation of production
techniques and sociopolitical institutions, we need accounts that build on the
actual work carried out by those who used their chemical knowledge and
know-how in their daily practices as mining officials, industry inspectors,
excise officers and so forth.48
William Ashworth has charted the ways in which mundane instrumentally-
mediated regulatory processes carried out by British excise agents worked, not
46 Joppe van Driel and Lissa Roberts, Circulating Salts (see note 24); David Wachsmuth,
Three Ecologies: Urban metabolism and the society-nature divide, The Sociological
Quarterly 53 (2012): 506-523.
47 Ursula Klein, Savant Officials in the Prussian Mining Administration, Annals of Science,
Special Issue: Artisanal-Scientific Experts in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Germany
and France, 69 (2012): 349-374; Peter Konen, The Hybrid Expert in the Bergstaat: Anton
von Ruprecht as a professor of chemistry and mining and as a mining official, 1779-1814,
Annals of Science 69 (2012): 335-347; Ursula Klein, The Prussian Mining Official Alexan-
der von Humboldt, Annals of Science 69 (2012): 27-68; Hjalmar Fors, The Knowledge and
Skill of Foreigners: Projectors and experts at the early modern Swedish Board of Mines,
Hartmut Schleiff and Peter Konen, eds., Staat, Bergbau und Bergakademie im 18. und
frhen 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: VSWG, 2012), 53-62.
48 Eric Dorn Brose, The Politics of Technological Change in Prussia: Out of the shadow of antiq-
uity, 1809-1848 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 13.

only to fix government revenues and establish standards for foodstuffs and
alcohol, but also to suggest new products and production processes for distill-
ers and others looking to minimize taxes and maximize profits. In turn,
developments in the production and marketing of new products fed the fur-
ther development of chemical instrumentation and testing for policing the
composition and healthfulness of comestibles.49
The sort of chemical governance discussed by Ashworth was largely an
urban matter. Cities increasingly became sites of chemical concern and gover-
nance, as their rising populations engaged in expanding networks of
production, exchange and consumption. This brought urban and rural envi-
ronments into closer contact through the interweaving of agricultural and
industrial practices. As discussed by Joppe van Driel, urban elites joined with
landowners and government officials in the Netherlands both to encourage
and police the collection and circulation of urban wastes for use as agricultural
fertilizers, and the return of industrial crops for urban-based manufacturing.
This reminds us that chemical governance was not only a governmental affair.
It also engaged private individuals who often joined together in oeconomic
societies to encourage and monitor improvement.50
As cities grew, observers became increasingly aware of the potential to study
and need to govern them as chemical systems in their own right. While medi-
ating between the encouragement of industry and the health of urban dwellers
exposed to industrial toxins was part of the story, so too were problems such as
sewage, water and food supplies, lighting, building supplies and the collection
of vital materials such as saltpeter all candidates for chemical governance.51
Ernst Homburg has discussed proposals to establish urban chemical police in
various German states from the 1820s.52 Christopher Hamlin has examined the
roles played by French and British chemists between 1780 and 1880, as they
simultaneously aspired to the position of urban regulators and tied their
increasing professional status to industrial consultation. Without a clear iden-
tity, he argues, chemists were never able to create a matter-based science of
urban management as an authoritative tool of governance along the lines of
49 Ashworth, Between the Trader (see note 24); See also the essays in this volume by Elena
Serrano and Marie Thbaud-Sorger.
50 Driel, Ashes to Ashes (see note 19); Lissa Roberts, Practicing Oeconomy (see note 17).
51 Andr Guillerme, Enclosing Nature in the City: Supplying light and water to Paris, 1770-
1840, Construction History 26 (2011): 79-93; Sabine Barles, Linvention des dchets urbains:
France, 1790-1970 (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2005).
52 Ernst Homburg, The Rise of Analytical Chemistry and its Consequences for the Develop-
ment of the German Chemical Profession, 1780-1860, Ambix 46 (1999): 1-32, 19.

architecture and engineering.53 Instead they remained a mixed community of,

at one and the same time, educators, guardians of the public interest and con-
sultants for maximizing industrial profit.
The period 1760-1840 was an age of networks and activity that encompassed
the entire globe, often involving the movement of massive quantities of chemi-
cal substances and objects, and innumerable possibilities for the exercise of
both chemical production and governance.54 Chemical governance was dis-
persed across a multitude of practices, techniques and decisions traversing the
planet. Such dispersal may be appreciated better by examining a case of the
global reach of chemical governance. Andreas Weber examines an episode in
the history of imperial Dutch monetary policy in this volume to demonstrate
that even something as seemingly abstract as monetary policy was subject to
chemical governance. Importantly, his analysis underscores the polycentric
character of imperial governance by revealing its mundane dependence on
local chemical practitioners and their practices situated both in metropolitan
centers and in far-off colonial settings.55 Beyond their initial pronouncement,
policies actually took shape through their embodiment in coins and bank
notes the production of which required locally available chemical expertise.
A colonially based assayer and mint master, therefore, could change the direc-
tion and consequence of imperial policy by minting coins with an alloy
containing more silver than instructed. Rather than simply serving imperial
masters, local practitioners harnessed their chemical know-how to colonize
the policy-making process by which the empire was supposed to be ruled.
Substituting locally determined value calculations for those that originated in
The Hague recalibrated the policy they were supposed to pursue, shifting the
fulcrum of practical power away from Dutch ministerial designs toward the
geographically distant networks to which such values were beneficial.
The point of Webers analysis is that both imperial policies and the Dutch
treasury were affected by the chemically informed acts of individuals operat-
ing on the other side of the world. But if chemical practices could alter the
course of financial management at the level of national and imperial govern-
53 Hamlin, The City (see note 6).

54 Pratik Chakrabarti, Empire and Alternatives: Swietenia febrifuga and the cinchona sub-
stitutes, Medical History 54 (2010): 75-94; Gregory Cushman, Guano and the Opening of
the Pacific World: A global ecological history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013).
55 Simon Schaffer, Golden Means: Assay instruments and the geography of precision in the
Guinea Trade, Marie-Nolle Bourget, Christian Licoppe and H. Otto Sibum, eds., Instru-
ments, Travel and Science. Itineraries of precision from the seventeenth to the twentieth cen-
tury (London: Routledge, 2002), 20-50.

ments, so was financial governance crucial to the development of chemistry at

the institutional level. Without the allocation and monitoring of funds to sup-
port institutions of learning, for example, the course of chemistrys disciplinary
and professional development would have been quite different during this
period. Importantly, as Sacha Tomic reveals in his study of financial gover-
nance at the Paris cole de pharmacie, financial records are more than just a
ledger showing income and expenditures. They also bear the imprint of a guid-
ing moral economy under whose regime rewards were calculated in accordance
with loyalty and service. Hence could a laboratory assistant rise to the rank of
professor, in direct contradiction to current generalizations about invisible
technicians and the role their perceived lack of scientific insight played in the
achievement of mechanical objectivity.56
In sum, if chemistrys practices, practitioners and educational institutions
were subject to various acts of regulatory governance, so too were chemists
and chemical practices integral to more general processes of governance
between 1760 and 1840. Insofar as chemists managed both materials and
socially-embedded processes, they could claim to be essential to good gover-
nance. Chemistry had long been connected to medicine and the management
of individual health. In the eighteenth century, chemists promoted and partici-
pated in practices that posited chemistry as an important or essential element
in the medical management of communities. As chemical products and con-
texts of material production, use and disposal proliferated, chemists assumed
an increasing number of roles as expert consultants in efforts to govern them.
They tested, measured, experimented with and informed legal adjudications
of material goods, serving taxation regimes, for example, through the study of
adulteration. Such roles were far from straightforward, however, as chemists
found themselves inserted into complex negotiations between competing
communities and interests. In this context, financial and legal demands over-
took oeconomic assessments of social and moral order that had previously
been linked to chemical interventions.
Out of these interactions emerged regularly renegotiated policies, regula-
tions, legal judgments, restrictions and codifications. Simultaneously these
processes transformed the identities of materials and chemists themselves.
Such mundane procedures and routines were also, no doubt, consequential for
changing iterations of chemistry, governance and production, which suggests
the inadequacy of a narrative that unduly focuses on revolutionary change in
this period.
56 Lorraine Daston, The Moral Economy of Science, Osiris 10 (1995): 2-24, 20.

Production looms large as a focus in history writing on the period covered by

this volume. Often linked to revolution whether political, scientific or indus-
trial, it is hard to ignore the roles that material and knowledge production have
been said to play in historical development. An obvious question for this vol-
ume, then, is what can be learned by considering the history of production
in conjunction with materiality and governance. In some ways, this approach
and the analysis to which it gives rise underscore current historiographi-
cal views. While it is still standard to speak of the Industrial Revolution, for
example, the term is now generally recognized as covering a longer and more
gradual process of change. So too have we let go of the belief that industrializa-
tion followed a single paradigm.57 And while economic historians continue to
focus on economic growth as the Industrial Revolutions defining characteris-
tic, they have joined with other historians to consider the relations between
material and knowledge production; between production, consumption and
use; and between production and the environment.58 This has created ground
for raising questions that are only answerable by bringing various historical
disciplines together. Especially given the braided connections amongst the
environmental, political, social, cultural and economic issues revealed by the
complex challenges we currently face, historians find themselves looking to
the past in more collaborative, interdiscipinary ways.59 A central argument of
this volume is that the history of chemistry provides a particularly apt vehicle
for this sort of collaborative inquiry because its subject matter so patently sits
at the intersection of historical engagements through which humans partici-
pated in weaving the social, material, political, economic and environmental
together.60
The essays in this section highlight the interpretive possibilities afforded by
bringing historical questions about production together with attention to gov-
57 Jeff Horn, Leonard N. Rosenband and Merritt Roe Smith, Reconceptualizing the Industrial
Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); Emma Griffin, A Short History of the Indus-
trial Revolution (London: Palgrave, 2010).
58 Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical origins of the knowledge economy (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2002); Jan de Vries, Consumer Behavior and the Household
Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); E.A. Wrigley,
Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010).
59 Brett Walker speaks of hybrid causation. Toxic Archipelago: A history of industrial disease
in Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010).
60 Lissa Roberts, Producing (in) Europe and Asia, 1750-1850, Isis 106 (2015): 857-865.

ernance and materials. Among other things, this approach underscores that
production is not simply a synonym for industry, translatable into measurable
economic indicators. Along with material goods, producers make, use and con-
sume knowledge, culture and political goods. The relations amongst all these
elements require investigation.61 Accordingly, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent
and Frank James examine the various ways in which governance mediated
between the supposedly distinct realms of knowledge production and social
order, bringing the core message of Leviathan and the Air Pump to life:
Solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social
order.62 Anna Simmons and John Christie explore production in the context
of urban manufacturing sites, affording an understanding of production sites
as complex points of intersection between local and global translations involv-
ing the interaction of humans and materials with layered regimes of governance
and production processes. Finally, Robert Anderson investigates interactions
between academic chemists and those directly engaged in chemical industry
to reflect on how we ought to understand the historical relationship between
material and knowledge production. Here again we find general claims giving
way to the specificities of local situations.
Though the period investigated in this volume is sometimes referred to as
the age of revolution, debate continues regarding its revolutionary nature.63
Definitions of the Industrial and Chemical Revolutions have changed with
generational regularity.64 And while no one doubts that political revolution
took place in France in 1789, discussions continue regarding its cause and char-
acter, including its relationship with Enlightenment ideas, industrialization
and scientific developments.65 The links between science and society in revo-
lutionary France have traditionally been discussed either by chronicling how
the state recruited scientists to perform specific tasks and reform productive
sectors or as an aspect of intellectual history.66 In her analysis of pedagogical
61 Roberts, Producing (see note 60).

62 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the
experimental life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 332.
63 Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution (see note 1).
64 David Cannadine, The Present and the Past in the English Industrial Revolution, 1880-
1980, Past and Present 103 (1984): 131-172; McEvoy, Historiography (see note 9).
65 Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: W.W.
Norton and Co., 1996); idem., Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); Jeff Horn, The Path Not Taken: French
industrialization in the age of revolution, 1750-1830 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
66 Gillispie, Science and Polity (see note 40); W.R. Albury, The Order of Ideas: Condillacs
method of analysis as a political instrument in the French Revolution, John Schuster and

reform at the cole normale, Bensaude-Vincent looks instead at the kinds of

mediation proposed to realize translations between the problem of knowl-
edge and the social order.
The establishment of the cole normale in 1794, she reminds us, was part of
a broader program to normalize France. Alongside training teachers to teach
a standard curriculum across France, a unified system of weights and measures
was meant to normalize market exchanges throughout the country itself
administratively normalized through its division into departements.67 The
pedagogical structure that informed teacher education at the cole built on
Condillacs analytical approach, an instrument for standardizing understand-
ing by eradicating lapses of logic and knowledge. Lavoisier had drawn on
Condillac in his Trait lmentaire de chimie.68 Disciplining chemistry, as advo-
cated by Lavoisier, was seen by the schools organizers as a model for disciplining
education more generally and, through that, disciplining the minds and bodies
of normalized French citizens.
In fact, the ideal of standardization proved historically problematic. The
metric systems introduction met so many local challenges that Napoleon
withdrew it; it was finally instituted in 1837. Professors at the cole normale
resisted standardization, generally choosing instead to stress the details of
their own disciplines. Charged to teach chemistry, Lavoisiers close associate
Berthollet went further, opposing the approach he was supposed to defend.
Where Lavoisier had claimed a seamless relation between properly disciplined
understanding and the order of nature, Berthollet professed a complex topog-
raphy of local circumstances and exceptions to rules that could only be
governed through careful attention. Teaching (how to teach) chemistry was
thereby not a question of normalization, but of training students to produce
and apply knowledge in particular situations. In place of the unatainable
dream of revolutionary transformation, he argued, an attentive and informed
citizenry could thus work to reform the production of knowledge and society
in more nuanced ways.
Berthollet was certainly not alone in criticizing the dream of organizing
science and society through the unmediated application of abstract principles.
But it is one thing to recognize a mismatch between revolutionary ideals and
R.R. Yeo, eds., The Politics and Rhetoric of Scientific Method: Historical studies (Dordrecht:
Reidel Publishing Co., 1986), 203-225; Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: From natural phi-
losophy to social mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).
67 Ken Alder, A Revolution to Measure: The Political Economy of the Metric System in
France, M. Norton Wise, ed., The Values of Precision (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1995), 39-71.
68 Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, Discours prliminaire, Trait lmentaire de chimie (Paris:
Chez Cuchet, 1789), v-xxi.

the complex variations of local circumstances, and quite another to foresee

how governance regimes would actually take shape. As stressed throughout
this volume, tensions amongst various interests engaged in the production of
knowledge, goods and social order often led to situations that emphasized
divisions rather than the applicability of universal principles. Disciplinary pro-
grams fed both the professionalization of and distinctions between individual
sciences, while attempts to mediate amongst various social, political and eco-
nomic interests from the standpoint of scientific knowledge often proved
illusory leading to hung juries and recriminations against (members of) the
scientific community.69 Current debates surrounding human and environ-
mental health show how the challenges of governing translations between
problems of knowledge and social order remain a key concern.70
While the revolutionary context of French attempts to engineer a clean fit
between knowledge production and social order through specific governance
practices set the question of their relations in sharp relief, examining the situ-
ation in Great Britain invites us to consider cases of this historical process in a
less dramatic context. Given the growing importance and visibility of laborato-
ries as the nineteenth century progressed, James contribution to this volume,
which follows the chemist Humphry Davys tenure at two institutionally-based
research laboratories in the late 1790s and early 1800s, provides a telling intro-
duction to what followed. James approach answers historian Graeme Goodays
call to consider laboratories in relation to the broader social worlds they inhab-
ited: as situated between those who provided funding and institutional
support, and the public, which varyingly acknowledged their status as sites of
knowledge production and authority.71 In fact, this was a fluid situation, mani-
festing as many variations as did laboratories themselves. A laboratory, for
example, might double as a kitchen whose domestic situation complicated the
gendered nature of the relation between science and the social order.72 So too
were laboratories attached to enterprises and institutions whose briefs tied
knowledge production to specific purposes, such as the advancement of man-
ufacturing, treating patients or public education.
69 In this volume, see essays by Thomas Le Roux, Jos Ramn Bertomeu Snchez, and Lissa
Roberts and Joppe van Driel.
70 Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured
the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming (London: Bloomsbury Press,
2010).
71 Graeme Gooday, Placing or Replacing the Laboratory in the History of Science? Isis 99
(2008): 783-795.
72 Anita Guerrini, The Ghastly Kitchen, History of Science 54 (2016): 71-97; Simon Werrett,
Household Oeconomy, this volume.

As indicated by Sacha Tomic in this volume, laboratories that relied on

external funding had also to reckon with an accompanying regime of financial
governance. This did not mean, however, that researchers were unable to exer-
cise independence, either in terms of their research or of maneouvering
between their sponsors desires and public approbation. James presents Davy
as an entrepreneurial figure who forged his career by creatively courting both
patrons and the publics politer echelons, using financial and institutional sup-
port to gain a measure of autonomy for his research, which he presented
publicly in ways that reinforced his and his findings authority. That he
anchored his efforts in laboratory settings is significant. Unlike modern defini-
tions that emphasize laboratories scientific character, the word laboratory
traditionally indicated a place where raw materials were elaborated worked
upon to produce medicines, chemical substances, or other substances that
could be put to use. Like many of his contemporaries, Davy applied the term to
nature itself.73 And in his public lectures at the Royal Institution, he drew on
the claimed continuity between nature and his laboratory work to argue for
public acceptance of a particular social order. Unlike his mentor Beddoes and
outspoken figures such as Joseph Priestley, who championed the egalitarian
ideals of radical politics and knowledge-based progress, Davy recruited nature
and its investigation in a bid to privilege social stability over equality.74
Bringing James thesis together with historian Jan Golinskis analysis of
science as public culture in early nineteenth-century Great Britain, underscores
the coincidence of an evolving regime of research autonomy a professed
characteristic of modern science and the rise of a modern culture of public
science in which the public was configured as a passive audience that bowed
before scientific authority.75 We might see this as part of a larger and longer
transition in which science and industry became increasingly professional-
ized. Whatever the realities of domestic participation and use, members of
73 Gooday, Placing or Replacing, p.788 (see note 71); Humphry Davy, Elements of Agricul-
tural Chemistry, or a course of lectures for the Board of Agriculture (London: Longman,
Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1813), 14; David Gooding, In Natures School: Faraday as an
experimentalist, David Gooding and Frank James, eds., Faraday Rediscovered; Essays on
the life and work of Michael Faraday, 1791-1867 (London: Macmillan, 1985), 105-136.
74 Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 197.
75 Ibid.; Thomas F. Gieryn, Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Sci-
ence: Strains and interests in professional ideologies of scientists, American Sociological
Review 48 (1983): 781-795; Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumfrey, Separate Spheres and Pub-
lic Places: Reflections on the history of science popularization and science in popular
culture, History of Science 32 (1994): 237-267.

the public were being configured as passive consumers of both knowledge and
material goods made by others.76
The essays in this section highlight the need to recognize multiple geogra-
phies, overlapping jurisdictions and evolving identities as intrinsic to historical
development. How do we reconcile narratives that stress the importance of
locally available materials such as coal or wool with those that follow the
movements of substances such as copper, barilla and mercury across the globe
or between productive sectors? We often read that English coal powered an
eclipse of Indian cotton and other foreign goods in the context of receding
government intervention.77 But other stories can be told that stress the locally
heterogeneous character of industrialization.78 Simmons examination of
pharmaceutical manufacturing in London illustrates the far-flung routes along
which pharmaceutically relevant substances traveled. She simultaneously
emphasizes the evolutionary character of local production processes that
combined incoming substances with locally available resources under corpo-
rate and governmental oversight. Governance did more than guide behavior; it
played an active role in shaping production, its components and outcomes. As
demonstrated by William Ashworth, governance included identifying sub-
stances, testing for their purity and composition, and making them serve
purposes ranging from revenue enhancement and international competition
to public health and welfare.79
Historical surveys of industrial production during this period generally
highlight mechanization, innovation and the introduction of steam power. But
London like other industrial centers also housed productive sectors whose
sites and methods depended on more and other things than the revolutionary
introduction of path-breaking machines. The pharmaceutical sector is a telling
example, as it encompassed international trading companies, large-scale
wholesale manufacturers and smaller-scale apothecaries and druggists, glob-
ally sourced substances and the equipment, knowledge and skill needed to
produce, store and sell its products. Its market brought suppliers together with
users ranging from individual customers to the mammoth British Navy and
East India Company. In turn, its manufacturing sector responded to the inter-
76 John Brewer and Roy Porter, Consumption and the World of Goods (New York: Routledge,
1993).
77 E.A. Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2010).
78 Thomas Misa, From Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and culture from the Renaissance
to the present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 59-96.
79 Ashworth, Between the Trader (see note 24).

active dynamics within and between supply and demand, mediated by the
governance of firms and institutions, as well as regulations imposed by the
state as its agents sought to generate revenues, oversee trade, monitor produc-
tion and protect consumers.
Two resulting trends are especially worth noting. The first has to do with
increasing reliance on keeping production and account records, akin to what
Ursula Klein calls paper tools.80 As much as the chemical formulae on which
Klein focuses, bookkeeping records formulized a means to manage humans,
substances, laboratory hardware and the processes in which they were mutu-
ally engaged with productive effect. This growing reliance on governance
through paper was especially welcome in conjunction with a second trend
whereby chemical manufacturers met growing demand: expanding premises
and upscaling production techniques. Because such moves required increased
capitalization, producers who enjoyed privileges and prestige, or whose phar-
maceutical skills and connections were matched by business savvy, were at an
advantage.
Upscaling also relied on hard-won knowledge, know-how and adaptive
hardware, as well as negotiations with government regulators and neighbors
who faced increased nuisances. Because chemical production relied on the
governance of fire, for example, knowledge of heat and its regulation at dif-
ferent scales were key components of this process.81 Along with having to
construct larger furnaces that provided constant and manageable heat, it was
necessary to revamp instrumentation to allow continued access to substances
while responding to problems and risks that emerged in large scale production.
At this level, fumes that were slightly bothersome in small concentrations, for
example, manifested a poisonous presence requiring containment.82 Material
production was thus generative of problems of chemical governance. But
upscaling also afforded opportunities that deserve more coordinated inves-
tigation. Increasing production yielded both sellable products and material
remains, which stimulated the utilization of industrial leftovers to achieve
80 Ursula Klein, Experiments, Models, Paper Tools: Cultures of organic chemistry in the nine-
teenth century (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002); Simon Schaffer, The Charterd
Thames: Naval architecture and experimental spaces in Georgian Britain, Lissa Roberts,
Simon Schaffer and Peter Dear, eds., The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and invention from the late
Renaissance to early industrialisation (Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts
and Sciences, 2007), 279-305.
81 See Marie Thbaud-Sorgers essay in this volume.
82 Carleton Perrin, Of Theory Shifts and Industrial Innovations: The relations of J.A.C.
Chaptal and A.L. Lavoisier, Annals of Science 43 (1986): 511-542, 530.

product diversification.83 Examining individual examples provides clues for

how to write a longer term history of circular economies that brings technical
details together with the various types of material, entrepreneurial and gover-
nance practices that stimulated, managed and opposed them.84
The picture this all paints might appear path breaking and progress oriented
when selectively viewed from the present, but its local ambiguities deserve
closer scrutiny. John Christie answers this call in his study of entrepreneurship
in industrial Glasgow. Historians variously treat the entrepreneur as an impor-
tant figure during our period, generally casting entrepreneurship as involving
the pursuit of innovation and powering creative destruction.85 Historical
actors, however, defined the word entrepreneur differently. They were silent
about the link between entrepreneurs and innovation and justifiably ambiva-
lent about whether innovation was necessarily a good thing.86 As Christie
shows, the road to success was not always paved by novelty and innovation.
This is not to say that chemical industry witnessed no innovation between
1760 and 1840, but that the contexts and processes that marked its develop-
ment were too heterogeneous to fit under a single rubric of revolutionary
change. It is by delving into the biographies of Glasgows foremost industrial
entrepreneurs that Christie brings industrializations historical variegation to
the fore. Chemical industry between 1760 and 1840 included a highly diverse
set of enterprises. Increasingly typical of industrializing cities at this time,
Glasgow housed businesses ranging from producers of chemical substances
used in other industries to those whose manufacturing processes depended
on chemical practices. These businesses also varied in terms of their overall
83 Timothy Cooper, Peter Lund Simmonds and the Political Ecology of Waste Utilization in
Victorian Britain, Technology and Culture 52 (2011): 21-44. For examples, see John Graham
Smith, The Origins and Early Development of the Heavy Chemical Industry in France
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).
84 Telling examples include the Javel factory, south of Paris, and the chemical factory run by
Watse Gerritsma in the north Dutch province of Friesland. For details, see Smith, The
Origins (see note 83); Driel and Roberts, Circulating Salt (see note 24).
85 Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper, 2008), 83;
Joel Mokyr, Entrepreneurship in the Industrial Revolution, David Landes, Joel Mokyr
and William Baumol, eds., The Invention of Enterprise (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2012), 183-210; Oliver Mallett, Contesting the History of Enterprise and Entrepre-
neurship, Work, Employment and Society 29 (2015): 177-182.
86 Dictionnaire universel de commerce (Paris: Estienne et Fils, 1748), vol. II, 1051. Jean Baptiste
Say, A Treatise on Political Economy; Or the production, distribution and consumption of
wealth, trans. with notes by C.R. Prinsep (Philadelphia: Grigg and Elliot, 1834), 82, note 1;
Barbara Cassin, ed., Dictionary of Untranslatables: A philosophical lexicon (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2014), 265-268.

production strategies and the processes and products found within each. The
range of strategies a single firm might employ can be mapped according to
five categories: adaptive maintenance of traditional techniques, tools and fur-
niture; upscaling; introduction of new chemical techniques; mechanization;
product diversification. In such complex environments, innovation emerges
as a contextually bound and relative term indicative, perhaps, of a change of
scale, a revamped instrument, the adaptive introduction of a process or sub-
stance used elsewhere, or the use of material leftovers to produce other goods.
It was never clear from the start which strategy would work. What is certain
is that innovation guaranteed nothing. Neither did knowledge and experi-
ence guarantee success. It could take years before a novel machine or process
was sufficiently stabilized to be effective, while ambient conditions including
government regulations, competition for materials, fluctuating demand and
international conflict could derail the best laid plans.
One thing that many industrial endeavors did share was pollution, though
its effects were not experienced evenly. Wealthy elites inhabited the greener
quarters of urban areas and could more easily escape the citys chemically
laden, foul atmosphere. The poor had fewer choices.87 Chemical industry took
place, then, in a context marked by sociomaterial hybridity and inequality. Still
true today, chemical production came with greater cost to some and greater
profit for others.88
A final issue that needs addressing is the historical relationship between
material and knowledge production. A longstanding concern amongst histori-
ans, the question has been especially highlighted by economic historian Joel
Mokyr. Interested to account for British and Western European economic
trends and their great divergence with China since the the late eighteenth
century, Mokyr dismisses explanations based on the availability of coal and
colonies in favor of a cultural argument that emphasizes what he sees as a
coincidence between political liberalization and the increasingly pervasive
production and application of useful knowledge.89 While discussions of the
87 Allan Potofsky, Recycling the City: Paris, 1760s-1800, Ariane Fennetaux, Amlie Junqua
and Sophie Vasset, eds., The Afterlife of Used Things: Recycling in the long eighteenth cen-
tury (New York: Routledge, 2015), 71-88, on 75.
88 Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, The Geology of Mankind? A critique of the Anthropo-
cene narrative, The Anthropocene Review 1 (2014): 62-69.
89 Mokyr, Gifts of Athena (see note 58); idem., The Enlightened Economy: An economic history
of Britain, 1700-1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Kenneth Pomeranz, The
Great Divergence: China, Europe and the making of the modern world economy (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

continued role of state intervention and governance regimes in Great Britain

and the continent, as well as of the unmissable contribution of colonial
resources and slave labor to European wealth and wellbeing, should be suffi-
cient to put his more contentious claims to rest, the relationship between
material and knowledge production to which he draws attention remains
crucial.90 As argued in this volume, focusing on the history of chemistry pro-
vides an especially revelatory lens through which to capture their historical
relationship.
The primary reason is that hybrid engagement with material and knowledge
production was often standard chemical practice. Ursula Klein argues that this
justifies considering eighteenth-century chemistry as a technoscience avant
la lettre.91 In his essay for this volume, Robert Anderson asks whether her
claim should be generalized for all of Europe and answers by demonstrating
that the relationship between science and industry was as much a question of
social identities as of knowledge content.
Scotland provides a particularly interesting setting for Andersons inquiry.
Its universities were more open and flexible than many other European insti-
tutions during the eighteenth century, which swelled student attendance. By
the 1740s the medical faculty at University of Edinburgh, where chemistry was
taught, became the most popular in Europe. Simultaneously, as outlined by
Christie in this volume, Glasgow, Dundee and other areas became centers for
Scotlands burgeoning chemical industry. Chemistry professors found them-
selves teaching both medical students and those oriented toward manufacture,
agriculture and law. Extended acquaintance with applicable knowledge and
networks of former students who asked for advice as manufacturers, landown-
ers, policy makers and administrators, meant that academic chemists had to
consider their public identities. Joseph Black, chemistry professor at Glasgow
and Edinburgh Universities for over forty years, engaged in consulting through-
out his career, but insisted on keeping chemistrys social identity as a science
distinct from the industrial realm. Contrariwise, Andrew Ure, professor at the
Andersonian Institution (1804-1830), happily opted for a hybrid public identity,
increasingly supplementing his lectures with publicized work as a popular
author and industrial consultant. Quite apart from the question of anachro-
nism, Anderson concludes, not all chemists would have accepted the identity
of technoscientists.
90 Brewer, Sinews of Power (see note 20); William Ashworth, The Ghost of Rostow: Science,
culture and the British Industrial Revolution, History of Science 46 (2008): 250-274.
91 Ursula Klein, Technoscience avant la lettre, Perspectives on Science 13 (2005): 226-266.

In sum, focusing on chemistry, materials and governance offers fresh per-

spectives on material and knowledge production in the period 1760 to 1840.
A picture emerges of gradual, open-ended transformations in which various
local circumstances and practices contributed to change. Alongside the new
and shiny, which often disappointed, more traditional and mundane processes
could make all the difference. Diverse strategies shaped production, from
upscaling, administration with paper tools and diversification, to the main-
tenance and adaptation of existing practices. Chemical practitioners engaged
with these strategies in various ways, overseeing global circulations of chemical
goods, scaling up manufacturing processes, exploiting byproducts, generating
and regulating waste and pollution. No doubt aspects of these activities were
innovative, but they were integrated in processes of gradual change and long-
term development, the results of which were never fully predictable.
Situating Chemistry
As a collaborative effort, the geographical focus of this volume might not be as

broad as one would wish. Both Sweden and the German lands, for example,
housed important centers of chemical education and activity whose content
and contours were closely tied to ambient political, economic and sociomate-
rial conditions.92 Chemistry, in fact, played a variety of important roles around
the world between 1760 1840, whether informing agricultural improvement
in the young American republic, producing textiles and luxury goods in Asia or
engaging with pharmaceutical substances and metals in Latin America.
Examining developments in all these regions through the approach of this vol-
ume would add greatly to our understanding of what is, after all, a transnational
subject.
But such a huge undertaking has to begin somewhere, and the narrower
focus of this volume makes sense, given that France and Great Britain (our
essays primary locations) have long been the dominant foci of attention in
connection with the revolutions (the French, Industrial and Chemical) with
which this period is most commonly identified. The cases presented here,
92 Anders Lundgren, The New Chemistry in Sweden: The debate that wasnt, Osiris 4 (1988):
146-168; Ernst Homburg, The Rise of Analytical Chemistry and its Consequences for the
Development of the German Chemical Profession (1780-1860), Ambix 46 (1999): 1-32;
Hans Erich Bdeker, Economic Societies in Germany, 1760-1820: Organization, social
structures and fields of activities, Koen Stapelbroek and Jani Marjanen, eds., The Rise of
Economic Societies in the Eighteenth Century (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 182-211.

some of which underline the global networks in which chemical substances

and practices were enmeshed, invite us to direct our attention away from the
monumental, essentially distinct breaks implied by organizing historical anal-
ysis according to separate political, industrial and scientific revolutions.
Instead, by considering often quotidian histories of material and knowledge
production in concert with human interactions with material substances and
objects and governance practices that managed productivity and social order,
we point to a more unified fabric of historical development: one in which
intertwined activities inductively manifested themselves in terms of a package
deal of longer-term political, social, industrial and environmental changes.
This hybrid approach fits with current historiographical trends, but is rooted
in the very history this volume presents. If we return to the early 1840s, we find
the chemist Justus Liebig reviewing chemistrys situation in similar terms to
those discussed here.93 Among other things, he discussed the chain of events
whereby the introduction in Great Britain of new bleaching techniques (them-
selves based on using a previously ignored by-product of soda manufacture)
rendered unnecessary the employment of large tracts of rural land as bleach-
ing fields.94 This freed up both industrial capital for investment elsewhere and
land for agricultural exploitation, the latter of which could be enriched with
fertilizers that again, thanks to productive chemical practices combined
urban and rural based waste products.
Liebig described this as affording an excellent illustration ofthe depen-
dence of the various branches of human industry and commerce upon each
other, and their relation to chemistry.95 But he and those who read his work
did not simply celebrate this as unequivocal evidence of innovation-based
progress. Karl Marx, for example, drew on Liebigs discussion of such hybrid
chains of knowledge and material production to connect the past with con-
cerns for the future. The sociomaterial metabolic system in which these
urban-rural links evolved, Marx recognized Liebig to say, was being unbal-
anced by capitalist production on an increasingly global scale. In place of
previous oeconomic visions of sociomaterial improvement, Marx and others
described a chemically mediated process of growing alienation between the
93 Justus Liebig, Der Zustand der Chemie in sterreich, Annalen der Pharmacie 25 (1838):
339-347; idem., Der Zustand der Chemie in Preussen, Annalen der Chemie und der Phar-
macie 34 (1840):97-136; idem., Die organische Chemie in ihrer Anwendung auf Agricultur
und Physiologie (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1840); idem., Familiar Letters on Chemistry (Lon-
don: Taylor and Walton, 1843).
94 Liebig, Familiar Letters, pp.37-38 (see note 93).
95 Ibid., p.31.

operative sources of production and those who saw to their managed exploita-
tion. It was in such a context of growing antagonism that talk of revolution
industrial or otherwise gained increasing parlance.96 A closer acquain-
tance with the history of chemistry that preceded such utterances can help us
reconnect with the continuities and evolutionary developments overshad-
owed by declarations of revolution.
96 Karl Marx, Das Kapital (Hamburg: Otto Meisner, 1867), vol. 1, part 4, chapter 13, pp.527-
530; Victor Hugo, Les misrables, authorized English translation, vol. 3 (London: Hurst and
Blackett, 1862), 231-233; John Bellamy Foster, Marxs Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical
foundations for environmental sociology, American Journal of Sociology 105 (1999): 366-
405.

Part 1


Household Oeconomy and Chemical Inquiry 35
Chapter 1
Household Oeconomy and Chemical Inquiry

Simon Werrett
The history of the chemical laboratory was until recently quite obscure. But a
number of studies have begun to reveal the material conditions and spatial
configurations of chemical practice in a variety of settings in the period 1760 to
1840. Peter Morriss recent book The Matter Factory examines the laboratories
of Lavoisier, Faraday and Liebig in this period, while a recent volume of Ambix
considered eighteenth-century laboratories dedicated to chemical inquiry in,
among other places, a porcelain manufactory, mining academy and assaying
office.1 The focus of these studies has been purpose-built laboratories dedi-
cated to chemical practice, and it has been suggested that chemistry could
only take place in laboratories constructed for the purpose, since they needed
to contain a furnace.2 While historians have clearly widened the repertoire of
laboratories being studied from famous research institutions to military, indus-
trial and academic sites, this chapter proposes that many sites of chemistry
were not originally dedicated to chemical labors, and some were not laborato-
ries at all.
Alix Cooper and Steven Shapin have noted that a great deal of early modern
experimentation took place in peoples homes.3 Cooper identifies the home as
a key site of scientific inquiry and the family as the central unit in domestic
knowledge-making. Cooper, Shapin and others have made social relations the
focus of analysis for exploring the nature of knowledge-making in the home.
Cooper considers how family life shaped early modern scholarly life, while
Shapin demonstrated how expectations of gentlemanly conduct in the home
1 Peter Morris, The Matter Factory: A history of the chemical laboratory (London: Reaktion, 2015),
esp.19-20; John Perkins, ed. Sites of Chemistry in the Eighteenth Century, special issue of Ambix
60, no. 2 (May 2013).
2 Ursula Klein, The Laboratory Challenge: Some revisions of the standard view of early modern
experimentation, Isis 99 (2008): 769-782, on 772-3.
3 Alix Cooper, Homes and Households, Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, eds., The
Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 3: Early Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
2006), 224-237; Steven Shapin, The House of Experiment in 17th-Century England, Isis 79
(1988): 373-404.
Simon Werrett, 2018|doi 10.1163/9789004325562_003


36 Werrett
shaped experimental etiquette.4 This chapter also proposes that the home,
among a variety of adapted spaces, continued to be an important site for
chemical experimentation in the period 1760 to 1840. It shows how chemical
practices were shaped by the social order of the home, and particularly ideas
of oeconomy, a body of knowledge and practice concerning the proper man-
agement of the household (and by extension, the state or even the universe).5
The focus here will be on Britain, and perhaps further research will reveal if
similar relations to oeconomy existed elsewhere. Importantly, a fundamental
focus of chemistry and oeconomy in Britain was the management of materials,
and it is the material aspects of chemical activity in adapted spaces such as the
home on which this chapter concentrates. Domestic chemistry and oeconomy
were equally social and material practices, and this chapter might be seen as
an exploration of sociomateriality, a term that reminds us that these arenas
were always linked together in a rich variety of ways.6
Like the home itself, the material culture of chemical inquiry in this period
could also be adapted, and might be said to have been in a constant state of
flux, what the sociologist Karin Knorr-Cetina refers to as the incompleteness
of objects.7 Chemical practitioners certainly purchased or made apparatus
serving some specific chemical end from an instrument-maker, but they also
turned a diverse array of household goods into apparatus for their experi-
ments. The material form and uses of a household object or instrument
unfolded over time. Even dedicated instruments were not static objects, but
underwent alterations and repairs. Rather than overlook this as simple expe-
4 Gadi Algazi, Scholars in Households: Refiguring the learned habitus, 1480-1550, Science in
Context 16 (2003): 9-42; Frances Harris, Living in the Neighbourhood of Science: Mary Evelyn,
Margaret Cavendish and the Greshamites, Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton, eds., Women,
Science, and Medicine 1500-1700: Mothers and sisters of the Royal Society (Stroud: Sutton
Publishing, 1997), 198-217; Deborah E. Harkness, Managing an Experimental Household: The
Dees of Mortlake and the practice of natural philosophy, Isis 88 (1997): 247-262.
5 On oeconomy, see Lissa Roberts, ed., Practicing Oeconomy in the Late Eighteenth Century,
special issue of History and Technology 30 (2014); Keith Tribe, Oeconomic History: An essay
review, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 36 (2005): 586-597; Both Roberts and
Tribe offer criticism of Margaret Schabas and Neil Di Marchi, eds., Oeconomies in the Age of
Newton, Annual Supplement to History of Political Economy 35 (2003).
6 For discussion of the term sociomateriality, see Wanda J. Orlikowski, Sociomaterial Practices:
Exploring technology at work, Organization Studies 28 (2007): 1435-1448; It has of course long
been an assumption of social studies of science and technology that the social and material
are fundamentally linked.
7 See Karin Knorr-Cetina, Objectual Practice, Theodore R. Schatzki, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Eike
von Savigny, eds., The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (London: Routledge, 2001), 175-188,
on 181-184.

diency, this chapter suggests that practices of adaptation reflected the values
of oeconomy. Oeconomy proposed that householders should care for material
culture in the home, balancing the use of old goods with the purchase of new,
and stewarding possessions through care, maintenance, and repairs which
would ensure both the saving of time and money and the good order and har-
mony of the household and the environment within which it was embedded.
What emerges then is a picture of chemical experimentation in the period 1760
to 1840 in which the re-use of old things was as significant a part of chemistry
as the invention or consumption of new.8
A variety of people undertook chemical practices in the home, ranging from
husbands and wives to servants and diverse networks and communities with
whom the household interacted. Much of this work could be experimental and
chemical, for example distilling and the preparation of medicines. This diver-
sity will be reflected in the use of the term chemical practitioners, rather than
chemists. Material culture was also diverse. It consisted of substances, the
raw materials manipulated by chemical practitioners, instruments, the tools
used to manipulate substances, and objects, the things chemists used besides
instruments. The essay begins by examining concepts of oeconomy in the
period before considering how the home was often a site for shared oeconomi-
cal and chemical practices. Householders strove to make the most of the
material objects in their possession, and took care of those possessions to
avoid them being damaged. Oeconomic and chemical literature offered diverse
recipes for maintaining and repairing material possessions, and encouraged
the re-use of broken objects and waste. The chapter concludes by considering
how such an approach to materials was extended from the home to other sites
such as the city and manufactories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Such extensions, which entailed rationalizations of labor and changes in scale
had unintended consequences, contributing to pollution and a paradox about
the value of re-using old materials which remains to this day.
The Practice of Oeconomy: Managing the Household
Early modern practices of oeconomy converged on the art of governance and

could apply to the management of the family and household, the state or even
the universe and divine oeconomy of nature. There was no agreed-upon defi-
nition of oeconomy, and the many books on oeconomy that appeared in the
8 Chemistry fitted broader trends in the sciences, discussed in Simon Werrett, Recycling in
Early Modern Science, British Journal for the History of Science 46 (2013): 627-646.

38 Werrett
period 1760 to 1840 included an array of advice on cleaning, cooking, and main-
tenance, medicine and health, gardening, husbandry and agriculture together
with the management of the family and servants. Genres of oeconomic litera-
ture were often divided according to gender, with women presented as being
responsible for the internal management of the home and men for husbandry
outside. Numerous books written by female authors gave advice to housewives
on cookery, cleaning and medicine. But as Karen Harvey has argued, any gen-
dered division of tasks [in the home] was unstable, even in those books
specifically intended for either male or female readers.9 Both men and women
engaged in developing complex networks of exchange of recipes and practices
related to chemical inquiry in the early modern period, and both men and
women communicated practice orally, through letters or by keeping manu-
script books.10 However, in this period the convention was for experimental
inquiries into chemistry to be published by men, while women wrote and
sometimes published recipes and hints for the preparation of medicines, food,
and materials related to household maintenance.11 Bringing these apparently
distinct literatures of household management and experimental inquiry
together helps to make clear their interconnections in this period.
Not that oeconomy was even restricted to men and women. Oeconomy
was not equivalent to economy. Although no strict contrast should be made
between the two terms, oeconomy was not an abstract system of demand and
supply or accounting of profit and loss, but a body of advice and examples
relating to the prudent management of people and things. Both oeconomic and
economic ideas related material culture, morals and social order, but economy
came to do this in narrower terms than oeconomy during the nineteenth cen-
tury. The subjects of oeconomy were typically humans, but numerous writers
described the oeconomies of animals, birds and insects. Oeconomic thinking
stressed the interrelatedness of all parts of the oeconomy of nature. By the
oeconomy of nature we understand the all-wise disposition of the creator in
9 Karen Harvey, The Little Republic: Masculinity and domestic authority in eighteenth-cen-
tury Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 27-28.
10 Elaine Leong, Collecting Knowledge for the Family: Recipes, gender and practical knowl-
edge in the early modern English household, Centaurus 55 (2013): 81-103; Elaine Leong,
Making Medicines in the Early Modern Household, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82
(2008): 145-168; Sara Pennell and Elaine Leong, Recipe Collections and the Currency of
Medical Knowledge in the Early Modern Medical Marketplace, Mark Jenner and Patrick
Wallis, eds., Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies, c.1450-c.1850 (Basing-
stoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 133-152.
11 Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, private, and the division of
knowledge (Baltimore, MD: Johns-Hopkins University Press, 2009).

relation to natural things, by which they are fitted to produce general ends, and
reciprocal uses.12
In the period 1760 to 1840, many chemical practitioners appear to have
shared in the values of oeconomy through a prudent stewardship of materials.
Since oeconomy often focused on the proper management of the home it is
perhaps inevitable that its goals of frugality and care were reflected in chemi-
cal practices that often took place in peoples houses. The domestic situation of
chemical activities was itself in part an expression of such concerns. Certainly
the need for a furnace meant some chemical laboratories required dedicated
buildings, but in many cases instead of building new laboratories, chemical
practitioners preferred to make use of existing and convenient sites, convert-
ing cellars, kitchens, parlors and outbuildings into experimental spaces. As the
English chemist and publisher John Joseph Griffin wrote as late as 1834,
The notion, that a laboratory fitted up with furnaces and expensive and
complicated instruments, is an absolute requisite for the proper perfor-
mance of chemical experiments, is exceedingly erroneous. In fact, the
truth is quite opposed to this opinion. For general and ordinary chemical
purposes, says Dr Henry, and even for the prosecution of new and
important inquiries, very simple means are sufficient: some of the most
interesting facts of the science may be exhibited and ascertained with the
aid merely of Florence flasks, of common phials, and of wine glasses. In
converting these to the purposes of apparatus, a considerable saving of
expense will accrue to the experimentalist; and he will avoid the encum-
brance of various instruments, the value of which consists in show rather
than real utility. It is a curious and instructive fact, that some of the most
important discoveries in chemistry were made by persons who, either
from choice, or motives of economy, used utensils of the very simplest
character. The laboratory of the great Priestley cost a mere trifle; and it is
well known how savingly Franklin went to work.13
12 Isaac J. Biberg, The Oeconomy of Nature, Anon., Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Natural
History, Husbandry and Physick, trans. Benjamin Stillingfleet (London: R. and J. Dodsley,
1759), 31-108, on 31.
13 John Joseph Griffin, Chemical Recreations: A series of amusing and instructive experiments
[] to which are prefixed First Lines of Chemistry, seventh edition (Glasgow: R. Griffin and
Co., 1834), 1; on Griffin see Brian Gee and William H. Brock, The Case of John Joseph Grif-
fin: From artisan-chemist and author-instructor to business-leader, Ambix 38 (1991):
29-62.

40 Werrett
The contents of Priestleys laboratories hardly cost a trifle, but his laboratories
were all rooms in houses belonging to Priestley or his patrons.14 An engraved
plate from Priestleys Experiments and Observations on Air (1774) showed the
corner of his laboratory set up inside the orangery of Robert Adams wing of
Bowood House at Calne in Wiltshire, home to Priestley and his patron and
employer the Earl of Shelburne in the 1770s. The fireplace, a round three-legged
and a square table have all been put into experimental service, providing a
source of heat and support for chemical instruments. Domestic and chemical
functions overlapped in these spaces. Even the furnace, supposedly the marker
of a dedicated chemical space, could double up as home heating. Priestleys
inventory of the laboratory in his Birmingham home in the 1780s included a
furnace, containing a large Copper Vessel also iron Tubes [] adapted to it in
order to warm the Laboratory.15 Chemical sites were also converted back into
domestic space. A visitor to Priestleys Philadelphia residence in the nine-
teenth century noted: His laboratory is now converted into a house for
garden-tools! The furnaces pulled down, the shelves unoccupied! the floor
covered with Indian corn! A stranger might be inclined to say, Sic transit gloria
philosophiae [Thus passes the glory of philosophy].16
Sites of chemistry were thus routinely in flux, transformed between domes-
tic, scholarly, and other uses. Cambridge colleges converted variously a cellar, a
shed and an idle printing house to create new laboratories.17 Edinburgh profes-
sor of chemistry Joseph Black occupied the Library Range of the Universitys
Old College from 1770 to 1781, before moving to a purpose-built chemistry
block. Archeology indicates that when both buildings were demolished in
1820, the larger stones were extracted from the rubble for re-use.18 From 1790
14 Priestley himself estimated the value of instruments and books in his Birmingham labo-
ratory to be more than four thousand pounds. See Douglas McKie, Priestleys Laboratory
and Library and Other of his Effects, Notes and Records of the Royal Society 12 (1956): 114-
136.
15 Ibid., pp.121-122.
16 John Finch, Travels in the United States of America and Canada, containing some Account
of their Scientific Institutions (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Long-
man, 1833), 316.
17 Kevin C. Knox, The Deplorable Frenzy: The slow legitimisation of chemical practice at
Cambridge University, Mary D. Archer, Christopher D. Haley, eds., The 1702 Chair of Chem-
istry at Cambridge: Transformation and change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005), 1-30, on 9.
18 Tom Addyman, Materia Chemica: Excavation of the early chemistry stores at Old Col-
lege, University of Edinburgh. Typescript, thanks to Robert Anderson for providing this
essay; see also Morris, Matter Factory, 70-72 (see note 1).

James Watt experimented on pneumatic medicine, pottery and sculpture in a

garret workshop at his home in Heathfield, Birmingham, a site which was later
installed in Londons Science Museum.19 Mixtures of domestic and experi-
mental space prompted sociomaterial puzzles. Engagement with chemical
commodities operated according to social divisions of private and public space
and access in these sites. In 1794, Irish physician and chemist Bryan Higgins
advertised a Society for Philosophical Experiments at his home at 13, Greek
Street, London, where participants would be given access to his extensive
Apparatus while the best books on subjects under examination would
always be ready for their perusal in the drawing-room.20 London chemist
Frederick Accum kept a considerable variety of apparatus and a working
laboratory in his house near Soho Square, which linked him to networks of
instrument-makers and students.21 Male inquiry depended on female good-
will. In North America, Benjamin Silliman and Robert Hare maintained a
chemical laboratory in the cellar-kitchen of their lodgings at 46, Walnut Street,
Philadelphia, conceded to us by the indulgence of our hostess, Mrs. Smith.22
Making Use of the Home in Chemistry
The kitchen could double up as a chemical laboratory, and as the oeconomy of

the household overlapped with sites of chemistry, so oeconomical practices
shaped or coincided with chemical practices.23 This might apply to shared
techniques, but also to shared approaches to material culture. Chemical and
oeconomic literature both described practices such as the distillation of spirits
and the preparation of medications. Chemical practitioners applied to chemi-
cal instruments the same kinds of stress on stewardship and thrift that
appeared in oeconomic literature on domestic management. Robert Dossie,
author of a work on Agriculture and Other Oeconomical Arts, advised readers of
his treatise on chemical arts The Elaboratory Laid Open of 1758 that proper
maintenance of chemical instruments ensured, considerable savings in
19 Ben Russell, James Watt: Making the world anew (London: Reaktion, 2014), 224-233.
20 Anon., Minutes of the Society for Philosophical Experiments and Conversations (London:
T. Cadell Jr, and W. Davies, 1795), 6, 12.
21 George Park Fisher, Life of Benjamin Silliman M.D., LL.D., 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scrib-
ner & Co., 1866), vol. 1, 142.
22 Ibid., p.103; Chandos Michael Brown, Benjamin Silliman: A life in the young Republic
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 108.
23 The kitchen was also an important space for the development of anatomy and dissection
according to Anita Guerrini, The Ghastly Kitchen, History of Science 54 (2016): 71-97.

42 Werrett
labour, fewel, and frequently the produce of the operation.24 This oeconomy
of materials incorporated a diverse array of techniques, ranging from care over
the human body to the maintenance, repair and re-use of various vessels and
goods for chemical purposes. In some cases this might correspond directly
with widely available oeconomic advice and in others chemical practice raised
unique problems that demanded distinctive solutions.
One feature of oeconomic advice was to highlight the diverse uses to which
materials could be put in the home, on estates and on farms. In his translation
of Noel Chomels Dictionaire oeconomique, or Family Dictionary, the Cambridge
botanist and oeconomist Richard Bradley noted of the beech tree, Its useful
for many things before listing the various uses of beech for making Dishes,
Trays, Rimbs for Buckets, Trenchers [] Chairs, Stools, Shovels and Spade-
Grafts.25 There was value in the capacity of things to be converted to a wide
array of uses. Certainly this was an era of expanding markets for luxury items.26
But oeconomy encouraged householders to balance the purchase of new goods
with making good use of the old. An essay in the Gentlemans Magazine of 1731
explained that oeconomy meant Wisdom applied to the Practice of private
Life; it is situated betwixt Profuseness and Avarice, and consists in a just
Medium of Concern, as to exterior Goods, between being over Careful and hav-
ing no Care at all.27
Chemical practitioners faced with the execution of novel experiments
might purchase or make new instruments for themselves but they also often
adapted household items to chemical ends. The material culture of chemistry
was a mixture of dedicated instruments purchased from specialist makers and
a variety of household vessels and commodities such as teacups, saucers,
bowls, dishes, wine glasses and furniture. Archaeological evidence supports
this. Excavation in 2011 of the location where Joseph Blacks chemical appara-
tus was stored in Edinburgh University uncovered at least two mid-late 18th
century black glass wine bottles and,
24 Robert Dossie, The Elaboratory Laid Open, or, the Secrets of Modern Chemistry and Phar-
macy Revealed (London: J. Nourse, 1758), 1; Robert Dossie, Memoirs of Agriculture, and
Other Oeconomical Arts (London: J. Nourse, 1768).
25 Beech-Tree, Noel Chomel, Dictionaire oeconomique; or, the family dictionary, trans. Rich-
ard Bradley, 2 vols. (Dublin: L. Finn, 1758), vol. 1, n.p.
26 See e.g. Sara Pennell, Pots and Pans History: The material culture of the kitchen in early
modern England, Journal of Design History 11 (1998): 201-216; Amanda Vickery, Behind
Closed Doors: At home in Georgian England (New Haven & London: Yale University Press,
2009).
27 Anon., [poss. Richard Burridge] Oeconomie and Extravagance, The Gentlemans Maga-
zine 1, no. 11 (November 1731), 489.

[] miscellaneous vessels of a [] domestic nature, such as blue and

white transfer-printed pearlware bowls and creamware jugs, that on the
basis of residues present had evidently been employed in the preparation
of chemical materials.28
Any number of such items are mentioned in chemical texts of the period. Less
familiar household items also served chemistry. Firearms were a commonly
adapted household item. Many early modern households contained muskets,
pistols, or rifles, attested to by court records of firearm offenses and a 1541 stat-
ute which governed firearm ownership in England and encouraged a variety of
subjects, to have and keep in every of their houses any such hand-gun or
hand-guns, of the length of one whole yard.29 Joseph Priestleys Birmingham
inventory included a brace of pistols and a Gun with a Bayonet.30 Gun barrels
could then be adapted for use as electrical conductors or as vessels for heating.
John White Webster proposed liberating gases from substances placed in a
gun barrel, the touch-hole of which has been accurately closed by an iron pin.31
Robert Dossie proposed making an alembic for distilling mercury with a cov-
ered copper or iron pan soldered to a gun barrel which sloped down into a
common water pail filled with water.32 The Earl of Dundonald used gun-bar-
rels to convey coal-gas for illumination in experiments at Culross Abbey near
Dunfermline.33 Chemical apparatus was a bricolage of material elements,
some old and some new, some dedicated and some adapted, an oeconomical
mixture of the specialized and the re-purposed. As much as this period saw the
construction of new instruments like the ice calorimeter, it also saw the thrifty
re-use of many old ones.
28 Addyman, Materia Chemica n.p. (see note 18).

29 Quoted in Joyce Lee Malcolm, Guns and Violence: The English experience (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2009), 50.
30 Priestley, quoted in McKie, Priestleys Laboratory, p.128 (see note 14).
31 John White Webster, A Manual of Chemistry: Containing the principal facts of the science,
third edition (Boston: Marsh, Capen, Lyon and Webb, 1839), 106.
32 Robert Dossie, Institutes of Experimental Chemistry: Being an essay towards reducing that
branch of natural philosophy to a regular system, 2 vols. (London: J. Nourse, 1759), vol. 1,
87-88.
33 Thomas, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, The Autobiography of a Seaman, 2 vols., second edition
(London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1861), vol. 1, 39.

44 Werrett
Avoiding Damage
The care of materials was equally valued in domestic oeconomy and chemical
inquiry. It was important to avoid damage to goods and the expense and trou-
ble of repairing or replacing them. Householders could repair damaged
household goods themselves or give them to street traders to fix. In her 1835
Modern Domestic Cookery and Useful Receipt Book Elizabeth Hammond ex-
plained how to mend broken iron pots, glass vessels and china, while recipes
for repairs appeared in various works on chemistry.34 Homes were embedded
in complex networks of artisans and waste traders who circulated between city
streets and the countryside repairing or disposing of materials for a fee. Street
traders included tinkers and chair menders, the former described as wearing
an apron and broad-brimmed hat, carrying saucepans, a hammer and crying
pots to mend!
Damage during chemical experiments could be of various sorts. Instruments
might be deranged or broken, substances could be corrupted or polluted
through unwanted mixing, and practitioners bodies might be hurt or wounded
by corrosive or explosive reactions. Much chemical practice centered on the
avoidance of such problems. Good design with appropriate materials and
careful storage, cleaning and maintenance helped to ensure the integrity and
longevity of instruments.
Practitioners reckoned making instruments durable and sturdy was critical.
This applied first and foremost, according to Dossie, to the principal instru-
ment of the chemical laboratory, the furnace,
[] they should be well designed, and judiciously executed; otherwise

their defects greatly enhance the expense, and frustrate the intention, of
the operations they are to perform; besides their being extremely liable
to become, in a very short time, out of repair and uselessly ruinous.35
Dossie identified types of furnaces that were liable to damage or difficult to

repair and warned against installing them.36 Damage for Dossie was a matter
of both financial loss and social disorder. Damage to flour-grinding mills or
34 Elizabeth Hammond, Modern Domestic Cookery and Useful Receipt Book adapted for Fam-
ilies in the Middling and Genteel Ranks of Life (London: Dean and Co., 1835), 246-7.
35 Dossie, Elaboratory Laid Open, pp.3-4 (see note 24).
36 Ibid., pp.9-10.

that caused by vermin or disease in sheep were among the greatest evils []
which the public sustains.37 Derangement was moral and material.
In domestic and chemical practices, glass provided the principal material
for ensuring substances were kept free from pollution and corruption. In 1780
The Farmers Wife; Or complete country housewife explained that, Stone or
glass jars are the most proper vessels in which to make and keep pickles; for
common earthen vessels are soon penetrated by the vinegar and salt.38 As
Marie Thbaud Sorger reminds us, glass vessels, including various jars and
tubes, were used in chemical experiments to collect and contain substances
such as airs, managed with glass stirring rods, thermometers, and stoppers.39
Vessels should be made to minimize the risk of damage. Dossie proposed that
glass receivers be made larger than those in common use.
A greater quantity of condensing surface [renders] the operation both

more profitable and safe, as it prevents the forcing of the lute, and the
escape of the vapour; as well as the hazard of bursting the vessels, on the
raising the fire too high.40
Chemical practice routinely threatened derangement. Chemistry by its very

nature involved unpredictable reactions which were liable to break or damage
instruments. To avoid cracking vessels heated to high temperatures they could
be placed in baths. Thomas Garnett explained in his chemical lectures of the
1790s,
Chemical vessels may be plunged [] in a pot placed over the furnace,

containing sand, water, or other matter capable of sustaining heat. These
substances interposed between the vessel and the fire, compose [] a
bath, and are very helpful in imparting an uniform heat [] Without this
contrivance, glass vessels would often fly and crack.41
37 Ibid., p.177.
38 Anon., The Farmers Wife; Or complete country housewife (London: Alex Hogg, c.1780), 57.
39 See Chapter 3. Robert Harrington, A Treatise on Air, containing New Experiments and
Thoughts on Combustion; Being a full investigation of Mr. Lavoisiers system (London:
T. Evans, 1791), 194; William Nicholson, The First Principles of Chemistry (London: G.G.J.
and J. Robinson, 1792), 48.
40 Dossie, Elaboratory Laid Open, p.29 (see note 24).
41 Thomas Garnett, Outlines of a Course of Lectures on Chemistry (Liverpool: J. MCreery,
1797), 47.

46 Werrett
Protecting instruments with cases, boxes, and crates for storage and transport
was another solution to such problems. Chemical goods routinely circulated
between homes in the hands of potentially unreliable couriers and post-men.42
Joseph Priestley shared many chemical practitioners anxieties over glassware
sent to him by mail coach. In 1781, he wrote to Josiah Wedgwood from
Birmingham about two boxes of retorts that Wedgewood had sent to him, The
cover of the larger box was quite off, and ten of the retorts broke, most of them
so as to be of no use at all.43 Things got even worse when Priestley moved to
North America.44
Managing damage was sociomaterial, involving both human and artificial
bodies. Chemical instruments were fragile and had to be carefully looked after.
The same was true of practitioners bodies, which they equally sought to pre-
serve from damage. Oeconomy concerned health and safety as much as the
saving of expense. Worcester surgeon William Sandford described his collec-
tion of medical advice on the oeconomy of health as an effort to enable the
uninformed in medical knowledge, to understand in some degree, upon what
principles life is sustained, and how it may probably be prolonged, with ease
and comfort to ourselves, and benefit to our posterity.45 The bodies of chemi-
cal practitioners also required sustaining. Explosions, broken glass, electric
shocks, and corrosive chemicals all threatened their integrity. To protect his
eyes during experiments James Watt adapted ordinary spectacles with flat
glass lenses.46 Michael Faraday recommended wearing glass masks, goggles,
&c. when making experiments with carbonic acid.47 Chemists invoked theory
when determining safety techniques. Kings College London professor of chem-
42 Kenneth Ellis, The Post Office in the Eighteenth Century: A study in administrative history
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958).
43 Joseph Priestley to Josiah Wedgwood, August 8, 1781, in Joseph Priestley, Scientific Corre-
spondence of Joseph Priestley. Ninety-seven letters addressed to Josiah Wedgwood, Sir Joseph
Banks [] Dr. Benjamin Rush, and others, ed. Henry Carrington Bolton (New York: pri-
vately printed, 1892), 29-30, on 29.
44 See e.g. Joseph Priestley to John Vaughan, March 21, 1799. Joseph Priestley Papers, Ameri-
can Philosophical Society, B P931.
45 William Sandford, A Few Practical Remarks on the Medicinal Effects of Wine and Spirits;
With observations on the oeconomy of health (Worcester: J. Tymbs, 1799), vii; see also e.g.
Andrew Harper, The Oeconomy of Health, or, a Medical Essay: Containing new and familiar
instructions for the attainment of health, happiness and longevity (London: C. Stalker,
c. 1785).
46 Watts safety goggles, Watts Workshop Collection, Science Museum, London, Inventory
number 1926-1075/440.
47 Michael Faraday, Experimental Researches in Chemistry and Physics (London: R. Taylor
and W. Francis, 1859), 92.

istry John Frederic Daniell described the way glass halted the passage of radiant
or dark heat and explained how, as a result, This property of glass is some-
times usefully employed where it is desirable to see the light of a fire without
being incommoded by the heat; [so] glass screens are used to protect the eyes
when it is necessary to inspect the action of a hot furnace.48
Chemistry could cause severe damage to the hands. In 1837 a young Matthew
Arnold was taken away from Winchester College after severely burning his
hand in a chemistry class (he nearly lost two fingers).49 Hands were protected
with gloves. Since phosphorus was sometimes thrown out of the mortar dur-
ing its preparation, American surgeon John Lee Comstock warned chemistry
students that it is therefore advisable to protect the hand with a glove, and
keep the face out of the way.50 But there were no cheap, disposable gloves
available at the turn of the nineteenth century, and gloves might hinder dexter-
ity. Experimenters thought twice before exposing gloves to damage. In 1816
Richard Davenport experimented on the communication of heat in boiling tar.
Although he was convinced that his gloved hand would not be dreadfully
burnt if he plunged it into boiling tar, Davenport hesitated. Not choosing to
sacrifice a pair of gloves to the trial of an effect I had no belief in, I wrapped a
newspaper double about my hand, and plunged it in up to the wrist. I retained
my hand in the tar longer than I could when naked without feeling any pain.51
Maintenance
Chemical practice was a trade-off between damage, durability, and discovery,

where by necessity the circulation of materials, whether in the laboratory or
across countries or continents, could and did break things. In addition to these
labors to keep things from derangement, chemical practitioners went to great
lengths to repair things if they did break. Repair constituted a major part of
enlightened artisanry and many makers spent more time cleaning and repair-
ing goods than making them. As David Edgerton has argued, repair and
48 John Frederic Daniell, An Introduction to the Study of Chemical Philosophy: Being a prepa-
ratory view of the forces which concur to the production of chemical phenomena (London:
J.W. Parker, 1839), 188.
49 My thanks to Geoffrey Day of Winchester College who provided the letter from Arnold to
his parents, dated April 7, 1837.
50 J.L. Comstock, A Grammar of Chemistry, adapted to the Use of Schools and Private Students,
second edition (Hartford: S.G. Goodrich, 1825), 30-31.
51 Richard Davenport, Curious Experiments on Boiling Tar, Annals of Philosophy; or, Maga-
zine of Chemistry 9 (Jan-Jun 1817): 111-114, on 114.

48 Werrett
maintenance are the most widespread form of technical expertise because

the number of users typically far outweighs the number of producers of tech-
nical artifacts.52 Oeconomical treatises discussed the cleaning and repair of
buildings and household goods.53 Repair work was also widespread in chemis-
try both because practitioners needed to repair their own vessels, and because
they offered techniques and recipes to others for making repairs.
Adhesives, for example, fascinated oeconomic writers and chemical practi-
tioners. Bradleys translation of Chomels Dictionaire oeconomique included
numerous glue recipes and advice on repairing broken glass with a mixture of
liquid fat and varnish.54 Mrs. Fisher explained in the Prudent Housewife how to
make cements and glues for sticking stone and glass using a paste of flint pow-
der combined with melted white rosin.55 Robert Dossie also investigated
various cements, pastes, lutes, sizes and glues, and published new recipes in
works on industrial arts and chemistry.56 Dossies recipes were intended to
allow repairs of common household commodities like china and porcelain, or
specialized chemical glassware and instruments. For the chemist, he provided
a recipe,
[] for the repairing the cracks, and replacing the broken pieces, of
receivers, or other glass vessels, which admit of being used after they are
in that condition; and this, judiciously applied, in an elaboratory, where
many such vessels are used, will make a considerable saving.57
Filling a crack with a linen rag soaked in a mixture of grated Suffolk cheese,
powdered quicklime and milk, will make the part equally strong, and sound,
with the rest of the vessel.58 Other recipes ranged from the simplest paste
made with flour and water to cements for fixing chemical vessels using linseed
meal, whiting, gum senegal, Windsor loom and Sturbridge clay, or mixtures of
52 David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and global history since 1900 (Oxford;
New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 80.
53 See e.g. John Mordant, The Complete Steward: Or, the duty of a steward to his lord, 2 vols.
(London: W. Sandby, 1761), vol. 1, 389.
54 See Glass, and Glue in Chomel, Dictionaire oeconomique, vol. 1, n.p. (see note 25).
55 Mrs. Fisher of Richmond, The Prudent Housewife; Or, complete English cook, for town and
country, fourth edition (London: T. Sabine, 1788), 80.
56 e.g. Dossie, Elaboratory Laid Open, pp.49-52 (see note 24); Robert Dossie, The Handmaid
to the Arts, 2 vols. (London, 1758), vol. 2, 21-31.
58 Ibid.

quicklime and egg whites.59 Cements were applied with a stick or an old
tobacco pipe.60
Chemical practitioners avoided damage, and repaired things when this was
unavoidable. And if instruments could not be repaired, they could still be
made serviceable. In the inventory of electrical instruments in his Birmingham
laboratory Priestley included About forty square feet of coated Jars which had
been cracked by Explosions but were of some use.61 When no longer useable,
broken items could be converted to some other use. Lavoisier explained in
Elements of Chemistry that to contain liquids for distillation, The best utensils
for this purpose are made of the bottoms of glass retorts and matrasses.62
A heated iron ring connected to a wooden handle could be placed around the
broken vessel to make it useable.63 This practice of using old vessels even after
they were broken had a long tradition, extending well before and after
Lavoisiers time. The archaeology of chemical remains related to Joseph Black
at Edinburgh revealed assorted bottle bases containing residues.64 In 1830,
Michael Faraday wrote that very useful glass dishes and capsules are made out
of old retorts, receivers, and flasks.65 Harvard professor of Chemistry John
White Websters 1839 Manual of Chemistry explained that earthenware vessels
could be used to liberate gases from substances if they were coated and luted
before heating to prevent cracking,
[] horse dung, chopped hay, horse hair, and tow cut short may be incor-
porated with the lute. The addition of sand, renders the lute more fusible,
and is not applicable when very high temperatures are to be sustained. In
such cases fragments of broken glass pots, or of broken crucibles, may be
used, being first well pulverized.66
Here broken items were used to prevent further items breaking. Fragments
served as a material for making new instruments, for lutes, and also to provide
59 Dossie, Handmaid to the Arts, vol. 2, p.26 (see note 56).

60 Ibid., vol. 2, pp.26-28.
61 Priestley, quoted in McKie, Priestleys Laboratory, p.117 (see note 14).
62 Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, Elements of Chemistry, trans. Robert Kerr (Edinburgh: William
Creech, 1790), 377.
63 Ibid.
64 Addyman, Materia Chemica n.p. (see note 18).
65 Michael Faraday, Chemical Manipulation: Being instructions to students in chemistry on the
methods of performing experiments of demonstration, second edition (London: John Mur-
ray, 1830), 168.
66 Webster, A Manual of Chemistry, p.106 (see note 31).

50 Werrett
physical support. Samuel Parkes, London chemical manufacturer and author

of a Chemical Catechism, used broken glass to produce phosphoric acid by
exposing sticks of phosphorus to the air inside a glass funnel. Two or three
pieces of broken glass placed in the neck of the funnel to support the phospho-
rus, and a small quantity of distilled water put into the receiving bottle,
complete this simple apparatus.67
Waste
Materials and instruments that really could not be used again might be dis-
carded as waste and swept out of the house as dust. At that point they returned
to wider circulations of used materials that characterized early modern states.
Few materials at this time were not re-used. Many people made a living trading
in old and discarded goods in the early modern period. Since the fourteenth
century in many European cities, a community of scavengers were employed
by municipal authorities to roam the streets with carts collecting materials.
Coal ashes, bones, metals, rags, cinders, night-soil, metals and shells were all
gathered and refashioned into new products.68 Chemical practitioners engaged
with these trades. In October 1768, Joseph Black told James Watt that he had
asked Ninian Hill, owner of a laboratory in Glasgow, to send Watt some things
to be packed and sent by carriers to Black in Edinburgh.
[] among these are an absurd sort of still and a tall head to it both of
copper the tall head you may sell as old Copper the Still or Body,
I wish to have opened above by taking off the top of it which is soldered
on only with soft solder and that top is also to be sold as old Copper the
rest of the Body will serve me as a boiler and may be sent packed full of
the other things.69
Nothing was wasted as Black cannibalized the still and sold the head.
67 Samuel Parkes, The Chemical Catechism: With notes, illustrations, and experiments, fifth
edition (London: Lackington, Allen and Co., 1812), 190.
68 On early modern waste disposal, see Emily Cockayne, Hubbub: Filth, noise and stench in
England, 1600-1770 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 183-91.
69 Joseph Black to James Watt, Edinburgh, 31 October 1768, in Eric Robinson and Douglas
McKie, eds., Partners in Science: Letters of James Watt and Joseph Black (London: Consta-
ble, 1970), 15.

Chemical practitioners also made it their business to encourage others to

make the most of waste, promoting the same oeconomic principles that guided
their day-to-day interactions with materials. Practitioners argued that the
application of chemistry reduced waste and improved arts. In 1800, for exam-
ple, the Scots periodical writer Robert Heron praised Lavoisiers chemistry for
improving the art of bleaching, which was, he said, till lately, extremely
tedious, and required long labour, a great waste of time, and an extraordinary
consumption of expensive materials. The waste of lime, alkali, acids, fewel,
was very great. Heron went on to argue that cookery, a prominent oeconomic
practice, if subjected to more chemical science, could equally become less
wasteful, how often are the best pieces of animal food, at present, wasted? []
much improvement might be made by a due application of chemical skill.70
Chemical authors also promoted the idea that chemistry could reveal new
uses for byproducts and waste materials. The re-use of old materials was of
course common in many chemical trades, and often international in scope. As
Joppe Van Driel has documented, in the Netherlands ashes and urban filth
were transported to rural areas to provide fertilizer for new raw materials for
urban factories. In the name of sustainability (duurzaamheid), administrators,
entrepreneurs and chemists collaborated to steward materials.71 In Britain,
paper was made from old rags imported from Spain, Russia, and elsewhere;
tanning used dogs dung picked up off the streets by female pure-finders;
copperas or green vitriol production mixed old iron with a liquor derived from
pyrites to produce copperas crystals. Old plaster was used to manufacture
niter; old bones were used to make glue.72 Chemical authors articulated the
practices of these manufactures and claimed to be able to improve them.
Robert Dossie described how to make spirit of hartshorn (the horns of a male
deer), used as a detergent for removing stains, by distillation in his explicitly
titled Elaboratory Laid Open. Place pieces of hartshorn in a still and gradually
70 Robert Heron, Elements of Chemistry: Comprehending all the most important facts and
principles in the works of Fourcroy and Chaptal (London: T.M. Longman and O. Rees, 1800),
548, 586.
71 Joppe van Driel, Ashes to Ashes: The stewardship of waste and oeconomic cycles of agri-
cultural and industrial improvement, 1750-1800, History and Technology 30 (2014): 177-
206; see also Joppe van Driel and Lissa Roberts, Circulating Salts: Chemical governance
and the bifurcation of nature and society, Eighteenth-Century Studies 49 (2016): 233-63.
72 Anon., The Art of Tanning and Currying Leather: With an account of all the different pro-
cesses made use of in Europe and Asia (London: J. Nourse, 1780), 142, 209-10; Tim Allen,
Mike Cotterill, Geoffrey Pike, The Kentish Copperas Industry, Archeologia Cantiana 122
(2002), 319-334; on niter, see Antoine Baum, A Manual of Chemistry; Or a brief account of
the operations of chemistry and their products (Warrington: W. Eyres, 1778), 269.

52 Werrett
increase the heat from a fire. An oil, salt and spirit would result, of which let
the spirit, and salt, be mixt together again; and distilled with a gentle heat, and
they will both rise purer. If this operation be several times cautiously repeated
[] the spirit will become limpid as water, and have a grateful smell.73
Others identified further waste substances which could be used for oeco-
nomic ventures such as agriculture. Chemical writers criticized the poor
practices of traditional managers of waste. In the Edinburgh Magazine of 1796
Thomas Butterworth Bayley, penal reformer and founder of the Manchester
Literary and Philosophical Society, advocated to the Manchester Agricultural
Society the use of waste materials for manure. Bayley lambasted farmers,
[] of all ranks, carrying on their lands, at a great expense of labour, time,

and money, vast quantities of stable dung, whilst at home they overlook
and neglect the most easy, plain, and cheap methods of accumulating
manures, and enriching their farms.74
Bayley then identified wastes that could be turned into valuable commodities,
including mud, mixed with lime, street sweepings and ashes, night soil, bones,
sweepings of cotton and woolen mills, sea-weed, sea shells, river weeds, spent
tanners bark, decayed vegetables, water from steepings of flax and hemp,
bleachers ashes, soap suds and ley.75 Also in the 1790s, following the Scottish
proverb that muck is the mother of the meal chest, Archibald Cochrane,
Earl of Dundonald, explored the potential of various wastes as fertilizers in
A Treatise, Shewing the Intimate Connection that Subsists Between Agriculture
and Chemistry. Chemical substances might be turned to good use, Muriat of
Magnesia [] may be procured in great quantities from the bitter refuse liquor
which at present runs to waste at the salt works.76 Coal-gas, another product
of interest to Cochrane, was a byproduct of the distillation of coal into coke,
and remained a waste product of that process, liberated into the air, through
the eighteenth century. In the early nineteenth century, however, the German
inventor Frederick Winsor competed with Scots engineer William Murdoch to

74 T.B. Bailey [Bayley], Thoughts on Collecting Substances for Manure, Edinburgh Maga-
zine, or Literary Miscellany (Oct 1796): 291-293, on 291.
75 Ibid., pp.291-293.
76 Archibald Dundonald, Earl of Cochrane, A Treatise, Shewing the Intimate Connection That
Subsists Between Agriculture and Chemistry (London: J. Murray and S. Highley, 1795), 73,
90.

use coal gas as an illuminant. Both Winsor and Murdoch sought to give credi-
bility to their enterprises by evoking scientific principles and backing.77
Such enterprises thus saw chemists seeking to co-opt traditional areas of
artisanry, agriculture, and manufactures in the name of the same oeconomic
goals of managing materials, reducing waste, and saving money that marked
household approaches to materials and experimentation. Chemical practition
ers frequently moved between manufacturing and domestic contexts in
pursuit of these enterprises. Dundonald spent considerable wealth scaling up
chemical manufacturing enterprises on his estates in Scotland, and passed
regularly between his large-scale concerns and smaller home laboratories like
that of James Watt in Birmingham.78 Dundonald ruined his finances on this
enterprise, suggestive of the way oeconomic motives might differ from the
simply economic.79 Watt meanwhile constructed prototypes of inventions
such as the separate condenser from left-over pipes and syringes, before
deploying them in steam manufactures.80 Gas-lighting schemes also moved
between the home and larger urban sites. Winsor first offered customers novel
stoves producing light and heat with gas, fitted inside a single house, which
were eventually connected through a network of pipes and supplied by gasom-
eters to produce a network on an industrial scale.81
In one case at least, claims that chemistry might improve the management
of waste went alongside changes from oeconomic to economic language.82
Oeconomy and economy shared some features but the rational management
characteristic of economy focused on quantitative measures of financial profit
and loss, numerical accounting, and the supposedly rational principles of the
unfettered market. The mathematician Charles Babbage famously reckoned a
77 Simon Werrett, From the Grand Whim to the Gasworks: Philosophical fireworks in Geor-
gian England, Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear, eds., The Mindful Hand:
Inquiry and invention from the late Renaissance to early industrialisation (Amsterdam and
Chicago: Edita; University of Chicago Press, 2007), 325-48.
78 Thomas Barnes Cochrane Dundonald and Henry Richard Fox Bourne, The Life of Thomas,
Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, completing The Autobiography of a Seaman,
2 vols. (London: R. Bentley, 1869), vol. 2, 223.
79 The theme is elaborated in John Christies contribution to this volume.
80 Russell, James Watt (see note 19).
81 Leslie Tomory, Progressive Enlightenment: The origins of the gaslight industry, 1780-1820
(London; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
82 For a fuller discussion of the shift from oeconomy to economy, see Joppe Van Driel, The
Filthy and the Fat: Oeconomy, chemistry and resource management in the age of revolu-
tions, (PhD Thesis, University of Twente 2016); and Simon Werrett, Thrifty Science (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).

54 Werrett
more careful accounting of the value of waste was necessary to improve manu-
factures. In an appendix to his 1832 Economy of Machines and Manufactures,
Babbage gave precise accounts of the profitable conversion of substances
apparently of little value at a horse-slaughtering yard in Montfaucon near
Paris. Reckoning the value of hair, skin, blood, hoofs, fat, flesh, tendons, and
bones converted into animal food, manure, combs, lamp fuel, and other prod-
ucts, Babbage demonstrated that a dead horse [] which can be purchased
at from 8.s. 6.d. to 12 s., produces from 2. 9.s. to 4. 14.s.83 In contrast with
Babbages optimism over the economics of waste, others were more cautious.
Economists questioned whether the efficient use of materials was actually
beneficial. In 1865, University College London economist William Stanley
Jevons argued in The Coal Question that the creation of increasingly efficient
engines had not led to a reduction in the consumption of coal but on the con-
trary to a great increase, because increased efficiency lowered the cost of
engines and encouraged their consumption. As Jevons concluded, It is wholly
a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to
a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.84 The efficient use
of waste might generate profits and growth, but it might equally create more
problems than it solved.
Conclusion
A common narrative identifies a revolution in chemistry in the period 1760 to

1840 and identifies this revolution with radical innovation. The rhetoric of con-
temporaries and historians often equated this innovation with a throwing out
of the old. John Joseph Griffin explained to readers of his Chemical Recreations
in 1834, To reform the nomenclature of chemistry, is to cleanse the Augean
stable, where rubbish has been accumulating for forty years.85 Georges Cuvier
reckoned Henry Cavendish and Torben Bergman had cleared that Augean
stable, still overspread with the rubbish of hermetical philosophy.86 Historians
follow the same lead. Lavoisier wrote J.D.Bernal in his 1965 Science in History
83 Appendix to Charles Babbage, The Economy of Machines & Manufactures, third edition
(London: J. Murray, 1846), 393-96.
84 William Stanley Jevon, The Coal Question (London: MacMillan, 1865)
85 Griffin, Chemical Recreations, p. iv (see note 13).
86 Georges Cuvier, Biographical Memoir of Henry Cavendish, Edinburgh New Philosophical
Journal 9-10 (1828): 209-222, on 217.

made a clean sweep of all the old time-hallowed chemical nomenclature.87

The Chemical Revolution, Mi Gyung Kim writes more recently, was success-
ful in cleaning the attic and thereby putting the house in order.88
The household and its maintenance remain potent locations for making
sense of chemical practice. However, chemical inquiry understood from a
sociomaterial perspective in the period 1760 to 1840 was by no means about
throwing out the old. Historians focused on the dedicated culture of chemistry,
on materials and locations which were designed and built exclusively for
chemical inquiry, have overlooked a widespread practice of adapting and con-
verting spaces and goods to chemical ends during these decades. Early
moderns, like contemporary sociologists, viewed much material culture as
incomplete, not dedicated to a single end but pregnant with possible uses.
Kitchens, cellars, wine bottles, broken saucers, gun barrels, and the hints and
recipes that cleaned, cared for and repaired them were as much a part of
chemical experimentation as specialized apparatus like the furnace or cruci-
ble and even the latter could be altered or repurposed according to need.
Making the household and other adapted spaces the focus in this essay has
revealed a set of practices and approaches to material culture that were inti-
mately connected with and often corresponded to practices of oeconomic
household management. Oeconomic concerns, shared among family mem-
bers, sought to balance the consumption and use of new goods with the careful
stewardship of the old, maintaining and making good use of existing posses-
sions where possible. This led to savings of money and time, but beyond narrow
conceptions of profit and loss, it established good order and provided a model
for the management of other arenas of life. Applied to chemistry, oeconomics
regulated a diverse body of spaces and materials that were the location of
much experimentation.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Lissa Roberts, John Perkins, and the members of the Situating
Chemistry project for their support and constructive commentary throughout
87 J.D. Bernal, Science in History, 4 vols. (Harmondsworth: C.A. Watts, 1965), vol. 3, 451;
Lavoisier soon realized that the confusion of alchemical terminology had to be swept
away along with the phlogiston theory. Sarah Regal Riedman, Antoine Lavoisier: Scientist
and citizen (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1967), 141.
88 Mi Gyung Kim, Affinity: That elusive dream (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 393.

56 Werrett
the development of this essay. Part of this essay was written as a fellow at the
Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry at the Chemical Heritage
Foundation in Philadelphia, and with the support of the Rachel Carson Center
for Environment and Society in Munich for which support I am most grateful.

The Case of Coal 57
Chapter 2Roberts and van Driel
The Case of Coal

Lissa L. Roberts and Joppe van Driel
Coal plays a key role in current debates regarding both the Anthropocene and
Great Divergence. Long identified as having fueled the Industrial Revolution,
coal has been celebrated and condemned for spurring material progress and
productivity, global inequality and environmental degradation.1 But what is
coal? While the answer might seem straightforward, recognizing that coals
identity as a chemical substance and material resource actually evolved over
time, rather than having been a priori essential, can help us better understand
the history which has both shaped and been shaped by it. That is to say that the
historical identity of coal evolved through a fluid amalgam of material charac-
teristics and applications, knowledge claims, technological capabilities, market
transactions and political decisions.2 By uncoupling our understanding of the
past from an acceptance that materials have an essential identity, we realize
that coal-powered industrialization was not historically inevitable; rather it
was a complex matter of choice. This recognition, in turn, accentuates the fact
that our collective future is also an open matter of choice.
A partial model for considering what this rethinking entails can be found in
Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political power in the age of oil.3 In the
first chapter, Mitchell contrasts the socio-technical agencies of coal and oil,
which did so much to shape politics since the nineteenth century. Briefly, coals
extraction, transport and use depended on the workers who operated coal
mines, ran the railroads and stoked coal-fueled fires. With so many workers
concentrated together in locations that were crucial to the growth of industrial
1 See especially E.A. Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010); Alfred Chandler, Anthracite Coal and the Beginnings of
the Industrial Revolution in the United States, Business History Review 46 (1972): 141-181;
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the making of the modern world
economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Will Steffen, Jacques Grinevald,
Paul Crutzen and John McNeill, The Anthropocene: Conceptual and historical perspectives,
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369 (2011): 842-867.
2 Compare with the treatment of uranium in Gabrielle Hecht, Africa and the Nuclear World:
Labor, occupational health, and the transnational prodution of uranium, Comparative Studies
in Society and History 51 (2009): 896-926.
3 Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political power in the age of oil (London: Verso, 2011).
Lissa Roberts and Joppe van Driel, 2018|doi 10.1163/9789004325562_004


58 Roberts And Van Driel
society, organization and political clout were bound to follow. What finally
broke their power, was not only the cooperation between captains of industry
and colluding politicians, however, but societys growing dependence on oil.
Because of their relative geographical and practical isolation, oils work-
forces those who manned the oilrigs, built the pipelines and crewed on oil
tankers never organized as coalminers and railway workers had. The global
nexus of political and economic power thereby shifted and carbon democracy
took on the characteristics that continue to haunt us today.
Mitchells analysis allows him to emphasize how it is that histories of pro-
duction, distribution and use are inevitably also social, economic and political
histories. Missing, however, is a consideration of whether the identities of the
substances with which he begins his analysis also have a history. What does it
mean, in other words, to speak of coal? Answering this question takes us back
to the long eighteenth century, when fossil substances were being increasingly
mined and exploited across significant parts of Europe. As demonstrated in
this essay, coals identity and uses were open matters at the time. As the phi-
losopher Annemarie Mol writes, [O]ntology is not given in the order of things
[] instead ontologies are brought into being, sustained, or allowed to wither
away in common, day-to-day, sociomaterial practices.4 Chemists, natural his-
torians, encyclopedists, scientific societies, mine operators, landowners,
investors, inventors, policy-makers and law courts all contributed to shaping
coals identity, classification and use. As they deliberated, they could not know
that the sum of their efforts would fuel historical development in the way that
has been retrospectively explained by binding coals essential identity to
industrialization.
In what follows, the initial openness of coals identity is examined. The first
section examines the categorizations through which encyclopedists, natu-
ral historians and chemists sought to define and situate coal in the realm of
nature. The second section zooms in on a series of British cases in which coal
was regarded as a political substance whose identity could only be resolved
through legal deliberation regarding its use. In the third section we shift our
attention to France and examine the evolving identity of coal as a natural
resource. We do so by considering those for whom the opening and governed
exploitation of coal mines was integrated with simultaneous efforts to improve
the soil and society. In other words, French chemists, entrepreneurs and offi-
4 Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple: Ontology in medical practice (Raleigh, NC: Duke University
Press, 2002), 6, quoted in Lissa Roberts, Exploring Global History Through the Lens of History
of Chemistry: Materials, identities and governance, History of Science 54 (2016): 335-361, on
347.

The Case of Coal 59
cials regarded coal mining as an element of oeconomic circulation of materi-

als, meant to stimulate agricultural, industrial and social improvement. Coals
identity was, thus, not written in stone from the beginning of time. Rather it
evolved during the period under investigation here in a field of historically
open possibilities regarding understanding, use and socio-environmental
amelioration.
Tentative Taxonomies
[T]here is no standard coal [] the very word itself is a popular term,

which has entered into science.5
Even today, coals identity is ambiguous. The product of decayed organic mate-
rial, it is generally considered together with inorganic minerals and referred to
as having fueled a mineral based energy economy.6 It is variously classified
scientifically in terms of the sort of plant remains that compose it (humic and
sapropelic), its heating value and carbon content level (lignite, sub-bitumi-
nous, bituminous and anthracite), and its chemical composition (this varies in
virtually every sample because of local conditions). Classification according to
chemical composition, unsurprisingly, has changed along with broader devel-
opments in analytic chemistry and its instrumentation. Coals quadripartite
division was only adopted internationally in a standardized way in the late
1930s, bringing a degree of stability after centuries of multiple systems and
suggestions.
Part of this is traceable to eighteenth-century translations of the Latin term
regnum lapideum. While generally translated as mineral kingdom (or similar
cognates in other languages), Linnaeus defined this realm to include petrae
(simple stones), minerae (composite/heterogenous stones) and fossilia
(aggregate mixts containing both decayed animal and vegetable and substances
classed as minerae). In the early editions of his Systema Naturae, the class of
minerae was further sub-divided into salts and sulfurs, the latter characterized
5 E.A. Newell Arber, The Natural History of Coal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1911), 6.
6 The United States government, for example, only began publishing separate production sta-
tistics for minerals and fossil fuels, including coal in 1977, following the 1973 oil crisis. See also
Cornelia Klein and Anthony Philpotts, Earth Materials: Introduction to mineralogy and petrol-
ogy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); E.A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and
Change: The character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge: Cambridge

by its combustibility and odoriferous quality. Sulfur, in turn, contained four

genera, including bitumen, within which the solids asphaltum, gagates, and
lithantrax were situated. The thirteenth edition of this widely referenced book
included an alternative system developed by the Swedish physician Magnus
Bromelius in 1730. This system divided Sulphura into five groups: sulphur, bitu-
men, petroleum, succinum and lithanthrax, which were translated into English
as sulfur, bitumen, petroleum, amber and coal.7
But lack of coherence was not confined to natural history systems. Encyclo
pedias, iconic vehicles of enlightenment, illustrate this. Both Diderot and
dAlemberts Encyclopdie and its Protestant counterpart edited by Fortun
Barthlemy de Flice (two of the Enlightenments most successful publishing
ventures) spread discussions out among a number of articles, including those
dedicated to charbon and its subdivision focusing on charbon de terre, in addi-
tion to fossile, and houille.8 Neither could turning to chemistry textbooks
provide clarification. Until the late 1780s, as Ursula Klein and Wolfgang Lefvre
point out, chemistry textbooks largely organized their classification systems
according to perceptible properties (appearance, smell and taste, solubility,
combustibility, etc.) and variously divided the mineral kingdom into com
peting sets of sub-categories. Wilhelm Hombergs taxonomy, for example,
employed the categories metals, salts, stones and earths, while Boerhaave
classed the same set of substances as metals, salts, sulfur, stones, earths and
semi-metals. Johann Christian Wiegleb divided this realm into earthy bodies,
metals, salts, waters and inflammable bodies.9 Establishing a unitary identity
for coal was bound to be a challenge in such a context.
Contemporary authorities nonetheless managed to turn the characteristics
of the chemistry of their age to advantageous use. The French surgeon and
Acadmie des sciences librarian Jean Franois Clment Morand, for example,
7 Carolus Linnaeus, Systema Naturae (Stockholm: Gottfried Kiesewetter, 1740), 6; Carolus

Linnaeus, Systema Naturae, thirteenth edition, ed. Johann F. Gmelin (Leipzig: Georg Emanuel
Beer, 1793), vol. 3, 17; in english, see Sir Charles Linn, A General System of Nature [] translated
from Gmelin, Fabricus, Willdenow, etc. [] by William Turton, M.D. (London: Lackington Allen
and Co., 1806), 11.
8 Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond dAlembert, eds., Encyclopdie ou dictionnaire raisonn des
sciences, des arts et des mtiers (Paris: Andr le Breton, Michel-Antoine David, Laurent Durand,
Antoine-Claude Briasson, 1751-1772); Fortun Barthlemy de Flice, ed., Encyclopdie ou
Dictionnaire universel raisonn des connoissances humaine (Yverdon, 1770-1780); Robert
Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979),
especially 19ff.
9 Ursula Klein and Wolfgang Lefvre, Materials in Eighteenth-Century Science: A historical ontol-
ogy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 163-164.

The Case of Coal 61
contrasted natural historys superficial multiplication of names and catego-

ries with the analytical insights afforded by chemistry in his oft-cited work lArt
dexploiter les mines de charbon de terre.
[O]f all the productions of natures three realms, it is this fossil which
presents the most singularities and analytical difficulties [] In order to
acquire a just idea of the constituent parts of charbon de terre, it is indis-
pensible to submit samples from as many different lands as possible to
chemical analysis.10
Sensible and qualitatively oriented chemistry, still closely related to medicine

but also increasingly allied to the improvement of both agriculture and manu-
facture, provided the analytical tools for linking experimentally-revealed
characteristics with a growing understanding of material composition and
application. Textures, smells, colors and combustibility, uncovered in the labo-
ratory, indicated whether a given sample of charbon de terre was sulfuric,
pyritic, acid or alkaline, in addition to the relative amount of phlogiston it con-
tained. In turn, this helped determine the nature of health risks to local miners
and possible medical applications. It further indicated which samples repre-
sented sources usable for forge work, domestic heating or fertilizing the soil.11
Disciplinary skirmishes continued at least through the 1830s when William
Hutton, agent for the Norwich Fire Insurance Company and amateur natural
investigator, noted that every variety of this fossil he subjected to microscopic
examination revealed the presence of vegetable remains.12 Together with the
University of Londons botany professor John Lindley, he set out his findings
and argued for more attention to what he called fossil botany. Like Morand,
Hutton and Lindley justified their approach in opposition to natural history.
[N]either a barren nomenclature, destitute of all attempts at determin-

ing the relations that former species bore to those of our own era, nor
supposed identifications of species by vague external characters, nor
hasty determinations by analogies by means of partial views of structure,
10 Jean Franois Clment Morand, LArt dexploiter les mines de charbon de terre, 4 vols. (Paris:
Saillant et Nyon, 1768-1779), vol. 2, 1117, vol. 4, 1384.
11 Ibid., see e.g. vol. 2, pp.980, 1143, 1115, 1150-1159, vol. 4, p.1384.
12 The vegetable origins of coal had certainly been noted before this. See e.g. John Playfair,
Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1802), 148-150,
where he discusses the views of Buffon, Richard Kirwan and others.

are sufficient [] nothing short of a most rigorous examination is likely

to serve the ends of science.13
The science these authors wished to serve was directed toward understanding
the past. The fossil remains of plants found in various subterranean strata pro-
vided them with an as-yet underexplored glimpse of the early history and
condition of our Planet, and of the successive races of organized bodies which
have existed upon it.14 Chemical inquiry insinuated itself differently in rela-
tion to the passage of time. Similarly able to assemble clues about the Earths
past, it was simultaneously poised to suggest possible futures, whether through
its application to the promotion of health, the production of new commodi-
ties, the improvement of crop yields, or a more general, manipulable
understanding of composition and decomposition.
The successful movement of chemical knowledge and processes in and out
of the laboratory depended on practical exactitude, but this was not enough to
provide a definitive answer to coals identity. Tentative taxonomies continue to
this day and, as a recent study intriguingly argues, it is the element of time that
is responsible for coals ambiguous identity as a chemical substance. Long
standing tests afford no information whatsoever [] about the nature of coal,
while examining its source history emphasizes locally-situated particularities
of character and composition. Perhaps it would be preferable simply, then, to
look to coal as a natural product that is subject to local and regional variations.15
As the following section indicates, coals identity remained a pressing issue
from the late eighteenth until the mid-nineteenth century, even if or espe-
cially because the authority of science was insufficient to resolve the question.
But if chemistry suggested trajectories of use that might shape coals otherwise
open future, might arguing back from these projected uses provide coal with a
clear definition? Crucially this required more than just moving back and forth
in time. It also entailed moving from the laboratory to legal courts and legisla-
tures, where evidence was collected and weighed with different measures and
identities were decided in a manner that went beyond laws of nature to
include those situated at the intersection of the state, society and the market.
13 John Lindley and William Hutton, Fossil Flora of Great Britain (London: James Ridgway, 1831-
1833), v-vi.
14 Ibid.
15 James G. Speight, The Chemistry and Technology of Coal (Boca Raton: Taylor and Francis, 2013),
97.

The Case of Coal 63
Adjudicating Identities
The biography of James Hutton (1726-1797) illustrates how these various

threads came together in the late eighteenth century. Educated as a physician,
Hutton engaged in a broad array of activities including farming, chemical
manufacture, canal construction and management, and geology. Coal played a
role in many of his endeavors, including his most famous publication The
Theory of the Earth. Hutton defined coal as both the product of dead vegetable
matter and as a source of subterranean heat, which was responsible for incit-
ing geo-chemical change; it thereby provided active testimony for the cycles
that lent natures oeconomy its dynamic character.16 This invited human stew-
ardship of a global system whose ongoing fertility depended on maintaining
its dynamic balance. It also invited analysis of coals own nature and identity,
which Hutton viewed as evolving over time.17
Huttons chemical investigations and related reflections led him to believe
that coal was composed of phlogiston and either a simple carbonic substance
or oily compounds produced by plants. [T]hough found in every intermediate
state, he distinguished two distinct sorts, related to level of exposure to higher
degrees of heat, and to other circumstances favourable to the dissipation of
their more volatile and fluid parts.18
Of the one kind is that fossil coal which melts or becomes fluid upon
receiving heat; of the other, is that species of coal, found both in Wales
and Scotland, which is perfectly infusible in the fire, and burns like coaks,
without flame or smoak [sic]. The one species abounds in oily matter, the
other has been distilled by heat, until it has become a caput mortuum, or
perfect coal.19
As this passage indicates, the binary nature of coaliness only revealed itself
through time. The first coaly substance was fusible and burned with a flame,
losing its phlogiston when heated. The second, more perfect coal was the
residue of longstanding heat and fusion, which left behind a carbonic and
combustible sort of phlogiston.
16 For multiple meanings of the word oeconomy, see the introduction to this volume.
17 Douglas Allchin, James Hutton and Coal, Cadernos IG/UNICAMP 7 (1997): 167-183.
18 James Hutton, The Theory of the Earth (Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh,
vol. I, Part II, 1788), 209-304, on 240.
19 Ibid., p.241.

Significantly, Huttons attention had previously been drawn to both the

question of maintaining the earths fertility and the identity of coal in circum-
stances that were other than purely intellectual. As an owner of farmland,
Hutton held active experimental and financial interests in matters of fertility
and fertilization, which led him to test the use of coal ash for improving crop
yields.20 As an investor and manager of the Forth and Clyde Canal in the
Scottish lowlands, the financial success of which depended on being able to
maximize the amount of goods that passed through it and minimize the duties
that had to be paid on them, Hutton also became actively engaged in the ques-
tion of coals identity long before he penned his famous Theory.
With the passage of parliamentary legislation that set a higher duty for ship-
ping excavated coal than for its close but equally ill-defined relative culm,
Hutton was anxious to set narrow boundaries around the formers identity and
thereby lower the charges assessed on the fossil material that passed through
the Forth and Clyde Canal. As he wrote in his 1777 pamphlet Considerations on
the Nature, Quality and Distinctions of Coal and Culm, the lack of a legally rec-
ognized definition made it impossible to distinguish culm purportedly the
predominant fossil substance to pass through the canal from coal. Neither
did recourse to natural distinctions offer an easy solution.
It cannot be in the nature of the fossile [sic] substance that the distinc-
tion of coal and culm consists; for in many places of the kingdom, the
same seam, stratum, or mine, produces what is esteemed either coal or
culm, according as it is in large pieces or broken small; therefore so far as
a judgment should be formed in this way, the distinction of coal and culm
would appear to consist in nothing but great and small.
On the other hand, it cannot be in the size alone, that culm differs
from coal, because the smallest dust of a certain species of coal always
pays the duty proper to coal [] It is therefore evident, that something
else [] must be required in order to distinguish culm from coal; and it
will appear reasonable to look for this in the purposes to which those
several commodities may be strictly applicable.21
20 James Hutton, Elements of Agriculture, (unpublished manuscript), 117; cited in Jean

Jones, James Huttons Agricultural Research and his Life as a Farmer, Annals of Science
42 (1985): 573-601, on 589.
21 James Hutton, Considerations on the Nature, Quality and Distinctions of Coal and Culm
(Edinburgh: C. Elliot, and Richardson and Urquhart, 1777), 2-3.

The Case of Coal 65
Of note in this passage is that it moves from speaking of the nature of a sub-
stance to the applicability of a commodity without any indication that a
boundary exists between the two. Hutton was sure that the use to which a
commodity could be put depends truly on the nature of the substance in
question, but argued that this was best revealed from observations that may
be made in the actual application of the commodity.22 While material identi-
ties were thus ascribed to nature by this logic, they were best sought according
to the same reasoning through an investigation of marketable goods.
Huttons memoir was matched by ten months of lobbying the Treasury and
Board of Customs in London and answered by at least one angry counter-pam-
phlet.23 In the end, Hutton suggested that fraud could easily be prevented and
government revenues protected by a simple test that any revenue agent could
perform. When the question arose of whether a barge shipment contained
culm or coal, the attending agent had only to place a small sample in a crucible
and attempt to light it; culms fusibility would prevent it from sustaining the
fire.24 The outcome, enshrined in the passage of Parliamentary legislation in
December 1777, practically set the identities of culm and coal and prevented
the erosion of profits that would have resulted from a refusal to distinguish
culm from coal and grant a lower rate of duty for its transport.
As industrial developments created greater possibilities for the exploitation
of materials, legislation and litigation were bound to follow. Questions of
ownership, transportation, safety, and revenues were aired and answered in
legislative assemblies, administrative offices and law courts. As seen in the
case just discussed, establishing material identities was a crucial part of the
process. And while this expanded the market for chemist-consultants, their
involvement neither guaranteed a solution to the problem nor a trustworthy,
scientific reputation for them.25 Consultants often disagreed with each other
22 Ibid.
23 Remarks on Considerations on the Nature, &c. of Coal and Culm, &c. By a Friend to the
Revenue. Addressed to the Commissioners for managing his Majestys Customs (London,
1777), cited in The Monthly Review or Literary Journal 58 (1778): 482; For lobbying by Hut-
tons colleague, see Jean Jones, James Hutton and the Forth and Clyde Canal, Annals of
Science 39 (1982): 255-263, on 263.
24 Hutton, Considerations, pp. 12-13 (see note 21).
25 Christopher Hamlin, The City as a Chemical System? The Chemist as Urban Environ-
mental Professional in France and Britain, 1780-1880, Journal of Urban History 33 (2007):
702-28; Joppe van Driel and Lissa Roberts, Circulating Salts: Chemical governance and
the bifurcation of nature and society, Eighteenth-Century Studies 49 (2016): 233-63,
esp.249; J.Z. Fullmer, Technology, Chemistry, and the Law in Early 19th-century England,
Technology and Culture 21 (1980): 1-28; Paul Lucier, Court and Controversy: Patenting

for reasons that spanned experimental evidence, training and interested

involvement in the case at hand. Science at the bar exposed its practitioners
and their disciplines to the fickle hybridity of a world at once material and
social. When nature was deemed unable to provide acceptable guidelines,
recourse was made to precedents of law and use, generously salted with the
power of courtroom or parliamentary persuasion.26
A celebrated court case, heard in Edinburgh in 1853, brought all these ele-
ments together. A landowning couple, Mr & Mrs William Gillespie of Tor-
banehill, had leased a parcel of land to James Russel & Son, coalmasters. The
lease granted the Russels the right to exploit the whole coal, ironstone, iron-
ore, limestone and fireclay (but not to comprehend copper, or any other
minerals whatsoever, except those specified) in the lands of Torbanehill.27
They leased the land, which adjoined a parcel they were already working,
because they assumed that the veins they had uncovered of what came to be
called Cannel, Boghead or Turbanite coal continued across the properties
boundary. Since it was a key ingredient in the newly burgeoning business of
manufacturing paraffin, lubricants and lamp oil, the Russels stood to make a
profit. The Gillespies, however, argued that this substance was not a kind of
coal, but a mineral hence, not covered by the lease. If the Russels wanted to
exploit it, they should have to sign a new lease with a higher rate that reflected
this added value.
More was at stake than the price of land, though. One of the major manufac-
turers who depended on a reasonably priced supply of this substance was
James Young, who owed his position to a patent that explicitly named the
ingredient in his process as coal.28 Should the Gillespies win their case, he
stood to lose his dominant industrial position; small wonder that he came to
the Russels aid. As the court case unfolded, twenty-eight geologists, mineralo-
gists, chemists and engineers gave testimony on behalf of the Gillespies;
forty-one spoke on behalf of the Russels. The judge finally charged the jury to
ignore the conflicting scientific evidence in favor of whether Gillespie had
included this disputed mineral as coal in the original lease. [Y]ou are to deter-
mine whether it is coal or is not coal, he pronounced, in the language spoken
science in the nineteenth century, British Journal for the History of Science 29 (1996): 139-
154.
26 Compare with Jos Ramon Bertomeus essay in this volume.
27 Alexander Watson Lyell, A Full Report of the Trial Before the Lord Justice-General and a
Special Jury of the Issues in the Action at the Instance of Mr. and Mrs. Gillespie of Torbanehill
(Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfute, 1853), 2.
28 John Butt, James Paraffin Young: Founder of the mineral oil industry (Edinburgh: Scot-
lands Cultural Heritage, 1983).

The Case of Coal 67
in the missive [] not [] in the language of geologists.29 After only ten min-
utes of deliberation, the jury found for the Russels and, implicitly, for Youngs
continued dominance in this coals industrial use.
The results were mixed. The Gillespies went away feeling cheated and con-
tinued to seek redress through the courts. Individual scientific reputations
were publicly attacked, which emphasized the fragility of sciences claim to
objectivity. Youngs victory was shaky and short-lived. The advertised value of
this commodity recently identified through litigation as coal drew inven-
tive competitors like moths to a flame; and, by the time his patent ran out in
1860, its value began to be eclipsed by the rise of shale-oil extraction. But the
domain of coals identity had grown, determined by the interpretation of a
legal document rather than the authority of science.
A Fertile Fossil
The connections between coal and industrialization, along with the social and
environmental inequalities and degradation they brought in their combined
wake, have been seared into our cultural consciousness by novels such as
D.H.Lawrences Sons and Lovers and Women in Love and Emile Zolas Germinal.
Coal, in these literary monuments, warmed the homes and lined the financial
portfolios of owners as it blackened the short and miserable lives of workers
whose families had to fight even for the right to glean the dusty leftovers of
shipments sent to stoke the fires of industry.30 These processes have been
traced forward from the second half of the nineteenth century with great
effect, but carrying them back in time risks papering over important develop-
ments. Generally overlooked in histories that return to the eighteenth century
is a combination of contemporary recognition of coals various identities and
the presence of oeconomic initiatives that incorporated the reclamation of coal
fields into visions of socio-environmental improvement.31 Focusing on these
29 Watson Lyell, Trial, pp.236-237 (see note 27).

30 Giulia Pissarello, Industrialism as Tragedy of Ugliness: D.H. Lawrences ecological con-
sciousness, Griseldaonline 10 (2011): 31-42; Sara B. Pritchard, Mining Land and Labor,
Environmental History, 10 (2005): 731-733; Agnes Kneitz, As if the River was not Meat and
Drink to You: Social novels as a means of framing nineteenth-century environmental jus-
tice, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 1 (2015): 1-16.
31 Lissa Roberts, ed., Practicing Oeconomy in the Late Eighteenth Century (Special issue of
History and Technology 30 (2014): 133-279). For recognition of various identities, see Cata-
logue alphabtique des differents charbons de terre, Morand, Lart dexploiter les mines,
vol. 1, pp.181-195 (see note 10).

developments is not to deny coals involvement in industrialization. It is to

recall that the historical trajectory along which this involvement unfolded was
neither necessary nor inevitable; alternative routes forward were acknowl-
edged and explored.
The Compagnie des Mines dAnzin, one of Frances largest industrial enter-
prises in the nineteenth century and setting for key scenes in Germinal,
illustrates this. Established in 1757, its incorporation document is couched in
Enlightenment terms that describe serving the public good as a primary goal.
Beyond rhetoric, the company stood out during its first several decades for pro-
viding its workers with housing, medical care, education and retirement
pensions.32 With this in mind, the rest of this section attends to the ways in
which coals multiple identities were intertwined with the projection of alter-
native historical futures in France during the second half of the long eighteenth
century.
Historians usually situate eighteenth-century French coal prospecting
between a deforesting past and an industrializing future. However, the fact
that other often more abundant and easier to access- energy sources were
available, reminds us that presenting coal as the driver of industrialization
imports a teleological perspective into historical interpretation.33 Throughout
the eighteenth century wood and peat remained the most commonly used
fuels in French households and factories, while the energy supplied by ani-
mals, humans, wind- and waterpower continued to top the share of fuel in
32 William Henry Hurlbert, France and the Republic (Charleston: BiblioLife, 2007 [1890]),
328; Richard Barker, French Entrepreneurship During the Restoration: The record of a
single firm, the Anzin Mining Company, The Journal of Economic History 21 (1961): 161-178,
on 164.
33 Michael Williams, Deforesting the Earth: From prehistory to global crisis (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2003), 171; Andre Corvol, trans. Richard C. Holbrook, The Forest,
Pierre Nora and David P. Jordan, eds., Rethinking France: Les lieux de mmoire, vol. 2, Space
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 109-110; Ian D. Rotherham and David McCal-
lam, Peat Bogs, Marshes and Fen as Disputed Landscapes in Late Eighteenth-Century
France and England, Louise Lyle and David McCallam, eds., Histoires de la Terre: Earth
sciences and French culture 1740-1940 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 75-88, on 87; Ivan
T. Berend, An Economic History of Nineteenth-Century Europe: Diversity and industrializa-
tion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 80, n. 15; The traditional economic
narrative nonetheless remains persistent. Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew
Rich and Asia Did Not: Global economic divergence, 1600-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2011), 160; Charles Coulston Gillispie, Science and Polity in France at the End
of the Old Regime (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980), 427; Michael Stephen
Smith, The Emergence of Modern Business Enterprise in France (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2005), 162.

The Case of Coal 69
manufacturing.34 The use of coal for fuel did indeed slowly spread in French
glassworks, potteries, brickworks and breweries, favored in these manufac-
tures because the fossil burned at higher temperatures than wood or charcoal.35
At the same time, eighteenth-century coal enthusiasts also promoted non-
industrial uses. In his previously mentioned LArt dexploiter les mines de
charbon de terre, Morand drew on an international array of authors to discuss
the different ways of employing coal in manufactories, workshops and
households.36 Monitored by chemists, Morand explained, the nature and uses
of coal proliferated as it was transformed into various states. Using the fossil as
fuel in manufactures, in what he referred to as the governance of fire, was
only one option.37 When oily, physicians employed it to combat ringworms,
abscesses or sexually transmitted diseases, while craftsmen converted it into
varnish. When smoky, it attacked scurvy and measles. Painters used coal-
impregnated water to produce black and red pencils. Artisans processed hard
and spongy coal to plaster vaulted ceilings. In a powdery state of ash, it found
employment in cement, dyestuff and glassworks, or as fertilizer.38
At mid-eighteenth century, French nobles were especially prominent among
those who mobilized their assets to capitalize on the newly discovered coal
fields in northern France.39 And here, the promise of mining coal for its fertile
ash was attractive accessing the subsoil to bolster soil fertility. Recognizing
an analogy with Dutch successes using peat ash for fertilizer, many nobles
invested in coal mining to seek local substitutes that would free them from
dependence on imported coal ash from Hainault in the Southern Netherlands
and wood and peat ash from the Netherlands.40 Their efforts were partly trig-
34 Rondo Cameron, A New View of European Industrialization, The Economic History

Review 38 (1985): 1-23.
35 Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, trans. Sin Reynolds (Berkeley and Los Ange-
les: University of California Press, 1992), 328-29.
36 Morand, LArt dexploiter, vol. 2, no. 4, pp.739-1356 (see note 10).
37 Morand, LArt dexploiter, vol. 2, p.1195 (see note 10).
38 Roland de la Platire, Abrg historique de lusage des cendres de tourbes superficielles
& souterreines pour fertiliser les terres en Hainaut & dans la haute Picardie, Art du Tour-
bier, in J.E. Bertrand, Descriptions des arts et mtiers, faites ou approuves par Messieurs de
lAcadmie royale des sciences, nouvelle dition, vol. XIX (Neuchatel: LImprimerie de la
Socit Typographique, 1783), 472-565, on 546.
39 Marc Rouff, Les mines de charbon en France au XVIIIe sicle (Paris: Rieder et Cie, 1922);
Reed Geiger, The Anzin Coal Company: Big business in the early stages of the French Indus-
trial Revolution, 1800-1833 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1974).
40 Roland de la Platire, Abrg historique, pp.545-546 (see note 38); On Dutch practices,
Joppe van Driel, Ashes to Ashes: The stewardship of waste and oeconomic cycles of agri-

gered by recent geo-political developments. The War of the Spanish Succession

ended in 1713 with new borders that delegated part of Hainault to the Austrian
Hapsburgs, including the coal mining areas of Mons and Charleroi. Inhabitants
on the French side of the border, long accustomed to securing supplies of
wood-, peat- and coal ash via these areas, now faced fees that could be raised at
will by foreign rulers.41
Noble French landowners, involved in managing vast tracts of arable fields,
had a direct interest in relieving this insecure supply of fertilizers.42 This led
them to invest in coalmines for two reasons. First, coalmines granted access to
coal that, when burned for fuel, left fertile ashes the use of which as fertilizer
for arable agriculture was widely documented in agricultural handbooks going
back to the late sixteenth century.43 Second, in some cases it was possible to
mine specially targeted fossils that could be directly manufactured into
fertilizers.
This last strategy gained import in 1753, when coal prospectors in Picardy
found shallow deposits of a substance that spontaneously combusted. In a
report on their discovery, the intendant of the local administrative center (at
Soisson, near Laon) noted that cultivators and laborers had found a way to
control this spontaneous combustion to produce blackish or reddish ashes
that contained salts specific to vegetation.44 The report soon circulated
widely. The intendant communicated the findings to the Inspecteur-gnral des
manufactures de Picardie, who was charged with consulting the central Council
of Commerce on new policies.45 The Inspecteur appealed to cultivators and
land managers across the country, to harness and experiment with the fertile
fossils. As such, the report was taken up in Diderots Encyclopdie in 1766 and
included by the agriculturalist, inspector general of the marine and Acadmie
cultural and industrial improvement, 1750-1800, History and Technology 30 (2014): 177-
206.
41 Roland de la Platire, Abrg historique, pp.545-546 (see note 38); P.M. Jones, The Peas-
antry in the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 15.
42 Ibid., p.15.
43 See e.g. Johann Coler, Oeconomia oder Hausbuch, 6 vols. (Wittenberg, 1593-1606); Gervase
Markham, Markhams Farwell to Husbandry or, The inriching of all sorts of Barren and Ster-
ile grounds in our Kingdome, to be as fruitfull in all manner of Graine, Pulse, and Grasse, as
the best grounds whatsoever (London: Roger Iackson, 1625); Pieter van ngelen, De Ver-
standige Hovenier (Doornick; Marcus Willemsz., 1659), Duhamel du Monceau, lments
dagriculture, 2 vols. (Paris: Guerin and Delatour, 1762).
44 Charles-Blaise de Mliand, Houille, Diderot and dAlembert, Encyclopdie, vol. 8 (1766),
pp.265-68 (see note 8).
45 Gillispie, End of the Old Regime, pp.425-26 (see note 33).

The Case of Coal 71
des sciences member Henri Louis Duhamel du Monceau in his popular

Descriptions des arts et mtiers reaching a wide audience of aristocrats and
governors.46
By this time, more than fifty new coalmines, the explicit purpose of which
was to mine for these self-combustible fossils, had been listed in the region.
(see Table 2.1.) The fertilizers manufactured from their yields circulated as
cendres de charbon de terre, cendres dengrais or houille dengrais (the term
houille was the word for coal used in Lorraine and around Lige). Farmers
eagerly bought and used them as fertilizer in arable agriculture. To govern
these and other coal mining activities, Frances royal administration took an
intermediary role, reconciling the drive toward improvement with nobles
assets and the know-how of practitioners. As landowners, the noblemen of
northern France were entitled to the lands surface, but the crown could lay
claim to everything underneath. By a new decree of 1744 the government
assumed control over the distribution of mining concessions, reaffirming that
a royal permit was required to open a mine.47 Officials prioritized noble
requests, but only if they kept production going and hired experts to do the job.
In this role, the administration stimulated the exploitation of Picardys coal-
field as a natural resource for the domestic production of fertilizers. For
example, one nobleman acquired a concession to quarry all the land between
the villages of Ham and Laon, including, as the official document read, the
property of others who were currently unable to undertake the exploitation,
provided that he would mine for cendres de charbon de terre, consult other ash
mining companies and hire proper gens de lart from Flanders.48
The strategy worked. Already in 1766, administrative reports cited over 400
farmers using coal-based fertilizers in the region of Aisne in Picardy alone.49
Subsequent surveys continued to cite their frequent use throughout northern
France until well into the second half of the nineteenth century.50 Stabili-
46 Roland de la Platire, Abrg historique (see note 38); Charles-Blaise de Mliand,

Houille, pp.265-68 (see note 44).
47 Arrest du conseil detat du roy, PORTANT Rglement pour lexploitation des Mines de Houille
ou Charbon de terre. Du 14 Janvier 1744 (Lyon: P. Valfray Fils, 1744).
48 Germain Martin, La grande industrie en France sous le rgne de Louis XV (Paris: A. Fonte-
moing, 1900), 158; Rouff, Mines de charbon, p.245 (see note 39).
49 The following is based on the empirical information provided in M. Lenglen, Etude de
quelques particularits relatives lHistoire des Engrais, Bulletin des Engrais 10 (1937):
222-24, 257-59, 305-08, 318-20, 353-55, 380-82, 403-06, 449-53.
50 Christophe Dieudonn Statistique du dpartement du Nord, vol. 1 (Douai: Marlier, 1804):
407-12; J.I. Pierre, Chimie Agricole ou lagriculture considre dans ses rapports principaux
avec la chimie, fifth edition (Paris: Libraire Agricole, 1863), 489-90.

zation of mining, production and use of cendres de charbon de terre, however,

was not straightforward. Its difficult history provides further evidence, of wide-
spread engagement with mining coal for fertilizers, of the involvement of
chemistry in these endeavors, and of the changing identity of coal in the period
around 1800.
To begin, the new fossils were initially surrounded by much publicity, as
newspaper announcements and advertising posters boasted of the fertilizing
quality of what was mined often without regard to the detailed rules for how
to convert these fossils into fertilizers.51 High promises could backfire, as some
farmers soon started reporting on diminishing returns, voicing fears of long-
term soil depletion. In his previously mentioned report, the intendant also
acknowledged the occasional hesitations, citing local concerns that cendres de
charbon de terre might harm the soil by their burning properties, that they
would give a bad taste to crops and keep fodders green for too long, against the
taste of the cattle.52 One prominent physician joined the skeptics, namely
Joseph Raulin (1708-1784), royal pensionary and inspector-general of mineral
waters. Raulin argued in a published treatise that the self-combustible fossil,
when turned into ash, developed a high concentration of vitriolic acid that was
harmful to skin and eyes. When used as fertilizer in fodder cultivation, these
properties might be communicated to the crops, causing cattle diseases. The
mined substances were surely useful, he stressed, but precautions and strict
guidelines were required.53 Merchants who traded in Dutch wood- and peat
ashes, operating close to the border with the Southern Netherlands (near
Cambrai), mobilized such arguments to put pressure on local authorities.
These, in turn, started circulating warnings on the potential dangers of mined
coal ash (as opposed to the ashes retrieved as a byproduct from burning fuel).
Meanwhile, at least one northern French municipality communicated a citi-
zen petition to their provincial council with complaints about increased fire
risks, recent disease outbreaks and sulfurous fumes damaging fruit trees, all
linked to the nearby cendrires where the self-combustible fossils were trans-
formed into fertilizers. Some agricultural societies tried to dismiss these
protests on the ground that they were initiated by landowners with a vested
interest in obstructing coal excavation on their lands. Others argued that bad
experiences were caused by the fraudulent circulation of forged species.
51 Lenglen, Etude (see note 49).

52 Mliand 1766, Houille, pp.267-68 (see note 44).
53 Joseph Raulin, Examen de la houille, considre comme engrais des terres (Paris: Vincent,
1775).

The Case of Coal 73
Meanwhile, chemically trained officials tried to steer ongoing practices in a

good direction. They did so by classifying the mined fossils and formulating
strict rules for identification and usage, tied to explicated improvement goals.
Practicing chemists at the Acadmie des sciences, such as Jean Hellot and
Gabriel Jars, took the lead in developing the administrative organization of
both mining and the use of mined substances.54 Combining chemical inquiry
with diplomacy and political management, both traveled abroad to examine a
wide array of mined substances and their organized extraction. In this context,
Hellot experimented with cendres de charbon de terre in the small-scale setting
of his garden.55
Another member of the Acadmie, Duhamel du Monceau, followed up on
these experiments. After chemically analyzing excavated ashy coal substances
in his own laboratory retort, Duhamel discussed their simultaneously natural
and political attributes in his widely translated lments dAgriculture (1762).56
As such, he formulated detailed guidelines for finding, extracting and using
cendre de charbon de terre. This particular caustic earth, he stressed, an-
nounces itself by leaving an oily film covering any surface waters in its sur-
roundings.57 To convert it into fertilizer, it should be watered slightly, mashed
and kneaded into cakes of seven inches in diameter, arranged to form conical
structures, allowing well-ventilated, slow combustion that should last for up to
three days, before being spread over the land in early spring, in a ratio of sixty
to eighty pounds per acre.
Similarly, the intendant adopted sensuous chemical classifications in his
original report, to summarize ongoing practices and extract rules for ascertain-
ing quality and proper use of mined self-combustible fossils.58 He classified
the mined fossils as a salty and bituminous type of fossil coal, verifiable by its
sulfurous odor and the way it lit up when placed in the smoldering remains of
a fire. Once the odor faded away, it could be used to cultivate grains, vegetables,
vines and fodders, or to maintain meadows.
54 Gillispie, End of the Old Regime, pp.425-429 (see note 33).

55 Ibid, pp.427-433; Doru Todericu, Les mines du pays de Lige dans les papiers du savant
Franais Jean Hellot (1685-1766), Technologia 6 (1983): 61-68; Mliand, Houille, p.266
(see note 44).
56 Duhamel du Monceau, lments dagriculture, vol. 1, pp.182-186 (see note 43); Idem., trans.
Philip Miller, The Elements of Agriculture, 2 vols (London: Vaillant, Durham and Baldwin,
1764), vol. 1,163-166.
57 Duhamel du Monceau, Cette terre est caustique [] sannonce, lments dagriculture,
vol. 1, p.183 (see note 43).
58 Lissa Roberts, The Death of the Sensuous Chemist: The new chemistry and the transfor-
mation of sensuous technology, History and Philosophy of Science 26 (1995): 503-529.

The written reports of chemically trained officials further circulated through

a network of agricultural societies. This way, their descriptions of local prac-
tices and their chemical assessments were attached to articulated improvement
goals. Tellingly, the initiative to establish these societies some fifteen founded
in 1761-1763 came jointly from the noblemen Louis-Franois-Henri de Menon,
marquis de Turbilly and the controller-general of finance Henri Bertin. The
texts that these societies produced suggest that the initiatives to enroll
coalmines in soil fertility management should not be understood solely as a
response to international politics. Rather, they extend beyond the quest for
import substitution to include broader concerns with oeconomy. The largely
noble coal entrepreneurs sought to bridge tradition and change, tying produc-
tive investment to promotion of publicly beneficial arts and sciences.59 On one
hand, they sought to maintain feudal customs of landownership and land cul-
tivation in the face of competitors keen to exploit subterranean resources. On
the other, they joined an emerging network of self-proclaimed improvers,
involving themselves in the formulation of oeconomic norms, values and
goals.
For example, in a series of published treatises on cendres de charbon de terre,
the baron Lon de Perthuis de Laillevault (1757-1818), member of the Socit
dagriculture de Meaux, emphasized that efforts to promote their use first
sprang from the study of morality.60 His writings exemplify the prevailing
stance among improvers to present the maintenance of both soil fertility and
society-wide improvement as a morally informed project, made possible by
organized material exchange and chemical inquiry. Such exchange and inquiry
were needed to build self-supporting moral communities, they believed, resil-
ient to the vicissitudes of war and international competition.61 Having visited
several coalmines and farms while garrisoned in northern France as an army
engineer, the baron decided to do his part by communicating his experiences,
noting the confusion arising from the various terms indiscriminately used by
other writers. He distinguished three types of mined earths: peat, brownish,
light, mixed with plant materials and extractable from marshes; houille, a
pyritic substance, darker, heavier, purer and extractable from strata as deep as
59 Lissa Roberts, Geographies of Steam: Mapping the entrepreneurial activities of steam

engineers in France during the second half of the eighteenth century, History and Tech-
nology, 27 (2011): 417-39, 421-423; Geiger, The Anzin Coal Company pp.14-29 (see note 39);
Rouff, Les mines de charbon (see note 39).
60 Ltude de la Morale, Lon de Perthuis de Laillevault, Expriences et nouvelles observa-
tions sur les houilles dengrais (Paris: Clouiser et Jombert, 1780), 1.
61 Ibid., pp.1-17, 21, 37.

The Case of Coal 75
forty feet; and charbon, the darkest, heaviest, purest and deepest.62 The baron
described various applications of the ashes of houille that he had witnessed,
including, beyond fertilization, the treatment of diseased cows with the fumes
and waters flowing from cendrires.63
Duhamel also linked his chemical assessment of fertile fossils to a more
inclusive political program of mixed social and material resource husbandry,
centering around agriculture. As the historian Etienne Stockland has argued,
his politics should not be seen as deriving from physiocracy, understood as a
school of thought that theorized agriculture as the backbone of (national)
surplus production. Rather, it was bound to a practice-based form of political
oeconomy.64 Duhamel promoted collaboration together with a hierarchical
division of labor, in which landowners would enable trials; magistrates would
protect participating tenants; naturalists would generalize local practices; cler-
gymen would instruct their subjects based on published communication; and
working farmers would develop insights through practice.65 Defining agricul-
ture as both a science and a branch of government, he viewed such colla-
borative work as forming, the true basis of commerce and moral well-being,
as it estranges [inhabitants] from Vice and spreads sentiments of probity.66
Agricultural historians mostly remember Duhamel for propagating the
work of Jethro Tull (1674-1741), who sought to circumvent manuring by intro-
ducing new sowing and ploughing devices. Yet in both his Trait de la culture
des terres suivant les principes de M. Tull (6 vols. 1750-1761) and in his lments
dagriculture, Duhamel embraced fertilizers as central to his project and adver-
tized mined coal ashes as part of an extensive list of fertilizer production. Tying
ash-based fertilization to the promotion of discarded or previously neglected
litter, he called on every citizen to search for similar hidden treasures.67
Duhamel organized the search by distinguishing between fertilizers from the
mineral kingdom (including mined cendre de charbon de terre, but also the
ashes of the fossil-coal burnt in glass-houses, brew-houses and other manu-
62 Lon de Perthuis de Laillevault, Observations critiques sur un ouvrage intitul Examen de

la houille, considre comme Engrais des terres (Meaux: Charlie, 1777), 5-9.
63 Lettre de M. le Marquis de Flavigny, Perthuis de Laillevault, Expriences et nouvelles
observations, pp.134-138 (see note 62); Idem., Instruction familire, adresse aux grand et
petits cultivateurs, Sur lusage des Houilles dengrais, des Tourbes & de leurs cendres (Paris:
Jombert et Clousier, 1781), 34.
64 Etienne Stockland, La Guerre aux Insectes: Pest control and agricultural reform in the
French Enlightenment, Annals of Science 70 (2013): 435-460.
65 Duhamel du Monceau, Elements of Agriculture, vol. 1, pp. viii, xi-xii (see note 43).
66 Ibid., pp. vi, xiv.
67 Ibid., p.180.

factories, old rubbish of mortar, rubbish of old walls, etc.) the vegetable
kingdom (including soot of Chimney-sweepers, saw-dust, sea-wreck, etc.)
and the animal kingdom (including the offals and cleansings of slaughter-
houses, discarded leather cuttings, night-soil, etc.).68
Assembling a wealth of such discarded materials might have been straight-
forward, but they had to be carefully processed to take part in the enactment
of the desired socio-material order. Duhamel provided rich information on
how to carry this out in practice. Organizing his discussion along the two stan-
dard modes of contemporary chemical production the wet and dry way, he
noted that sensible farmers accumulated their litter in watered holes, then
laid it to rot, while the extracted juices in the holes further served to enrich
and rot the fresh litter.69 Alternatively, farmers stuffed decaying materials into
kilns that were specially constructed to allow for slow burning, yielding ashes
impregnated with fertile salts. (See Figure 1.) Such discussion was not uncom-
mon among French amateurs. The marquis de Turbilly, patron of the provincial
agricultural societies, for example, likewise acknowledged that when prepar-
ing artificial manure [] if we lack water, we must turn to fire.70
As valued by these writers, the mined fossils thus gained political attributes.
When carefully selected and prepared, they could join other resources to main-
tain self-supporting moral communities. This vision, in turn, translated into
expressions of what constituted good oeconomy, connected to values of dili-
gence, thrift and avoidance of waste. Duhamel concluded that proper colla-
borative management prevented the resources embodied in materials, soils
and people from being squandered. Thus, the best advice I can give to good
oeconomists, is first to get their plowed lands in proper order, before they think
of breaking up wastes.71
While numerous aristocratic enthusiasts experimented with communi-
cated techniques on their own estates, the oeconomic vision of mutually
attuned social classes, materials and landscapes to which promoters attached
these techniques obviously failed to materialize. But even if a durable interac-
tion between agricultural societies, mostly occupied by local administrators
and aristocrats, and practicing farmers was not achieved, the continued
engagements with mining and using fertile fossils in northern France shows
that individual successes were booked.72
68 Ibid., pp.144, 151, 153, 166, 171-174.

69 Ibid., p.182.
70 Marquis de Turbilly, Memoire sur les dfrichemens (Paris: DHoury, 1760), 122.
71 Duhamel du Monceau, Elements of Agriculture, vol. 1, p.100 (see note 43).
72 Gillispie, Science and Polity, p.370 (see note 33).

The Case of Coal 77
In the long run, however, these activities became disconnected from the
Western-European coal business. During the first half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, the regional involvement of coal mines in soil fertility management was
increasingly overshadowed by the contemporary growth of mechanizing
industry. As mining of coal for fuel increased, dramatically altering the socio-
material landscape as it brought improvement for some, these once innovative
practices faded into what was perceived as the homogenous fabric of rural tra-
ditionalism, gradually narrowing coals recognized identity.
The historical trajectories that helped shape this development are vast and
complex, as the daily use of coal, the political organization of mining and the
classification of matter continued to be deeply entangled. Very briefly, a new
series of coal-fired steam engines of the early nineteenth century began to
allow for more efficient use of coal as fuel, making it an increasingly attractive
power source in places where capital investment and access to coal converged
this last extended by expanding transport systems. This went hand in hand
with increased consumption of coal as fuel in European industry, reinforced by
contemporary industrial upscaling. In this context, the Compagnie des Mines
dAnzin quickly monopolized the resources to mine and sell French coal with
the financial aid of Parisian private bankers and sustained governmental tariff
protection.73 As the uses of French coal were mounting, coals recognized
identity was both narrowed and generalized as fossil fuel. Meanwhile, at mid-
nineteenth century, the fertile ashes once known as cendres de charbon de terre
came to be referred to in purchase agreements and scientific textbooks as the
very particular cendres noires de Picardie.74
Conclusion
What, then, is coal? This essay provides at least two lessons that help answer
this question in a historically meaningful way. The first takes us back to Timothy
Mitchells discussion of what he calls coal and oils socio-technical agencies.75
As powerfully insightful as his analysis is, he begins by classifying these sub-
stances as carbon fuels, thereby black-boxing their material identities even
73 Geiger, Anzin Coal Company (see note 39).

74 Pierre, Chimie Agricole, pp.489-490 (see note 50); M. Andraud et al., Dictionnaire du com-
merce et des marchandises, vol. 1 (Paris: Guillaumin, 1837), 495; A. Payen et A. Richard,
DAgriculture thorie et pratique a lusage des coles dagriculture, des propritaires et des
fermiers, vol. 1 (Paris: Hachette, 1851), 38-39.
75 Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, pp.12-42 (see note 3).

as he integrates them in his analysis. By including the material character of

coal in the historically evolving mix out of which its identity flows, this essay
suggests the interpretive fecundity of recognizing that agency is at once social,
technical and material. By mutually informing each other through time, these
three aspects constitute an entitys historically evolving identity. Coal was not
always already a carbon fuel, leading ineluctably to the socio-technical prom-
ises and threats of the industrial world. Rather, its identity evolved over time
through interaction with and use of its embodied properties (themselves quite
situational in character) in the field, the laboratory and the workshop, on the
printed page, in the marketplace, courts and legislative assemblies.
This first lesson thus responds to a broad tendency to consider a substances
identity as providing a source of historical explanation, based on its purport-
edly ahistorical character. The argument made here is that this is precisely
what needs to be investigated because the entwinement of the material with
the social and the technical renders identity innately historical. The second
lesson relates to the historical consideration of substances as commodities.
This essay illustrates the struggles entailed in transforming coal from an in
choate field of confusedly classified material substances into more clearly
identified and regulated substances liable to profitable excavation and exploi-
tation. So too does it document contestations and alternatives. In doing so, it
reminds us that considering substances such as coal as resources should not
be done in a narrow economic sense.76 Neither is it warranted to focus nar-
rowly on the historical links between material resources such as coal and the
technological contrivances with which they were processed and put to use. In
both these cases, a further step often involves speaking of human capital
whereby people, along with their knowledge and skill are viewed as one more
set of resources that contributed to economically measured productivity. This
essay has instead shown how human actors and the socio-material networks in
which they were engaged sometimes worked toward goals other than eco-
nomic progress for its own sake, oeconomically seeking to steward human and
material resources in ways that benefited both nature and society. Given that
concerns with the combined economic and environmental crises we currently
face have led to paying increased attention to the era covered by this essay and
volume of which it is a part viewing it as the birthplace of modern industri-
alization, environmental decline and socio-geographical inequalities recog-
nizing the past existence of such alternatives might prove salutary as we plan
for our future.
76 Lissa Roberts, Producing (in) Europe and Asia, 1750-1850, Isis 106 (2015): 857-865.

The Case of Coal 79
Table 2.1 Coal mines exploited for fertilizers (des mines de terre de houille)
5 Location Opened in* Region Source
1 Beaurain 1753 Picardy, Aisne A, p. 265

B, p. 546
E, p. 44
J, p. 15
K, p. 395
N, p. 95
O, p. 524-25
P, p. 185
2 Suzy, Faucoucourt, 1756 Picardy, Aisne A, p. 265
Cessieres and Lizy B, p. 546
E, p. 44, 55
I, p. 68
P, p. 185
R, p. 28
T, p. 374
3 Armay 1750s Picardy, Aisne B, p. 545
4 Annoy and Rumigny 1760 Picardy, Somme A, p. 265
B, p. 545
E, p. 44
I, p. 67
J, p. 15
P, p. 185
5 Jussy 1760 Picardy, Aisne I, p. 67
J, p. 15
O, p. 524-25
P, p. 185
R, p. 28
6 Hinacourt 1760 Picardy, Aisne I, p. 67
J, p. 15
7 Sissonne 1761 Picardy, Aisne I, p. 65-66
8 Anvi and Montigny 1753-1761 Picardy, Amiens C, p. 186
D, p. 195.
9 Vill and Breuil 1762 Bas-Rhin I, p. 65
R, p. 28

Table 2.1 Coal mines exploited for fertilizers (des mines de terre de houille) (cont.)
10 Itancourt 1767 Picardy, Aisne E, p. 44

G, p. 407
I, p. 67
R, p. 28
11 Vendeuil 1769 Picardy, Aisne E, p. 44
I, p. 67
P, p. 185
R, p. 28
12 Homblires 1771 Picardy, Aisne E, p. 44, 69
G, p. 407
I, p. 67
13 Beaurieux 1772 Picardie, Aisne F, p. 404
I, p. 65
T, p. 374
14 Travecy 1753-1772 Picardy, Aisne B, p. 546
H, p. 216
R, p. 28
E, p. 44
I, p. 67
P, p. 185
15 Rheims (direction 1753-1772 Marne E, p. 45
Soissons) Q, p. 357
16 Canly 1775 Picardy, Oise N, p. 95

O, p. 524
17 Baurin 1753-1775 Picardy, Somme F, p. 397
G, p. 407
18 Chavignon 1753-1776 Picardie, Aisne E, p. 44, 69
F, p. 403
19 La Fre / Charmes 1777 Picardy, B, p. 546
Aisne I, p. 68
P, p. 185
R, p. 28
20 Mezy-Moulins and 1779 Picardy, Aisne E, p. 45, 54, 69,
Passy-sur-Marne 72, 211
I, p. 64
R, p. 28
T, p. 374

The Case of Coal 81
21 Mailly 1753-1780 Picardy, Somme B, p. 546

E, p. 44, 69-70
22 Golancourt 1753-1780 Picardy, B, p. 546
Oise E, p. 44
O, p. 524-25
P, p. 185
23 Liez 1753-1780 Picardie, Aisne B, p. 546
E, p. 44
I, p. 67
P, p. 185
24 Luzancy 1753-1780 Brie, Seine-et- E, p. 43, 54, 102,
Marne 118
25 Marlemont 1753-1780 Champagne, E, p. 41, 45, 118
Ardennes
26 Aubigny 1753-1780 Picardy, Somme E, p. 41, 45, 118
27 Ecogne 1753-1780 Champagne, E, p. 118
Ardenne
28 bois de Prie 1753-1780 Champagne, E, p. 41, 45, 118
(Msires) Ardenne
29 Muirancourt 1753-1780 Picardy, Oise E, p. 44, 71
K, p. 395
O, p. 524-25
30 Beuvraignes 1753-1780 Picardy, Somme E, p. 44
O, p. 524-25
31 Benet 1753-1780 E, p. 44
32 Thirache 1753-1780 Picardy, Aisne E, p. 45
33 Rocroi 1753-1780 Champagne, E, p. 45, 55, 118,
Ardenne 212
34 Saint-Aude 1753-1780 E, p. 90, 104,
118,
35 Vandeuil 1753-1783 Champagne, B, p. 546
Marne
36 Bassay 1753-1783 B, p. 546
37 Hinnacourt 1753-1783 Picardy, Oise B, p. 546
38 Lambays 1753-1783 B, p. 546
39 Le Santerre 1753-1783 Picardie, Somme B, p. 546

Table 2.1 Coal mines exploited for fertilizers (des mines de terre de houille) (cont.)
40 Roye 1753-1783 Picardie, Somme B, p. 546

M, p. 827-28
41 Chaulnes 1753-1783 Picardie, Somme B, p. 546
42 Rollot, Montdidier 1753-1783 Picardie, Somme B, p. 546
O, p. 524
T, p. 374
43 Verberie 1753-1783 Picardie, Oise B, p. 546
L, p. 20
O, p. 525
44 Compigne 1753-1783 Picardie, Oise B, p. 546
N, p. 95
O, p. 524
T, p. 374
45 Benay 1753-1787 Picardy, Aisne I, p. 67
P, p. 185
46 Urcel 1753-1796 Picardy, Aisne I, p. 63-64, 66
47 Mesnil-Saint-Laurent 1753-1796 Picardy, Aisne I, p. 67
48 Hallencourt 1753-1796 Picardy, Somme I, p. 67
49 Cerisy 1753-1796 Picardy, Somme I, p. 67
50 Lisfontaine 1753-1796 Picardy, Oise I, p. 67
51 Gibercourt 1753-1796 Picardy, Oise I, p. 67
52 Eaucourt 1753-1796 Picardy, Somme I, p. 67
53 Cugny 1753-1796 Picardy, Aisne I, p. 67
54 Blrancourt 1779-1796 Picardy, Aisne I, p. 68
T, p. 374
55 Arsy 1775-1812 Picardy, Oise N, p. 95
S, p. 108
56 Jonquires 1775-1812 Picardy, Oise N, p. 95
57 Moyvillers 1775-1812 Picardy, Oise N, p. 95
58 Remy, Estres-Saint- 1775-1812 Picardy, Oise N, p. 95
Denis
*When a source mentions a specific year of opening or concession for a mine, this year is listed
in the table. Otherwise, the period in which the mine opened is estimated by reference to the
earliest known source that cites the mine.

The Case of Coal 83
Sources
A. De Mliand, Charles-Blaise. Houille. In Diderot and dAlembert, eds., Encyclopdie,

ou Dictionnaire raisonn des sciences, des arts et des mtiers, vol. 8, 265-68 (Paris:
Briasson, 1766).
B. De la Platire, Roland. Abrg historique de lusage des cendres de tourbes super-
ficielles & souterreines pour fertiliser les terres en Hainaut & dans la haute Picardie,
Art du Tourbier, in J.E. Bertrand, Descriptions des arts et mtiers, faites ou approuves
par Messieurs de lAcadmie royale des sciences, nouvelle dition, vol. XIX (Neuchatel:
LImprimerie de la Socit Typographique, 1783), 472-565.
C. Duhamel du Monceau, Henri-Louis. lments dagriculture (Paris: Guerin and
Delatour, 1762).
D. Duhamel du Monceau, Henri-Louis. Trait de la culture des terres. Vol 6. (Paris:
Guerin and Delatour, 1761).
E. Perthuis de Laillevault, Lon. Expriences et nouvelles observations sur les Houilles
dengrais and Recherches sur la houille dengrais et les houilleres (La Haye: Clousier
et Jombert, 1780).
F. Dictionnaire minralogique et hydrologique de la France. Vol. 4 (Paris: Brunet, 1776).
G. Review of Raulin, Joseph. Examen de la houille, considre comme engrais des
terres, Journal Encyclopdique. Vol. 6 (Bouillon, 1775), 406-418.
H. Courier du Bas-Rhin 1772.
I. Suite du Tableau des Mines et Usines de la France, Journal des Mines. No. 25 (1796):
49-73.
J. Brayev, B.L., Statistique du dpartement de lAisne (Laon: Melleville, 1825).
K. Journal des mines, ou recueil de mmoires sur lexploitation des Mines, et sur les
Sciences et les Arts qui sy rapportent. Vol. 12 (Paris: Bossange, Masson et Besson,
1801).
L. Grave, Louis. Prcis statistique sur le canton de Pont-S.TE-Maxence, arrondissement
de Senlis (Oise) (1843).
M. Tessier, Alexandre-Henri. Encyclopdie mthodique: Agriculture. Vol. 2 (Paris:
Panckoucke, 1791).
N. Graves, Louis. Prcis Statistique sur le canton dEstres-S.t-Denis, arrondissement de
Compigne (Oise.) (1832).
O. De la Platiere, Roland. Art du Tourbier, in J.E. Bertrand, Descriptions des arts et m-
tiers, faites ou approuves par Messieurs de lAcadmie royale des sciences, nouvelle
dition, vol. XIX (Neuchatel: LImprimerie de la Socit Typographique, 1783),
471-558.
P. Monnet, Antoine-Grimoald. Memoire Sur la Terre pyriteuse qui se trouve en
Picardie & dans le Soissonnois, & sur les moyens quil y a dtablir des Fabriques de
Vitriol avec cette matiere, in Rozier, ed. Observations sur la physique, sur lhistoire

naturelle et sur les arts. Vol. 11 (Paris: Bureau du Journal de Physique, 1778),
183-186.
Q. Dictionnaire minralogique et hydrologique de la France. Vol. 2, no. 2 (Paris: Costard,
1772).
R. Statistique gnrale et particulire de la France et de ses colonies (Paris: Buisson,
1804).
S. Graves, Louis. Prcis statistique sur le canton de Liancourt, arrondissement de
Clermont (Oise) (1837).
T. Cuvier, F.G., ed. Dictionnaire des Sciences Naturelles, vol. 26 (Strasbourg: Levrault,
1823).

Heat, Steam and Gases in France and Great Britain, 1750-1800 85
Chapter 3
Capturing the Invisible: Heat, Steam and Gases in

France and Great Britain, 1750-1800
Marie Thbaud-Sorger
Over the course of the eighteenth century the common perception of air, that
invisible but omnipresent element of nature, experienced a profound change.
This essay argues that a common field of knowledge emerged through the
materialization of aerial fluids, including gases, steam and heat. This topic
inspired the creativity of a hybrid milieu of practitioners, who extended the
investigation of air while embedding it in public concerns. A growing culture
of consumption, especially in urban contexts in France and Britain, helped
nurture a number of new devices and apparatus aimed at mastering these
fluids for various purposes and in everyday life. They offered the capacity to
reshape the interplay between scientific results, social needs and political
incentives, presenting new horizons for the public good and public health.
This essay reformulates assumptions (and raises questions) regarding the
sites where new approaches to air were forged. From the seventeenth cen-
tury, air was closely linked to the rise of the experimental sciences. Calculating
the weight and pressure of the air and understanding the vacuum, were crucial
to a change of perception embodied in devices such as the air-pump. Imbuing
immaterial air with a new kind of materiality fostered the emergence of a set
of practices which centered on the climate, meteorology, the atmosphere and
electricity. According to Simon Schaffer, aerial philosophy played a major
role in this change and acted as a wider and grander theater of power and also
as a space in which a new economy of understanding and control might
operate.1 Discoveries in the 1770s of various elastic fluids challenged and dif-
fracted the category of air as a unified, natural body and, together with the
identification of various gases, reframed the growing field of pneumatic chem-
istry.2 However, while the role of prominent European chemical practitioners
in this story is familiar, this essay explores how investigations of air engaged
the creativity of a less familiar and more heterogeneous set of practitioners,
1 Simon Schaffer, Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century, History
of Science 21 (1983): 1-43, on 16.
2 Joseph Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (London: W. Bowyer
and J. Nichols, 1774).
Marie Thbaud-Sorger, 2018|doi 10.1163/9789004325562_005


86 Thbaud-sorger
who engendered novel communities and new audiences around their inven-
tions and devices.
To do this entails a methodological displacement through a focus on the
sociomateriality of the devices through which this broad range of practitioners
contained, investigated and manipulated aerial fluids, including small-scale
inventions, machines and commodities such as lamps, ventilators, gas masks,
firebombs, conomic stoves and furnaces. Discussion of specific cases draws
on a body of printed ephemera leaflets, advertisements, subscriptions, short
essays, trade cards and project descriptions sent to various societies, acade-
mies and societies of arts. The essay thus moves beyond tired distinctions
between scientific and more commercial practices which were in fact closely
interconnected. In this account the manufacture of certain technical inven-
tions may be seen to have operated as both what Rheinburger has called an
experimental arrangement and as a social and epistemological one.3 Con
sidering air as a boundary object helps to formulate new assumptions about
the epistemic nature of the devices that materialized invisible aerial fluids for
a wide range of audiences.4 This enables a more general questioning of changes
in perceptions of nature at the end of the eighteenth century, and the relation-
ship between material and knowledge production, which entailed the co-con-
struction of an investigative field. Mapping the intellectual and social milieux
in which people engaged with materiality through the making, use and under-
standing of small-scale devices and the substances they contained reveals how
changes occurred at the level of daily practices.
This essay centers on an understanding of aerial fluids through technical
work that practically interacted with air qua matter. Andr Leroi-Gourhans
anthropology of techniques is an inspirational source for the essays approach.5
The specificity of aerial fluids (such as rarefied air, noxious air, expanded air,
inflammable air) inspired specific operative work on the shape and composi-
tion of devices (such as containers and vessels) designed to capture, investigate
and make use of the fluids. Reinterpretating chemistry from the angle of tech-
nology recalls the pattern of Catherine Jacksons glass revolution the way in
3 Hans-Jrgen Rheinberger, Experiment, Diffrence and WritingI, Studies in History and

Philosophy of Science 23 (1992): 305-331, on 309.
4 Susan Star, James Grisemer, Institutional Ecology, Translations and Boundary Objects:
Amateurs and professionals in Berkeleys Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39, Social
Studies of Science 19 (1998): 387-420.
5 Andr Leroi-Gourhan, Lhomme et la matire (Paris: Albin Michel, 1943).

which materially embodied processes eventually transformed the whole

understanding of air.6
The essay begins by examining how, on both sides of the English Channel,
practitioners proposed a diverse array of commodities and objects that
emerged from their investigations into air. These offered practical improve-
ments in public and private everyday life through different means of mastering
aerial fluids. Subsequent sections consider how the effects of these objects on
air reshaped the social and material arrangements in which they were devel-
oped. Focusing on inventive practices makes clearer transfers of skills and
hybridizations that occurred between entrepreneurs, amateurs and craftsmen.
The careers of Ami Argand and Flavien Marie Scanegatti demonstrate this
with particular clarity. While material devices provided the means to do exper-
iments and create narratives about air, they also raised questions regarding
both the social and intellectual boundaries of chemistry along with the knowl-
edge they helped to forge.
Sites of Airs Commodification
Historians have recently attended to an aerial sensibility that emerged over

the course of the eighteenth century, focused particularly on environmental
medicine a field that connected issues of health, a global understanding of
weather and an emergent pneumatic chemistry.7 The changing understanding
of airs in this period has been extensively studied from the point of view of
the prominent European chemists of the period.8 Studies of the intersection
6 Catherine M. Jackson, The Wonderful Properties of Glass,Isis 106 (2015): 43-68. Technology
will be used here with its original meaning of techno-logos, science of operations or science
of the arts, rather than applied science. See Eric Schatzberg, From Art to Applied Science,
Isis 103 (2012): 555-563.
7 Simon Schaffer, Measuring Virtue: Eudiometry, enlightenment and pneumatic medicine,
Andrew Cunningham and Roger French, eds., The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 281-318; Marco Beretta, Pneumatic
vs. aerial Medicine: Salubrity and respirability of air at the end of the eighteenth century,
Nuova Voltiana: Studies on Volta and his time, Pavia, 2 (2000): 49-71; Vladimir Jankovic,
Confronting the Climate. British air and the making of environmental medicine (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
8 Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Isabelle Stengers, Histoire de la chimie (Paris: La Dcouverte,
1993); Marco Beretta, The Definition of Chemistry from Agricola to Lavoisier (Canton, MA:
Science History Publications, 1993).

88 Thbaud-sorger
of their practices with the social milieux of instrument-makers and artisans

have shed light on dynamic collaborations but also revealed tensions and ways
in which knowledge was challenged by new measurement practices.9 However,
little attention has been paid to the role of inventive practices that were sup-
ported by a growing market for new consumer commodities. Entrepreneurs,
amateurs, architects, physicians and a large community of skilled artisans
including instrument-makers, stove and pump manufacturers, distillers, cop-
persmiths and tinsmiths all engaged with aerial substances. They designed
objects dedicated to mastering the elements, including a wide range of devices
for cooking, heating rooms, preventing and extinguishing fires, fumes and
every type of suffocation. They used steam and included small appliances ded-
icated to hygiene and comfort (steam baths, ventilators, lamps, portable stoves,
and so on). This commodification of air, recently noted by Vladimir Jankovic,
spread in the second half of the eighteenth century.10 It fostered public inter-
actions in various sites: public lectures, workshop displays, repositories of the
new sociabilities of improvement, demonstrations and trials occurring in situ
on river banks, in gardens, parks, at a cesspool. Audiences interacted at these
sites with devices that have not usually been considered as tools of pneumatic
chemistry investigation; nor have these audiences been recognized as partici-
pants in a new ontology of air, which emerged at this time.
Recognizing changes in the culture of consumption permits a different
approach to these sites so that, rather than exploring separate spaces, it is pos-
sible to ask how evolving practices forged links between various spaces such as
laboratories, workshops, factories and public squares. Diverse fields of action,
such as medicine, architecture, urban safety and industry, which have until
now been studied separately, are thereby seen as connected. Indeed, from this
perspective, aerial fluids can be seen to have entailed a common approach.
Writing in the 1940s, the anthropologist Andr Leroi-Gourhan proposed that
fluids ought to be considered as matter if they could be decanted and poured.
This entails expanding the category fluids beyond liquids to include all kinds
of containable materials. Leroi-Gourhans interest in prehistoric tools in the
9 Larry Stewart, Ordinary People and Philosophers in the Laboratories and Workshops of
the Early Industrial Revolution, Margaret C. Jacob and Catherine Secretan, eds., In Praise
of Ordinary People: Early Modern Britain and the Dutch Republic (New York: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2013), 95-122; Lissa L. Roberts, The Death of the Sensous Chemist: The new
chemistry and the transformation of sensuous technology, Studies in History and Philoso-
phy of Science Part 4 (1995): 503-529; H. Otto Sibum, Les gestes de la mesure. Joule, les
pratiques de la brasserie et la science, Annales Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 4-5
(1998): 745-774.
10 Jankovic, Confronting the Climate, p.70 (see note 7).

Figure 3.1 Anon., Trade Card of Scanegatty, Machine Inventor and Demonstrator of Physics
Apparatus, c. 1775; etching and engraving on paper; 160 202mm; Waddesdon,
The Rothschild Collection (The National Trust) Bequest of James de Rothschild,
1957; acc. no. 3686.1.65.123. Photo: University of Central England Digital Services
The National Trust, Waddesdon Manor.
1940s led him to single out a pattern of technological action, distinguishing

social-technical human activities according to their relation to different types
of matter. This approach proposed a classification of various gestures and
operations that are done to matter. Consequently, Leroi-Gourhan defined flu-
ids by the processes developed to enable their containment and circulation,
that is, through the vessels in which they were contained. For certain eigh-
teenth-century practices, diverse forms of aerial fluids, vapors and emanations
might be understood in this way, through the objects and techniques used to
capture, investigate and manipulate them.
The trade card of Flavien Marie Scanegatti, an Italian-born instrument-
maker who settled in the French city of Rouen in the early 1760s, perfectly
illustrates this perspective (Fig. 3.1).11 It depicts the instruments that could be
found in his shop, described two decades later by Arthur Young as a consider
able room furnished with mathematical and philosophical instruments and
11 Waddesdon Manor Trade Cards Collection, Acc. No. 3686.1.65.123, Trade Card of Scane-
gatty, Machine Inventor and Demonstrator of Physics Apparatus, n.d., c. 1775.

90 Thbaud-sorger
models.12 Scanegatti used these in the public physics lectures he advertised

regularly in gazettes, where he performed curious experiments for local audi-
ences with electricity, hot air and inflammable air. His trade card presented
various instruments including a barometer and thermometer, and demonstra-
tion apparatus such as an air pump, an oliopyle on a stand, an electrical
machine with a wheel, a glass tube with measurements and a pot of water with
a siphon. The Journal de labb Rozier reported on other Scanegatti inventions
such as an aromtre or pse-liqueur (scales designed to precisely measure the
weight of several liquid substances), and, in 1774, new medical tools such as an
improved fumigatory apparatus to save people from drowning. Scanegattis
activities extended beyond his shop door, taking in industrial sites for the
needs of local production (textiles machines, enamel at Saint Sever); industrial
chemistry, with the development of a lead chamber for sulfuric acid produc-
tion; and a plaster kiln fueled by coal an invention for which he performed
experiments in front of local elites and in academic accreditation exams for
the Bureau du commerce and the Acadmie royal des sciences.13 He also under-
took the scientific supervision of balloon experiments in 1784 on behalf of the
Avignon city council, where he had been called to work on hydraulic projects.14
There were continuities across this diverse and impressively creative activity,
which has normally led to him being described as eclectic.15 Motivated by util-
ity and industry, a good part of the inventions he designed, despite their
heterogeneous appearance, were connected by a common desire to capture
fluids and enable their transformation.
Situated between what is retrospectively identifiable as philosophical curi-
osity and craft-based practicality, the creative activities of Scanegatti appear
exemplary of an intermediary world, of interactions between local academies,
artisanal elites and industrial networks. The career of the entrepreneur Ami
Argand followed a similar trajectory, although Argands reputation was not
12 Arthur Young, Travels in France, During the Years, 1787, 1788, 1789 (London: George Bell and
Son, 1909), 142 (5th October 1788). Thanks to John Perkins for his help on Scanegatti.
13 Archives Nationales de France, Paris (subsequently A.N.F), series F12-2380, Scanegatti,
Application du charbon de terre la cuisson du pltre, 1786 1788; Archives of Cnam,
T.666, 24, p.2 engravings.; Academie des sciences archives, Paris, Pochette de sance, 31st
January 1787: Fourneau pour cuire le pltre de Scanegati, (Report from Vandermonde,
Sage et Monge, 3rd February 1787).
14 Courrier dAvignon 26 (Tuesday 30th March 1784): 108; Air and Space Museum Archives, Le
Bourget, Montgolfier folders, XV-33, Letter of the marquis de Brantes to Joseph de Mont-
golfier, Avignon, 7th April 1784.
15 Frdric Morvan-Becker, Lcole gratuite de Dessin de Rouen, ou la formation des tech-
niciens au XVIIIe sicle (PhD Thesis, Universit Paris VIII-Saint Denis, 2010), 779-790.

built up in one place, but through traveling across Europe to develop his inven-
tion of a lamp using double air currents.16 The son of a Geneva watchmaker
who was educated by Horace-Bndict de Saussure, Argands interests covered
a wide range of connected chemical and mechanical processes, such as distil-
lation, combustion and evaporation. He made the acquaintance of the
Montgolfier brothers, and Etienne Montgolfier engaged his help with hot-air
balloon experiments in Paris in autumn 1783.17 Louis-Paul Abeille, a former fac-
tory inspector and at that time the French royal governments Secretary of
Commerce, recorded his visit to their open-air workshop situated in the gar-
den next to Jean-Baptiste Reveillons famous wallpaper factory in the Faubourg
Saint Antoine. Abeille described a diverse community of actors surrounding
the balloon prototype, including state and city administrators, entrepreneurs
such as Argand and Reveillon, a foreman of the factory Giroud de Villette,
apothecaries such as Quinquet and Lange, and Meusnier de la Place, a mathe-
matician and correspondent of the Acadmie Royale des sciences, not to men-
tion neighbours and curious onlookers.18 Leaving Paris for England, Argand
sought the support of Boulton and Watt, who helped him take out a patent for
his lamp that he later lost in a trial. Returning to France he obtained a privilge
to set up a lamp manufactory in Versoix in 1787.19 Projecting for the lamp in
Birmingham and London was punctuated by other experiments first with
air-pumps and gas balloons, which were shown to George III at Windsor in
November 1783, and then with the large-scale production of inflammable air
for Lunardi and Blanchards public balloon ascents made in London in 1784.20
Argand moved through a variety of different contexts in which aerial fluids
16 Michael Schrder, The Argand Burner: Its origin and development in France and England,
1780-1800: an epoch in the history of science illustrated by the life and work of the physicist
Ami Argand, 1750-1803 (Odense: Odense University Press, 1969).
17 Charles Coulston Gillispie, The Montgolfier Brothers and the Invention of Aviation, 1783-
1784 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983); Marie Thbaud-Sorger, Amities,
entraides et circulations techniques: les affinites lectives de lentrepreneur Argand,
Michel Cotte, ed., Circulations techniques, en amont de linnovation: Hommes, objets et
idees en mouvement (Montbeliard: Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comte UT Belfort-
Montbeliard, 2004), 111-128.
18 Louis-Paul Abeille, Dcouverte des lampes courant dair et cylindre par M. Argand
(Geneva: 1785), 13.
19 John Wolfe, Brandy, Balloons, and Lamps: Amy Argand, 1750-1803 (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1999).
20 Air and Space Museum Archives, Le Bourget, Montgolfier folders, XIII-39-45: letters from
Argand to Etienne de Montgolfier, 1783-1785.

92 Thbaud-sorger
Figure 3.2
Balloons. Engraving. [s.n.]
[S.l.]. Wellcome Library,
London, Iconographic
Collections, ref. ICV No 41432.
were worked on and exhibited, including factories, gardens, public squares,

shops and workshops.
What was original in this period was the way a dynamic set of actors from
various backgrounds, including entrepreneurs, instrument-makers, craftsmen,
merchants, servants, noble amateurs and apothecaries, moved from one field
of practice to another, transferring skills and knowledge as they did so.
They thereby helped to establish common interests among large audiences,
which fostered intersections between the pleasure of curiosity and industrial
achievements, private comfort and public concerns. These intersections cre-
ated a constellation of sites around their objects where the same processes
could be staged and reinterpreted in a variety of ways. Many practitioners,
such as Argand and Scanegatti, maintained complex relationships with aca-
demics, seeking out support, recognition, institutional and social credit and
their further involvement in projects. Their practices were shaped by porous
institutional, political and territorial boundaries and by intellectual tensions,
which differed between Britain and France. In France, for instance, the Acad
emys pre-eminence in the evaluation of inventions was on the increase.21 But
21 Liliane Hilaire-Prez, Technical Invention and Institutional Credit in France and Britain
in the Eighteenth Century, History and Technology 16 (2000): 295-306.

while local configurations diverged in many respects between Britain and

France, they were nevertheless forged by symmetrical dynamics.
In the 1760s fire hazards, noxious air, hygiene and health became prominent
topics in society. Individuals engaged with these issues prompted a wide circu-
lation of processes and forged new audiences, encountering in particular the
interest of alternative new sites of sociability, such as the prosperous London
Society of Arts, founded in 1757, and many similar societies across Europe.
Scanegatti promoted a scheme to open a Socit des arts in Rouen affiliated
with the Parisian Socit dmulation pour lencouragement des arts (1777-1782),
an ephemeral society founded by a physiocrat, the Abb Baudeau.22 Embodying
a public consisting of mixed audiences of aristocrats, savants, elite artisans and
men who exercized the machinery of power, these societies were particularly
concerned with issues related to the public good, while at the same time
increasing support for patriotic and capitalist businesses.23 Offering new
spaces of legitimation, they launched contests, offered rewards and issued
medals. They were sensitive to supporting all kinds of artifacts in which tech-
nological improvement and the management of global reform were at stake,
such as ventilation and rescue apparatus, extinguishers and fire engines, stoves
and furnaces. For instance, William White Esquire approached the special
committee established by the London Society of Arts on hand ventilators
with an air machine of his invention. (The committee ran for several years,
organizing a prize for this category in 1791-1792.) Besides being exhibited in his
workshop, Whites machine was on display in the societys repository, along-
side similar devices for comparison.24 White also approached the Humane
Society, which gave him several accreditations in support of the development
of a patent.25 These efforts coincided with the growth of philanthropic societ-
ies dedicated to resuscitating drowned people in Amsterdam, Hamburg,
22 A.N.F., T*160.5, Grand registre du secrtariat de la socit dmulation de labb Beaudeau

depuis 1778 1782, Mmoire de Mr Raymond de St Sauveur sur une proposition de Mr
Scangatti de Rouen sur un comit provincial a tablir en cette ville, Retenu au comit
dinspection, 10 fev. 1778.
23 Liliane Hilaire-Prez, LInvention technique au sicle des Lumires (Paris: Albin Michel,
2004).
24 Diary or Woodfall Register (1792) Tuesday 5th June.
25 London Metropolitan Archives, 4517/A/01/01/001, Minutes of the Humane society, meet-
ings of the 30th January 1776 and 7th May 1783; Royal Society of Arts, Society of arts
archives, Loose letters, PR.MC/101/10/512, Letter from William White about his air
machine, 30th January 1792; Extracts from the reports of the Royal Humane Society, with
certificates, letters, & c. which fully evince the utility of an air machine, or patent ventilator;
invented and sold by William White (1794).

94 Thbaud-sorger
London, Paris and Geneva.26 Founded mostly by physicians, they dealt with
issues of asphyxia and reanimation and scrutinized various inventions includ-
ing gas masks, fumigation boxes and fumigation apparatus, such as that
improved by Scanegatti, or conceived by the physician and alderman Philippe-
Nicolas Piat in Paris in the 1770s.27
In England and France, a similar concern emerged regarding risk and safety,
the mastering of new energies and a shared desire to discipline urban areas.28
Identifying technical devices with the capacity for improvement enabled a
new marketing dynamic based on claims to be able to transform the immedi-
ate environment. Through the commercialization of various commodities,
apparatus and objects, a new material culture took root in the social and urban
landscape of the eighteenth century that gradually changed peoples relation-
ship to the elements of nature. Infused with this aerial knowledge for large
audiences, for whom the natural world was submitted to intensive changes,
each invention intersected with these different spheres. Producing an appara-
tus or new commodity using airs was the result of a complex reception and
production process that made their achievement possible and, in return,
shaped communities around their materiality.
Devices Shaping Communities
Through the design of devices an evolving sociomateriality situated the air in

a densely populated field that highlighted the possibilities offered by aerial
26 Luke Antony Francis Davison, Raising up Humanity: A cultural history of resuscitation

and the Royal Humane Society of London, 1774-1808 (PhD Thesis, University of York,
2001).
27 Philippe-Nicolas Pia, Dtails des succs de ltablissement que la ville de Paris a fait en
faveur des personnes noyes (Paris: S. Yves, 1773) with an engraving of his Bote-entrept;
Boite fumigatoire de Gardanne, Gazette du commerce, de lagriculture et des finances
84(1778): 668-669 (20th October); On the disinfecting devices of Guyton de Morveau and
Dumotiez, see the essay by Elena Serrano in this volume.
28 Sabine Barles, La ville dltre. Mdecins et ingnieurs dans lespace urbain, XVIIIe- XIXe
sicles (Seyssel: Champvallon, 1999); Catherine Denys, Police et scurit au XVIIIe sicle
dans les villes de la frontire franco-belge (Paris: LHarmattan, 2002); Marie Thbaud-
Sorger, Innovation and Risk Management in Late Eighteenth-Century France: The
administration of inventions in French cities at the end of the ancien regime, Christelle
Rabier, ed., Fields of Expertise. A comparative history of expert procedures in Paris and Lon-
don. 1600 to present (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholar Press, 2007), 261-189; Thomas Le
Roux, Le laboratoire des pollutions industrielles. Paris, 1770-1830 (Paris: Albin Michel, 2011).

substances. A flourishing consumption culture encouraged many multi-func-

tional inventions in which aerial fluids were used, fitting within a general
agenda of improvement. These new apparatus appeared not only as goods
ready for sale on the market but also as unfinished objects whose completion
would require wider participation. Consumers, experts and administrators
would be involved in such practices, which would also generate communities
of hybrid actors and allow different manufacturing techniques to converge
into collaborative enterprises that might lead to pioneering work on various
materials.
A perspective that includes technology, rather than just thinking about
gases themselves, makes it possible to reveal the inventions and materials used
to capture and thereby frame them. Adapting materials articulates a way of
acting upon aerial matter which must be understood in terms of operations
such as wood turning, glass blowing and polishing, tinning, welding and var-
nishing, which required expert knowledge and much skill in order to adapt the
reaction between the air enclosed and the material used. These operations,
according to Leroi-Gourhan, are embodied in concrete local and historical
configurations. The effectiveness of devised craft methods depended precisely
on the physical specificities of each kind of fluid, which entailed appropriate
constructive processes, aimed at the performance of sealing, resistance, cap-
ture and circulation. They inspired pioneering work with various shapes and
materials (valves, sheet metal, glass and metal tubes, various chimneys, var-
nishes, soft fabrics, leather bellows, burners) that created an operational
chain: a set of sequences that performed an effective action upon matter.29
Balloon workshops embodied these processes perfectly and, since the
invention of hot-air balloons in 1783, opened up a new and stimulating field of
research. These balloons involved complex technology though it must be
added that components thereof might be objects that were traditionally avail-
able and quite mundane.30 This included wooden barrels in which sulfuric
acid was diluted with water, and then poured onto iron filings to produce
inflammable air; pipes intended to capture gases and conduct them into a soft
fabric balloon, covered with a varnish that had to be elastic enough to allow a
variation in pressure and prevent the escape of the volatile air inside and any
risk of explosion; and tin-plate cooling systems designed to avoid the danger-
29 This concept was also part of Andr-George Haudricourts approach, La technologie, sci-
ence humaine. Recherche dhistoire et dethnologie des techniques (Paris: Maison des sci-
ences de lhomme, 1987), and was related initially to French sociologist Marcel Mauss and
the techniques of the body.
30 See Simon Werretts essay in this volume.

96 Thbaud-sorger
ous heat that occurred during chemical reactions, and which also purified the
carbonic gas. The processes at stake in these machines were part of a research
trend associated with the industrial development of new substances, which
included not only the chemistry of gases, but also sulfuric acid and waterproof
varnish made from rubber: in short, chemical practices that were deployed at
several levels of collaboration31. Every experiment with a balloon required the
production of a prototype, the making of which involved a mixture of entre-
preneurs, provincial amateurs, semi-learned people and manufacturers,
chemists and craftsmen, often financed by public subscription.32 Much more
than a commercial practice, this procedure enabled people to engage with the
processes being developed. Prototypes enhanced their inventors credit, and
were used for many other inventions, such as the air pump, ventilator and
steam engine.33
Abeilles account of the Reveillon factory describes the energy that Argand
had put into his supervision of Montgolfiers construction of the hot air bal-
loon, which involved many impassioned exchanges with the people gathered
around the machine. To all those present, the analogy between the hot air bal-
loon and the process involved in Argands lamp seemed obvious. The flame
was stimulated by vital air (oxygen), and issued by way of the resistance of the
walls of the machine. The way in which, in general, containers behaved through
a transformation of temperature and composition of the air enclosed was also
crucial for the lamp. Argands lamp was also a composite object, made of glass,
sheet metal, welding, varnish, wheels, wick, and oil. The tube was a crucial
issue. Argand wished to replace the metal chimney located above the flame
with a glass one, which might help to increase the effectiveness of the light. In
order to develop a suitable material, he needed to find glass able to resist alter-
nate heating and cooling. British knowledge of flint glass might reveal the
solution, so Argand moved to England to overcome this obstacle and to find
31 Leslie Tomory, Progressive Enlightenment. The origins of the gaslight industry, 1780-1820
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
32 Marie Thbaud-Sorger, Larostation au temps des Lumires (Rennes: Presses Universita-
ires de Rennes, 2009).
33 See, among many examples, Thomas Tidd, Considerations on the Use and Properties of the
olus a New Invented Portable Machine for Exchanging and Refresching the Air of Rooms,
&c. (London: J. Reeves, 1755); Anon., Pompe nouvelle et portative pour les incendies et
arrosements, Journal de littrature, des sciences et des arts par Mr. labb Grosier (1780):
358-359, referring to a subscription opened in Paris by a mechanic, Charpentier. Lissa
Roberts also discusses this entrepreneurial processin Geographies of Steam: Mapping
the entrepreneurial activities of steam engineers in France during the second half of the
eighteenth century, History and Technology 27 (2011): 417-439.

adequate support to develop his invention. Similar issues were raised and dis-
cussed widely among various audiences and through transnational networks
of expertise. Argands connections extended into French-English capitalism,
networks of administrators, savants and investors who were all crucial in
chemistrys evolution in the last decades of the century.
Synergies, analogies and systematization emerged in the development of
aerial contraptions. These objects constituted a common taxonomy of differ-
ent shapes (vessels, tubes, connecting pipes, spring, bellows, blades and so on)
and a repertory of know-how that could be put to diverse uses. Coating and
varnishing, critical techniques for the containment of air, emerged as promi-
nent fields of investigation relating to fireproofing and the production of
airtight seals. Every element in one invention could potentially be transferred
to another. Inventions were composite artifacts, and adaptable to a wide range
of applications at different scales (not to mention prices). Inventors then
shaped communities around their objects employing many common forms of
action such as display, advertising, seeking the approval of various societies, or
engaging in other spheres of accreditation. Commercial literature played a cru-
cial role in the dissemination of these processes: through advertisements,
leaflets and calls for subscription, entrepreneurs required consumers to culti-
vate the ability to understand, compare and judge the relevance of a device.34
Objects were bonded together. While drawing attention to Argands great assis-
tance in gas-making for Blanchards balloon in London, an article published in
the Courier de lEurope advertised his new lamp in an enthusiastic way.35
Artifacts such as lamps, stoves and ventilators were designed on the border
between private and public concerns. The announcement of Whites air
machine claimed that it was conceived to serve in various contexts where air
was confined in public buildings, ships, hospitals and mines, and also in pri-
vate rooms. He targeted not only London markets, but also the colonies. This
kind of device thus existed at the intersection of health and private comfort, in
addition to being intended as an improvement for people at work. Yet this
polysemy was based on one coherent principle: that invisible air became pal-
pable through devices and their components (here the fan blades stirring the
air) producing an obvious effect that everyone could grasp and comprehend.
Many kinds of devices were designed to fight asphyxia. Inventors acted either
34 Liliane Hilaire-Prez, Marie Thbaud-Sorger, Les techniques dans lespace public. Publi
cite des inventions et litterature dusage au XVIIIe siecle (France, Angleterre), Revue de
Synthese 127 (2006/2): 393-428; Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth, Selling Science in the Age of Newton:
Advertising and the commoditization of knowledge (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 7.
35 Courrier de lEurope (September 1784), 24.

98 Thbaud-sorger
on the surrounding air or they invented equipment for the exposed body,
such as the fumigator apparatus. The description of Scanegattis apparatus
involved flexible tubes, cannula and a bellows designed to inject tobacco
smoke into the bodies of drowned people to help recover respiration after
drowning.36 The opening up of a new understanding of airs addressed the
issue of being able to breathe, in both a literal and a metaphorical sense, in the
human and the social body.
Capturing, changing and making air drew on a wide range of actions and a
new comprehension of the nature of aerial substances, which occurred in vari-
ous social spaces on various scales. Bringing these together reveals a continuity,
where linking one object to another in a whole system made sense. Emerging
through decomposition and re-composition, the staging of inventions pre-
sented relationships between simple natural bodies in a new light, initiating a
shift in sensitive and conceptual frameworks of material life. Scanegatti offered
lessons in which he presented this kind of interconnection by exploiting the
intrigue of striking experiments.
Among the many items to be exhibited before the eyes of the public will
be a hydraulic pendulum of very regular movement that will act as an
alarm in the morning, via two small canon blasts, which light a vessel or
lamp filled with spirits, which heats a small pot of broth during the time
it takes to get dressed, which will be ready to drink at the end of ones
toilette.37
Mastering this operative sequence on a small scale set up the wonderful power
of working with fluids, by means of a curious mechanical arrangement, using
explosions, liquor, heating and evaporation to achieve individual accom-
plishments like waking up and making a pot of broth. By using the possibilities
offered by aerial fluids, a new kind of relationship with materials emerged for
large audiences, changing the way in which they could be understood, mas-
tered and turned into an effective action.
Small-scale inventions, even those that were amusing and curious, encour-
aged a common way to explore the new materiality of air and its effect upon
daily improvements, where mastering these substances played a major role in
36 Noy, Flix Vic dAzyr, Encyclopdie mthodique, 8 vols. (Paris, 1783), vol. 5, 366; Joseph-
Jacques Gardane, Gazette de sant, contenant les nouvelles dcouvertes sur les moyens de se
bien porter & de gurir quand on est malade (Paris, 1774), 298.
37 Notice of Scanegattis course of experimental physics beginning 1st July 1764. Annnonces,
affiches et avis divers de Normandie(1764), 20.

the providential economy of nature.38 Scanegatti later explored this creativity

by tackling objects for urban management through his fumigation apparatus
and his furnace, which dealt with the crucial oeconomic issue of the shortage
of wood for production. As part of the promotion of his plaster kiln in 1786, he
organized extensive trials in front of the kings representative in Rouen, several
manufacturers, town aldermen and local men of science. This demonstrated
further what kind of achievement the mastering of combustion could provide
when embedded in a political conomy that dealt with the management of
energy and the search for fuel substitutes.39 Seemingly technical practices
would actually change the sociomaterial process of knowledge production and
contribute to a transformation in the perception of these invisible substances.
Airs as Boundary Objects
The materiality of airs could only be revealed when they interacted with other
materials. As Lavoisier wrote in his first essay on elastic fluids in 1777, They
escape the sense of touch, except where their resistance to bodily movement
renders them discernible and to a certain extent palpable.40 By working with
airs (vaporized substances, noxious air, hot air) via their devices, practitioners
tried to track this materiality, simultaneously producing experimental sys-
tems in which the identification of these airs properties was put to the test.
Partly because they presented prototypes, projects and inventions under devel-
opment, each artifact could act as an experimental tool, similar in some ways
to the generator of surprise, to recall Rheinbergers category.41 The degree of
uncertainty inherent in the success of these apparatus and devices made their
performance in various sites a source of permanent wonder. Their effective-
ness depended on many material arrangements that constantly needed to be
re-adjusted.
Inventors scrutinized the interaction between airs and the materials of the
containers they adapted. Aerial fluids, unlike a liquid with an identical density
throughout, diverged because they might be made of several fluids with
38 Golinski, British Weather, p.161 (see note 7).

39 See the essay by Roberts and Van Driel in this volume.
40 Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, Expriences et observations sur les fluides lastiques en
gnral et sur lair de latmosphre en particulier, (1777), Jean-Baptiste Dumas and
Edouard Grimaux, eds., uvres de Lavoisier (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1862-93), vol. 5,
271.
41 Rheinberger, Experiment, Diffrence and WritingI., p.307 (see note 3).

100 Thbaud-sorger
different properties and densities. Therefore practical observations and work

on various technical arrangements led practitioners to formulate observations
according to these distinctions. Air being perceived as a single entity seems to
have been diffracted by various components resulting from the heating pro-
cess, such as the vaporization of various liquid substances, which created
invisible fluids, and combustion, which liberated several substances including
fumes and invisible components such as the hypothetical air du feu, equated
by some with phlogiston. The relationship between aerial gases and atmo-
spheric air was not resolved by the discovery of new gases such as vital air
(oxygen), noxious air (carbonic gas), and various inflammable airs (such as
hydrogen and methane).42 The idea that air was composed of several chemical
elements only emerged gradually and in the meantime, ideas about air inter-
acted with inventive practices. Observers were able to record accurately how
airs changed the vessels in which they were contained, through corrosion,
condensation, fermentation and inflammation. In response, they sought out
materials that could maintain a flame, avoid toxic emanations, reduce fumes
or exploit possible motions.
These dynamic processes engendered a wide range of experiments, in sur-
face treatments or ingenious connecting mechanisms such as flexible strips
and elastic springs. However, the behavior of invisible aerial fluids in their
devices raised many assumptions due in part to this feature of invisibility.
Pneumatic chemists undertook a tests to define the different properties of
elastic fluids, through reactions with combustion (explosion, extinction) made
thanks to the possibility of isolating them in glass vessels to carry out analysis.
Other practitioners used their technical devices to explore the same prop-
erties, with opposite expectations: for instance, to avoid explosions or to
restore the vivacity of a living organism. They scrutinized the effects that cap-
turing air made possible, such as the elasticity that provided motion when air
was compressed. They sought to master aerial matter while experimenting
concretely with the behavior of invisible aerial fluids that revealed their differ-
ent natures and compositions.
Rather than considering inventions as applications of scientific knowledge,
we need to consider how seemingly technical practices changed the socioma-
terial process of knowledge production and contributed to the understanding
of these substances. Such practices and the objects they engaged often
42 Maurice Crosland, Slippery Substances. Some practical and conceptual problems in the
understanding of gases in the pre-Lavoisian era, Frederic Lawrence Holmes and Trevor
Harvey Levere, eds., Instruments and Experimentation in the History of Chemistry (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 79-89.

pre-empted theory, as was the case for the understanding of heat and steam, or
the nature of noxious air. Long before any chemical identification of carbonic
gas, for example, the link between an understanding of atmospheric air and
health was made through practical research into ventilators such as those pro-
posed by Stephen Hales.43
Combustion processes were at the heart of chemical practices. The reaction
of air, fire and various materials and substances remained a central issue.
Understanding the role of air in combustion was crucial for the design of many
devices, which dealt with producing heat and fire, whether they were intended
to extinguish a flame, or conversely to maintain it while circulating the heat
produced. Far from being restricted to an empirical level of practice, practitio-
ners engaged with newly generated knowledge of pneumatic chemistry.
Activating fire with air was at the core of many apparatus, especially lamps, as
highlighted by Argands lamp. Argand was engaged in enthusiastic discussions
with Meusnier de la Place during Montgolfiers experiments in Paris in 1783,
especially concerning the action on dilated air by fire, the vaporization of
substances, and the formation of droplets condensing on the sides of the fabric
envelope that particularly caught their attention. For Argand, as for Meusnier,
who was working at that time with Lavoisier on the experiment of the decom-
position and recomposition of water, vapor was related to water, understood as
being composed of vital air and inflammable air.44
Elasticity was particularly complicated to comprehend because it could be
and was approached from both a physical and chemical standpoint. Lavoisier,
among others, moved between these approaches in the pattern he proposed
regarding aerial elastic fluids and, in particular, the property of many acids
vaporized under the effect of a change of temperature.45 By the end of the
century, a permanent porosity between physical and chemical ideas concern-
ing the states and composition of matter existed in the category of fluids.
As Robert Fox demonstrated in his book on the caloric theory, a chemical
approach was maintained for a long time in the understanding of heat.46 Thus
while many practitioners did not identify themselves as chemists, a large com-
munity worked with the materiality of invisible aerial substances, exploring
43 Stephen Hales, A Description of Ventilators: Whereby great quantities of fresh air may with
ease be conveyed into mines, goals [sic] hospitals, work-houses and ships, in exchange for
their noxious air, which was read before the Royal Society in May, 1741 (London: W. Innys,
1743).
44 Abeille, Dcouverte des lampes courant dair (see note 18).
45 Lavoisier, Expriences et observations sur les fluides lastiques (see note 40).
46 Robert Fox, The Caloric Theory of Gases from Lavoisier to Regnault (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1971).

102 Thbaud-sorger
not just their behavior but also their nature. The chemical knowledge of an
engineer such as James Watt, for instance, was relatively great, exemplifying
the fact that we need to overcome the anachronistic separation between phys-
ics and chemistry.47 Airs were boundary objects that shaped the field of
knowledge in addition to distinctions between practitioners.
Argand brought the evidence of his ability to transgress apparent boundar-
ies between an empirical approach and chemical knowledge while performing
practical work. Understanding perfectly the role of oxygen in combustion as
he did, he qualified as the most appropriate person to supervise the chemistry
required by ballooning projects, helping to manage balloon ascents in London
by mixing the diluted sulfuric acid in each barrel with an iron stick in order to
accelerate the hydrogen production process.48 Argands activities illustrate
that the processes involved in mastering heat and the production, evaporation
and manufacture of gases were linked by an exploration of the risks they
entailed, such as explosion and flammability. They simultaneously point to the
social dimensions of such work. While Argand took part in the Coffee House
Philosophical Society in London and befriended the Lunar Society group in
Birmingham, especially Priestley, his integration may have been easier in
England than in the intellectual surroundings of the French Acadmie des sci-
ences where the reform of empirical practices of chemistry was at stake.49
However the majority of relations between established men of science and
various practitioners involved close interactions, especially in provincial cities,
in France and Britain alike. Provincial French academies such as those in
Nancy or Rouen, which admitted Scanegatti as a fellow in 1775, offered a favor-
able framework of convergence for scientific and practical arts, fortunes and
talents.50 Recognized as a fine glass blower, a skill necessary for the success of
meteorological experiments that he helped to perform, Scanegatti also earned
recognition among the elite of Rouen for his lectures in physics, and demon-
strations of his fumigatory apparatus, which focused particularly on the
47 David Philip Miller, James Watt, Chemist: Understanding the origins of the steam age (Lon-
don: Pickering and Chatto, 2009).
48 Courrier de lEurope (September 1784), 24.
49 Jan Golinski, Conversations on Chemistry: Talk about phlogiston in the Coffee House
Society, 1780-1787, Trevor Harvey Levere and Gerard LEstrange Turner, eds., Discussing
Chemistry and Steam: The minutes of a coffee house philosophical society, 1780-1787 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), 191-205; Peter Jones, Industrial Enlightenment: Science,
technology and culture in Birmingham and the West Midlands 1760-1820 (Manchester: Man-
chester University Press, 2008).
50 John Perkins, Creating Chemistry in Provincial France before the Revolution: The exam-
ples of Nancy and Metz, Ambix 51 (2004): 4375.

injection of hot air and complemented theoretical essays on the noxious and
mephitic air of cesspools that he presented at the local academy.51
The fact that debates surrounding the identity of aerial fluids rested on rec-
ognizing their characteristics demonstrates that these men were no less
informed or capable of tackling issues relating to airs than their better-known
academic contemporaries. They evolved within the same epistemic world,
offering solutions to mastering steam and fire, producing hydrogen and purify-
ing the atmosphere of carbon dioxide. Their activities helped to shape both
the intellectual boundaries of air and a social world through the design of
artifacts. The outlines of the social milieux engaged with airs shed light on
new arenas of practices and exchanges where different communities inter-
acted, creating opportunities to speculate about the concrete expectations of
airs aroused in the public sphere. This was particularly the case with the pre-
vention of hazards that aimed at disciplining urban spaces and spreading
social reform. In ancien regime Paris, prefiguring the creation of the Committee
for Salubrity in 1791, public authority and the politics of regulation fostered
much expertise dedicated to salubrity. Skilled chemists such as dArcet or
Cadet de Vaux supervised a large field of research that connected hygiene and
philanthropy.52 The nature of airs was not only discussed in restricted areas
such as Royal Society of Medicine, but also staged through experiments in the
center of the city, that linked a variety of public buildings with risk-filled places
such as mines, cesspools and rivers, targeting both injured workers and
drowned people.53 They generated new expectations in the public sphere by
staging miracles of chemistry that underlined the real solutions offered to
the citys suffering humanity by a discipline that had been freed from its old
formulas.54 Mastery of air was one among many miracles provided by chem-
istry. Prompting a large number of essays, prints and explanations, discussions
51 Extrait dune lettre crite par Boin correspondant de lacadmie de Rouen, in the section
Observations sur le froid de lhiver de 1776, Oeuvres de Lavoisier, vol. 3, 394; Annnonces
(see note 37); Sur le mphitisme des fosses daisances (1781), in Liste des mmoires lus
lAcadmie dans ses sances particulires et publiques, depuis 1781 jusquen 1793, Prcis
analytique des travaux de lAcadmie royale des sciences, belles-lettres et arts de Rouen,
depuis sa fondation en 1744 jusqu lpoque de sa restauration 5 (Rouen, 1821): 16.
52 Le Roux, Le laboratoire des pollutions industrielles (see note 28).
53 Thbaud-Sorger, Innovation and Risk Management, (see note 28); Philippe-Nicolas Pia,
Avis patriotique concernant les personne suffoques par la vapeur de charbon qui apparais-
sent mortes et qui ne ltant pas, peuvent recevoir des secours pour tre rappeles la vie
(Paris: Veuve Thiboust, imprimeur du roi, 1776).
54 Louis-Sbastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris (Hambourg: Virchaux & co., 1781), volume 1,
chapter 53 Air vici, 62.

104 Thbaud-sorger
occurred in various social spaces that interacted with the development of a

chemistry embedded in wider debates. A directory of practical solutions was
explored by a great variety of actors, in and beyond academic circles. The inter-
action between air and the city, seen as a living organism, facilitated a recon-
ciliation between and convergence of investigations into nature and social
reform.
Conclusion
This essay has shown how devices used to contain airs reorganized the socio-
material world around them and reshaped the environment at the end of the
eighteenth century. Inventive practitioners aspired not only to capture invisi-
ble fluids but also to modify their actions, and even to produce them artificially.
Each device they created comprised a material arrangement that might per-
form the impossible: resuscitation, mastering fire and heat, using the power of
steam for daily comfort and transforming the irrespirable atmosphere into
breathable air.
Embodied in various adaptable commodities, apparatus and objects de-
signed to perform useful actions, a new material culture brought about a
concretisation of gases, heat and steam. This entailed a mixture of sounds,
smells, movements, changes of temperature and changes in the size and shape
of containers. On a broader scale, it brought together chemical practice and an
evolving culture of consumption in ways that gradually changed society and
the urban landscape. These devices were not necessarily designed to serve just
one purpose but were, on the contrary, intended to be transferred and applied
to a great variety of contexts: urban, rural, industrial, domestic and public.
From lighting streets and theaters to preventing fires, resuscitating drowned
people and overcoming gravity, these devices exhibited a wide range of pos
sibilities that fostered the creation of a heterogeneous network of practi-
tioners who understood and promoted their intensive development for new
purposes.55
Many improvers were engaged in a synthetic approach based on compari-
sons, analogies, reconciliations, convergences and proportions, that engaged
with some of the most recently generated knowledge on materials and sub-
stances. They thereby contributed to the further understanding of the airs
they sought to master. These persons were not just academic figures or typi-
cal projectors, but hybrid entrepreneurs, craftsmen, lecturers, manufacturers,
55 Leslie Tomory, Progressive Enlightenment (see note 31).

administrators, physicians, apothecaries, architects and clergymen. Their iden-

tities drew on a whole gallery of Enlightenment occupations. They contributed
through their material devices to the creation of a new oeconomy of nature,
which intersected with social expectations, the market place and entrepre-
neurial strategies in addition to the governance of matter.
Far from seeing this complex process in terms of the application of theoreti-
cal chemical knowledge to practice, this essays more anthropological approach
transcends the supposed opposition between know-how and empirical knowl-
edge, on one side, and theory on the other. It refuses, that is to say, the separation
of epistemic investigation from the material arrangements that made it possi-
ble. Concentrating on the materiality of devices further affords a historicisation
of the distinction between physics and chemistry, and the social distinction
between chemists and other practitioners.56
Whereas the question of the nature of airs (intersecting with water and
fire) was surely a concern of transnational debates, one could argue that the
involvement of a much wider audience occurred through advertisements,
public displays and experiments; by coming into contact with the everyday
experiences of the inhabitants of European cities, this context forged a new
culture of the natural elements through demonstrated knowledge of their
properties. In conclusion, air stood at the boundary of a whole range of actors,
linking diverse activities from industry to public lecturing, and various
practices attempting to contain and manage aerial fluids. These labors had
transformative sociomaterial effects, taking place in a wide range of sites, cre-
ating the grounds for new understandings of air, encouraging new audiences
and public interactions, and prompting the creation of a variety of ingenious
small-scale inventions.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Liliane Hilaire-Prez with whom I gave the very first ver-
sion of this paper in January 2012, Les techniciens des gaz et de la vapeur au
18e sicle: savoirs, micro-inventions et industrial Enlightenmentat the
Research seminar LIED, Paris Diderot Paris 7. My thanks to Delaina Haslam,
Simon Werrett and Lissa Roberts for their intensive work revising my text.
56 Jackson, The Wonderful Properties of Glass, p.68 (see note 6).

106 Serrano
Chapter 4
Spreading the Revolution: Guytons Fumigating

Machine in Spain. Politics, Technology, and
Material Culture (1796-1808)
Elena Serrano
Salve Morv! [sic]

Your inquiring mind
Made a sweet breath of life []
Which flying into the atmosphere
Purifies and destroys at once
The corrupted germ of death.1

In 1806, the Spanish poet Rosa Glvez (1768-1806) published a seven-page
poem celebrating the lawyer, chemist and politician Louis-Bernard Guyton de
Morveau (1737-1816). During the first years of the century, an epidemic of yel-
low fevers caused thousands of deaths on the Spanish coasts. Guyton had
arguably fabricated a gas that destroyed the agents of contagion that stub-
bornly remained in the atmosphere and goods for years. This sweet breath of
life as the poet called it, was the controversial oxy-muriatic gas.
Guyton was a champion of oxy-muriatic gas. He not only wrote about its
properties, but also with the prestigious French instrument-makers the
Dumotiez brothers, he developed a machine that released the gas.2 The fumi-
gating machine embodied two essential features of Lavoisiers system of
chemistry: the theory of acids and the theory of combustion.3 As is well known,
Lavoisier believed that all acids contained oxygen (including muriatic acid,
1 Rosa Glvez, Oda en elogio de las fumigaciones de Morv [sic], Minerva o el Revisor General
52 (1806): 3-10, on 8. My translation.
2 The reports do not distinguish between the two brothers, Louis Joseph and Pierre Franois.
See Maurice Daumas Les instruments scientifiques aux XVII et XVIII sicles (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1953), 378-79.
3 In Spanish it is often referred as Mquina fumigatoria; in French as Appareil de dsinfection.
Elena Serrano, 2018|doi 10.1163/9789004325562_006


Spreading the Revolution 107
which Humphry Davy later demonstrated to be composed of hydrogen and

chlorine). According to Guyton, the fumigating machine supplied a highly oxy-
genated compound of muriatic acid oxy-muriatic acid which destroyed
contagious particles in a process akin to combustion.4 The machine was
intended to prevent gangrene in soldiers wounds and to disinfect the air of
poisonous sites such as jails, hospitals, theaters, churches, and ships. It was also
widely used during epidemics of yellow fevers in Europe.
This essay focuses on the fumigating machine as a means to explore how
beliefs and attitudes became embedded in societies and also inversely, how
ways of interpreting nature, society, and politics became embedded in arti-
facts. It will show, first, how the machine served to spread the new French
chemistry; second, how it came to embody a new relationship between citi-
zens and the state, and third, how this artifact was imported by the Spanish
absolutist state, appropriated, and used for its own propaganda. It thereby
adds to this volumes general argument against simplistic narratives regarding
the intellectual foundations of the chemical and industrial revolutions and
argues against a linear model of technological development.5 By focusing on
a chemical artifact, it shows a historically more complex and significant inter-
weaving of theory, material culture, and politics.
Simon Schaffer and Ken Adler have shown how instruments and techno-
logical artifacts are deeply political, moving beyond the view that instruments
simply embody theory and visions of nature.6 Schaffer has stressed the links of
eudiometers with dissenters political agendas, while in his classic book
Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, (1763-1815) Alder
confronts the question of the politics of revolutionary guns.7 He argues that a
4 Ruth Ashbee, The Discovery of Chlorine: A window to the chemical revolution, Hasok Chang
and Catherine Jackson, eds., An Element of Controversy: The life of chlorine in science, medicine,
technology, and war (London: British Society for the History of Science, 2007), 15-40; William
A. Smeaton, Guyton de Morveau, Louis Bernard, Charles C. Gillispie, ed., Dictionary of
Scientific Biography (New York: Scribner, 1976), 600-4.
5 See the essay by John Christie in this volume for a statement of this argument.
6 Simon Schaffer, Measuring Virtue: Eudiometry, enlightenment, and pneumatic medicine,
Andrew Cunningham and Roger French, eds., The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 281-318; On the relationship of instru-
ments and theory, Trevor H. Levere, The Role of Instruments in the Dissemination of the
Chemical Revolution, ndoxa: series Filosficas 19 (2005): 227-42; Bernadette Bensaude-
Vincent, Lavoisier: mmoires dune revolution (Paris: Flammarion, 1993); John Tresch, The
Romantic Machine. Utopian science and technology after Napoleon (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2012).
7 Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and enlightenment in France, 1763-1815 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1997); Charles C. Gillispie and Ken Alder, Exchange: Engineering
the revolution, Technology and Culture 39 (1998): 733-54.

108 Serrano
new, intimate relationship between politics and technology was forged during
this period. Alder recognizes the interaction of artifacts and politics at differ-
ent levels. The most obvious concerns the way in which technologies were
bound up in struggles over sovereignty, over foreign policy, and over relations
with different political groupings. The relationship between the oxy-muriatic
acid fumigation and the politics of the Spanish state has been analyzed in
these terms. During the 1970s, Spanish scholars construed the polemic between
followers and detractors of acid fumigations as an example of the impossibility
of pursuing authentic science in an authoritarian political regime.8 It may be
useful to recall that at that time, Spain was moving away from Francos dicta-
torship, a regime notorious for its purges of scientists and its censorship
practices. Recently, Jos Ramn Bertomeu and Antonio Garca Belmar have
argued for a more nuanced view, in which a broad consensus about the efficacy
of fumigation was fabricated not by the Government alone, but with the coop-
eration of other groups that shared academic and economic interests in
fumigation.9
Artifacts could also be potent icons.10 For instance, Alder identifies the
pick as a symbol of the revolutionary power of the French people. But his most
important contribution from the viewpoint of this analysis is his turn to poli-
tics for an explanation of the design and functioning of artifacts. Rather than
using technological or social determinism to explain why particular objects
take the form they do at particular times, he stresses the political dimension of
choices: the deep structural level of politics necessarily shapes the way mate-
rial objects and technological knowledge are organized and directed.11 The
essay will explore how the practices of fumigation afforded changes in the rela-
tionship between the citizen and the power of the state.
We must, however, be aware of the dangers of over-emphasizing the agency
of artifacts on one hand, and of considering them as empty vessels to be filled
8 Luis Garca Ballester and Juan L. Carrillo, Un ejemplo de represin de la ciencia en la

Espaa absolutista: la supresin del capitulo 15 de la Breve descripcin de la fiebre ama-
rilla (1806) de J.M.Arejula, Revista de Occidente 134 (1974): 205-11; Juan L. Carrillo, Pedro
Riera Perell, and Ramn Gago, La introduccin en Espaa de las hiptesis miasmtica y
prcticas fumigatorias. Historia de una polmica (J.M Arjula M.J Cabanellas), Medic-
ina e historia 67 (1977): 8-26; Luis Garca Ballester and Juan L. Carrillo, The repression of
Medical Science in Absolutism Spain: The case of Juan Manuel de Arjula, 1755-1830, Clio
Medica 9 (1974): 207-11.
9 Antonio Garca Belmar and Jos Ramn Bertomeu, Espaa fumigada. Consensos y silen-
cios en torno de las fumigaciones cido-minerales en Espaa, 1770-1804 (in progress).
The author was unable to consult this source before this essay was completed.
10 Gillispie and Alder, Exchange, p.745 (see note 7).
11 Ibid., p. 743.

with meanings on the other.12 To avoid this danger, this essay approaches the
fumigator through the study of its affordances. According to Susan J. Douglas,
affordance may be defined as, what certain technologies privilege and permit
that others dont.13 The concept of affordance has a relational ontology, and
thus the affordances of objects change as their historical context changes.
Affordance refers to those functional and relational aspects of technology
that frame but do not determine the possibilities for action in relation to an
object.14 The analysis that follows takes into account this dynamic and rela-
tional construction of artifact-meanings. It is divided into two sections. The
first deals with Guytons fumigating machine, while the second follows the
instruments journey to Spain and the complex history of this relocation.
Guytons Fumigating Machine
The disinfection apparatus that Guyton and the Dumotiez brothers designed
basically consisted of a closed vessel that stored oxy-muriatic acid gas ready to
use. Figs. 4.1 and 4.2 show the 1805 version for disinfecting big rooms. The
machine ensured a controlled emission of the gas by way of an ingenious
method of keeping it under moderate pressure in a glass bottle, which was
housed in a wooden frame. A large screw held a wooden cap (H) that was
pushed over a thick tap of glass (I) to keep the bottle closed. When the screw
was loosened, the cover rose up under pressure from the gas, which escaped
into the room. Notice that the piece (H) was specifically designed to engage
with the columns (B), so it could easily be slipped through the columns. When
one needed to refill the apparatus, the screw (E) was loosened, so that the bot-
tle could be removed from its setting onto the surface of the board (D). Even
when the apparatus required moving around the room while emitting the gas,
the bottle remained safely in place.
12 Francesca Bray, Technology, Gender and History in Imperial China: Great transformations
reconsidered (London; New York: Routledge, 2013), 8.
13 Susan J. Douglas, Some Thoughts on the Question How Do New Things Happen?, Tech-
nology and Culture 51 (2010): 293-304, on 293; Ian Hutchby, Affordances and the Analysis
of Technologically Mediated Interaction, Sociology 37 (2003): 581-89; Idem, Technolo-
gies, Texts, and Affordances, Sociology (2001): 441-56.
14 From Brian Rappert criticizing Ian Hutchby, in Brian Rappert, Technologies, Texts, and
Possibilities: A reply to Hutchby, Sociology 37 (2003): 565-80, on 566; For an insightful
discussion of the types of affordances, see Mats Frindlund, Affording Terrorism: Idealists
and materialities in the emergence of modern terrorism, Max Taylor and P.M. Currie,
eds., Terrorism and Affordance (London: Continuum, 2012), 73-92.

110 Serrano
Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2

A large disinfection apparatus for military Sketch of the large version of Guytons
hospitals and other public spaces. Museo Galileos disinfection apparatus as published in the
Photographic Archives: Pressure receiver Semanario de Agricultura y Artes a los
(Inv.3778). Courtesy of Museo Galileo, Prrocos. Courtesy of Biblioteca del
FLORENCE. Real Jardn Botnico, CSIC, Madrid.
No metal parts were used because the acid gas would corrode them. Once
the apparatus was filled with reagents, one needed only to unfasten the screw,
let the fumes of the oxy-muriatic acid flow, and fasten the screw back. For dis-
infecting hospitals, this was to be done once or twice a day, for a period of two
to six minutes, dependent upon the size and occupancy of the ward. According
to the leaflet that accompanied the machine, the gas lasted six months if used
daily. In addition to the large version, the Dumotiez brothers also designed
machines of a smaller size (Figs. 4.3 and 4.4). This latter was designed for car-
rying with the caution of keeping it upright in order to visit the sick, attend
funerals, concerts, theaters, and masses.

Figure 4.3 Figure 4.4

A portable version of Guytons disinfection Sketch of the portable version of Guytons
apparatus. Courtesy of Science disinfection apparatus as published in the
Museum, South Kensington, London. Semanario de Agricultura y Artes a los
Prrocos. Courtesy of Biblioteca del Real
Jardn Botnico, CSIC, Madrid.
Although the fumigating apparatus might look simple, its construction

involved a great deal of material research.15 The system that confined the gas
with the wooden screw was decided upon after models using ground-glass
stoppers failed because the gas corroded them. The bottle was made with a
new technique of grinding glass developed by Guyton. It also needed to have
thick borders to resist the pressure of the screw and the gas. In addition, the
15 William A. Smeaton, Platinum and Ground Glass: Some innovations in chemical appara-
tus by Guyton de Morveau and others, Frederic L. Holmes and Trevor H. Levere eds.,
Instruments and Experimentation in the History of Chemistry (Cambridge, MA; London,
England: MIT Press, 2000), 211-37.

112 Serrano
glass disk that sealed the bottle needed to be flat, as did the edge of the bottle,
to allow perfect contact and avoid leaks of gas. The Dumotiez brothers recom-
mended following the same technique as in the pneumatic machine.16 The
machine required construction by skillful craftsmen. In Spain, a Guyton-style
machine was made by a gifted artisan and member of the Barcelona Academy
of Sciences, Pelegrn Fors y Madaula (1775-1841).17 The fact that this was high-
lighted in Fors y Madulas obituary indicates the high prestige that constructing
such an apparatus supposed. Indeed, one of the biggest issues faced during
attempts to replicate the machine on a large scale in Spain was precisely the
lack of specialized glassmakers and turners available to perform the work.18
Guytons machine in its various forms was just one part of a spectrum of
fumigation techniques performed with everyday gadgets and materials. Since
ancient times, people had evaporated fumes of odoriferous stuff, including
thyme, rosemary, juniper, wormwood, myrrh, incense, and vinegar, simply by
heating pots.19 Contemporary treatises on domestic economy included recipes
for disinfecting with sulfuric, muriatic, and nitric acid, in which no special
devices were needed.20 To fumigate using sulfuric acid for instance, the Spanish
agricultural magazine El Semanario de Agricultura suggested filling a normal
clay pot with salt and putting it on a portable oven full of coal embers. The salt
was stirred with a simple stick until one felt the heat, and then the sulfuric acid
was carefully poured on.21 In the fumigation of the Russian hospital ship Union,
doctor Archibald Menzies heated sand in a clay receptacle, inserted a teacup
containing sulfuric acid, and added powdered niter to produce fumes of nitric
acid.22 This raises the question of how contemporaries justified buying special-
16 Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, Trait des moyens de dsinfecter lair (Paris: Bernard,
1805), 388.
17 Carlos Puig-Pla, Els primers socis-artistes de la Reial Acadmia de Cincies i Arts de Bar-
celona (1746-1842), Agust Nieto Galn and Antoni Roca Rosell, eds., La Reial Acadmia de
Cincies i Arts de Barcelona als segles XVIII y XIX. Histria, cincia i societat (Barcelona:
Institut dEstudis Catalans, 2000), 287-310, on 300.
18 Levere, The Role of Instruments (see note 6).
19 Antonio Prez de Escobar, Avisos populares mdicos y domsticos (Madrid: D. Joachin
Ibarra, 1776), 74-5; Flix Martnez Lpez, Reflexiones del Dr. Flix Martnez Lpez sobre las
enfermedades (Valladolid: En la oficina de la viuda e hijos de Santander, 1788), 13; Marie
Armande Jeanne Gacon-Dufour, Moyens de Conserver la sant des habitants des cam-
pagnes (Paris: Buisson, 1806), 165.
20 Miguel Jos Cabanelles, Observaciones sobre los gases cido- minerales (Cartagena: Man-
uel Muiz, 1802), 18-22.
21 Anon., Medicina Domstica, Semanario de agricultura y artes 1 (1797): 70-2.
22 Juan Manuel Arjula, Memoria sobre el modo y ocasiones de emplear los varios gases para
descontagiar los sitios epidemiados (Sevilla: Imprenta Mayor, 1800).

ized precision instrumentation to do something that could be done with pots

and pans.23
The fumigating machine was part of an explosion of contemporary gadgets
aimed at transforming the atmosphere of densely populated cities, which
people of the last decades of the century felt were becoming alarmingly con-
taminated.24 Frightening warnings about urban airs were heard almost
everywhere. In Barcelona, for example, members of the Royal Academy of
Medicine vividly described how Barcelona air, being full of fetid particles, cor-
rupted, acrid, corrosive, and poisonous, damaged health.25 Thomas Garnett, of
the Royal Institution in London, described English city air as a, chaos of eter-
nal smoke and volatile corruption from the dead, the dying, sickning, and the
living world.26 A British leaflet announced the sale of fumigating ingredients
for removing the foetid smells, stagnated and putrid air which were the
cause of many dreadful diseases [] which so frequently prove fatal.27 In this
climate of anxiety the fumigating machine provided an easy, quick, and handy
way of disinfecting.
Oxy-muriatic gas became an object of consumption, a commodity. The
fumigating machine was marketed as a reservoir of a potent disinfectant ready
to use, which provided a standardized, reliable means of fumigating.28 It
offered educated urban elites a new optimistic feeling of controlling conta-
gion. Chemists succeeded in enclosing hermetically (or almost hermetically) a
powerful new gaseous substance. Designed with the latest material technol-
ogy, filled up with kits of ingredients prepared by chemists or pure ingredients
purchased in apothecaries the fumigating machine fostered the authority of
chemical mostly male experts, and nourished the prestige of the new
chemistry.
23 On the adapted use of household items, see Simon Werretts essay in this volume.
24 Vladimir Jankovi, Confronting the Climate: British airs and the making of environmental
medicine (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Candance Ward, Desire and Disorder:
Fevers, fictions, and feelings in English Georgian culture (Lewisburg: Bucknell University
Press, 2007).
25 Academia Mdico-Prctica de Barcelona, Dictamen de la Academia Mdico-Prctica (Bar-
celona: Carlos Gibrt y Tut, 1784), 26.
26 Thomas Garnett, A Lecture on the Preservation of Health (Liverpool: J. MCreery, 1797).
27 Gerard William Groote, Fumigating Ingredients, to Remove Offensive Smells, Foul, Putrid
and Stagnated Air ([London], [1780?]).
28 That was probably the reason why in 1807 the Spanish Government spent 258 Reales de
Velln on two fumigating machines for disinfecting La Corte jail. Archivo Histrico Nacio-
nal (AHN): Consejos, 1397, folio 375.

114 Serrano
Empowering Oxygen
In 1801, disappointed by the city of Genoas management of the fever epidemic

of 1800, Guyton published his Trait des moyens de dsinfecter lair (Treatise on
the Means of Purifying Infected Air).29 The Trait enjoyed three editions (1801,
1802, and 1805), and was translated into English, Spanish, German, and Italian.30
Furthermore, it was widely publicized in journals, magazines, and domestic
economy manuals. The way in which Guyton demonstrated in the Trait the
superiority of the acids, and particularly, the oxy-muriatic acid, is revealing of
theepistemicandmoralaffordancesthatthefumigatingmachineofferedtocontem-
poraries.
Guyton described his experiments for testing the disinfectant properties of
different substances with a kind of chemical miasma-test that he developed.
The miasma-test constructed the authority of oxy-muriatic acid as the supreme
disinfectant, and so it is worth describing it in detail. Guyton made three
assumptions. First, he elaborated on the relation of fetid and pernicious
odors (supposedly caused by maladies within bodies), and concluded that
they could only come from some constituent of the body.31 Second, he logically
argued that since odors were part of bodies, and a body only remained the
same while it preserved all its properties, it followed that to destroy the odor
was to destroy the body a dangerous challenge.32 Here Guyton made a crucial
distinction between chemists and lay people. Lay people many times con-
founded destruction with masking; only the knowledgeable chemist could
determine when a disinfectant was working. With these assumptions, Guyton
put into practice his test. He left three samples of meat under a glass bell until
it became perfectly putrid after six days. Then he kept the pestiferous odor in
a bottle, which he connected to another one that contained the supposed dis-
infectant.33 If the disinfectant destroyed the foul odor, it meant that it might
also destroy the miasmas.
Guyton tried perfumed waters and mineral acids and concluded that only
mineral acids had the power to destroy the odor, and therefore, the miasmas.
Now, seeking for a chemical rationale to explain why acid destroyed putrid
29 Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, Trait des moyens de dsinfecter lair (Paris: Bernard,
1801).
30 For quotations in English, I use the English translation, Louis-Bernard Guyton de Mor-
veau, A Treatise on the Means of Purifying Infected Air, trans. R. Hall (London: J. & E. Hod-
son, 1802).
31 Guyton, Trait, p.92, point 59 (see note 29).
32 Ibid., p. 93, point 60.
33 Ibid., pp. 68-9.

miasmas, Guyton argued that miasmas could not be simple bodies because
simple bodies could not reproduce. Miasmas should then be organic bodies,
from which it followed that miasmas could be destroyed by fire. Using a dra-
matic image for his readers, Guyton asked When the clothes or furniture of a
person dead of the plague are burned, does any one suspect that the virus, with
which they were infected, can be found entire in the ashes?34 For the very
same reason then, miasmas could not resist the condensed oxygen of the
mineral acids, which produced the combustion of organic bodies, in Guytons
words the most astonishing of combustions. Guyton celebrated the power of
the oxy-muriatic acid with these words: Such are the properties of oxygen, of
super-oxigenants, of acid fumigations, and, above all, of the oxygenated muri-
atic acid gas.35
The oxygenated muriatic acid was thus construed as a product of chemical
research, based, according to Guyton, on the most exact experiments, the
application of principles the most evident, and the consequences of observa-
tions drawn from the most authentic sources.36 Modern chemistry discovered
that fumigating with acids, especially with the oxy-muriatic acid, had the same
purifying effect as fire: Such is the grand instrument of disinfection which
modern chemistry has brought to our knowledge.37
Moralizing Fumigations, Empowering Citizens
Four years later, Guyton went even further. In the 1805 edition of the Treatise,
fumigating with oxy-muriatic acid acquired a moral dimension. Guyton had
already received the Napoleonic Legion of Honour. According to the award let-
ter (published in the Treatise), the reasons were not only his numerous writings
that advanced chemistry, but also the discovery that fumigations with muriatic
acids could stop the contagion of yellow fevers, the rival of the plague.
Moreover, the letter continued, he had invented a fumigation apparatus that
was very useful.38 In addition to including three sketches of the fumigating
machines, Guyton concluded the Treatise with a meaningful paragraph. After
stressing that he had provided all kind of proofs of the efficacy of mineral
34 Guyton, Treatise, p.218 (see note 30); Guyton, Trait p.263 (see note 29).
35 Ibid., p. 268.
36 Guyton, Treatise, p.221 (see note 30); Guyton, Trait pp.267-8 (see note 29).
37 Guyton, Treatise, p.223 (see note 30); Guyton, Trait, p.266 (see note 29).
38 Guyton, Trait, p. viii (see note 16); The apparatus were sold in Dumotiezs shop at 12 Rue
des Jardinets.

116 Serrano
fumigations, the theoretical principles on which their action was grounded,

the ways to apply them, and even the instruments for making the practise easy,
Guyton stated, in upper case: THE CONTAGION CANNOT BE BORN AND SPREAD
IF NOT BY THE MOST CULPABLE NEGLIGENCE.39 Fumigating was no longer a
personal choice, but a moral responsibility. Thus, the disinfection machine
embodied the conceptual and moral power of the new chemistry, warranting
chemists intervention in both the private and the public spheres for the sake
of the whole of society.
The machine also embodied the changing relationship between political
power and the citizenry. Epidemics expose how power is exercized and how
deep social inequalities may be. The control of the contagion implied a tight
control of the population. The traditional way of fighting epidemics resembled
traditional forms of conquest. Troops sent by the sovereign besieged the
infected city. Quarantines and Lazarettos served to isolate populations at the
discretion of the authorities.40 The city doors were closed and a tight military
cordon sanitaire prevented traffic between the infected city and the outside.41
No one could travel without a sanitary passport, except the rich, who as soon
as the epidemic was declared, fled the city.42 Sick poor indigents were moved
to hospitals, those suspected of being sick to the lazaretto, while the dead were
buried with quicklime. Prisoners were forced to conduct the carts of corpses.43
Cannon were fired in infected neighbourhoods in the belief that this dispersed
39 Ibid., p. 596.
40 Mercedes Pascual Artiaga, La ciudad ante el contagio: medidas polticas y administrati-
vas dictadas en la epidemia de fiebre amarilla de 1804 en Alicante, Asclepio 54 (2002):
125-53, on 133-4; On the cordon sanitaire in Malaga see Gaceta de Madrid 71 (04/09/1804):
791; See also Gaceta de Madrid 77 (25/09/1804): 857-9. The Government forbade the people
of Madrid to communicate with Mlaga, Vlez, Antequera, Montilla, and Alicante under
punishment of five years of exile for nobles and prison for lay people.
41 Anon., Edicto general comprehensivo de todas las reales provisiones (Barcelona: Manuel
Texro, 1800), 202-10; See also Capitana General Cdiz, Cerciorado ya de que la enferme-
dad que reina en Mlaga (S.l., 1803?). <http://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=0000070734&
page=1> Accessed 6 December 2015.
42 Juan L. Carrillo, and L. Garca Ballester, El comportamiento de las clases y grupos sociales
de Mlaga en las epidemias de fiebre amarilla, Cuadernos de la historia de la medicina
espaola 11 (1972): 88-95; See also Juan Manuel Arjula, Breve descripcin de la fiebre ama-
rilla padecida en Cdiz (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1806), Figure 6, in which he numbered the
people who fled the city of Malaga.
43 Andrs Prez Bayln, El templo de la muerte (Malaga: Francisco Martnez de Aguilar,
1804).

the infection.44 Those who dared to escape from the lazarettos were shot, as
were burglars of contaminated houses. Commerce was strongly controlled and
smuggling was punished with the gallows. The cost of the epidemic was huge.
Military and the other expenses were great, while commerce withered. Ships
from infected ports were quarantined and not allowed to anchor in other
ports.45 Once the epidemic was over, goods suspected of being infected bed-
clothes, wool, furniture and books were burnt or buried with limestone.
Only fire, gold, and gallows cure the fevers, a medical saying stated.46
In contrast, the fumigating machine fought the contagion in a profoundly
different way. The wellbeing of the whole community was assured by fumigat-
ing with gas that, arguably, democratically disinfected the houses of poor and
rich identically. Unlike military violence, this manner of stopping the conta-
gion appealed to citizens moral responsibility, by asserting their responsibility
for their own health and that of their peers. Citizens were thereby empowered
but were also culpable if infected. The discourse shifted from a state that
assured control of epidemics and the population by means of force to a more
subtle register, in which it assured control through its own citizens, who were
now responsible for protecting themselves and their peers.
In 1804, the Spanish Prime Secretary Manuel Godoy (1767- 1851) decided to
manufacture thirty thousand fumigating machines for distribution among the
population of southern Spanish towns suffering from yellow fever epidemics.47
The Spanish ambassador in Paris sent three models (large for hospitals,
medium for households, and a portable version) to guide production.48
However, it soon became apparent that massive and rapid replication was
impossible. Guytons apparatus proved too expensive and sophisticated to be
produced on this scale. As other essays in this volume argue it was often a pro-
cess of elaborating and extending already known procedures rather than
44 Six cannon shots were fired in Malaga over two days in 1803. AHN: Consejos, 11975. Junta
de Sanidad: Sobre las precauciones con motivo de la enfermedad de Mlaga.
45 Archivo Histrico de la Univesidad Complutense (AHUC): Reglamentos Navales in Provi
dencias generales, artculo 93.
46 Anon., Reflexiones acerca de la epidemia que reyna [sic] en Cdiz (Madrid: Imprenta Real,
1800), 46.
47 In 1800, the Cadiz fever epidemic killed 7,387 people (population 48,520), in Seville 14,685
(population 80,568); in Malaga 1803, 6,887 (population 51,7459); in 1804, 11,486. The 1804
epidemics extended to Alicante (2,472 dead people, population 13,212), Antequera (2,948,
population 14,5779), Velez Mlaga (5,245, population 12,700), Crdoba (400, population
40,000), Cdiz (28,92, population 54,899), and Cartagena (11,445, population 33,222).
Arjula, Breve, figures 1-6 (see note 42).
48 Anon., Mercurio de Espaa (15/4/1805): 69-71.

118 Serrano
radical innovation that solved problems posed by large-scale production.49

The royal apothecary, entrepreneur, and chemistry professor Pedro Gutirrez
Bueno (1745-1822) responded in this case with a new model of Guytons
machine, rendering it easier to replicate.
The Fumigating Machine Travels to Spain
Gutirrez Buenos ability to move comfortably between artisanal, fashionable,

and academic milieu was the key to establishing the Spanish fumigating
machines authority.50 Educated as an apothecary, in 1788 Gutirrez Bueno
translated the Mthode de nomenclature chimique of Lavoisier, Guyton de
Morveau, Fourcroy and Berthollet.51 He taught chemistry in the surgeons col-
lege of San Carlos (1801-1804) and was director of the Royal Laboratory of
Chemistry from 1787. Situated in the center of Madrid, the laboratory hosted
his popular chemical classes which were frequented by craftsmen, apothecar-
ies, and aristocrats.52 Gutirrez Bueno was close to influential people, such as
the poet and politician Leandro Fernndez de Moratn, who called him Petrus
Bonus, and the editor Juan Antonio Melon, who published Gutirrez Buenos
treatise on dyes and glass making.53 In 1790, Gutirrez Bueno famously accom-
49 See the essays by Christie and Simmons, this volume. Thomas P. Hughes, The Evolution
of Large Technological Systems, Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch
eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New directions in the sociology and
history of technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 51-82, esp.57-58; Thomas P.
Hughes, American Genesis: A century of invention and technological enthusiasm, 1870-1970
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 53 ff.
50 Paula Carrasco Jarabo, Vida y obra de Pedro Gutirrez Bueno, Boletn de la Sociedad
Espaola de Historia de la Farmacia 15 (1964): 154-69; 16 (1965): 10-24; 71-86; 101-18 and 153-
77; Carrasco transcribes a document in the Archivo General del Palacio Real de Madrid
(Leg. 490, Exp.26), in which Gutirrez Bueno listed his merits ((1965): 113-14). He prepared
the acids for fumigating, the machines, and the leaflets to be sent to Granada, Cdiz,
Valencia, and other villages.
51 Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau et al., Mtodo de la Nueva Nomenclatura Qumica
(Madrid: Don Antonio de Sancha, 1788).
52 Antonio Garca Belmar and Jos R. Bertomeu Snchez, Pedro Gutirrez Bueno, los libros
de texto de qumica, y los nuevos pblicos de la qumica en el ltimo tercio del siglo
XVIII, Dynamis 2 (2001): 351-74; Jos R. Bertomeu Snchez and Antonio Garca Belmar,
Pedro Gutirrez Bueno (1745-1822) y las relaciones entre la qumica y la farmacia durante
el ltimo tercio del siglo XVIII, Hispania 208 (2001): 539-62.
53 Melon published the journal Semanario de Agricultura y Artes, in which Gutirrez Bue-
nos daughter Mara Antonia collaborated.

panied an aristocratic female association, the Seoras de las crceles, to analyze

the Madrid prisons air.54 He was also keen to participate in public health
issues. He discussed the quality of Madrid airs and waters and the proper way
of coating pots for preventing certain type of fevers.55 In addition, some of his
entrepreneurial activities were closely related to the oxy-muriatic acid.56 He
directed the production of sulfuric acid in a manufactory beside the Manzanares
River. In 1790, he translated Berthollets treatise on the use of oxy-muriatic acid
for bleaching, and employed Berthollets method in the Royal Manufactory of
San Idelfonso. He even designed a domestic machine, which according to him,
easily bleached cloth at home with oxy-muriatic acid..57
It was this acquaintance with materials, devices, and large-scale production
that allowed Gutirrez Bueno to substantially cheapen Guytons models. This
he did using low-cost wood, substituting round forms for square boxes (which
were easier to mold), and inventing a new system for holding the gas (see Fig.
4.5). Instead of screws, Gutirrez Bueno used wedges. To release the gas, one
opened the box by pulling up the cover and dragging out the wedge. Gutirrez
Bueno also developed a large apparatus similar to Guytons, minus the round
forms and screw, which was both simpler and easier to repair. If the wedges
came loose, one only needed to add another piece. In addition, the bottles that
held the gas could be cheaper, since the system of sealing the glass did not
require as much pressure as the Parisian ones. Finally, the Spanish portable
machines apparently lasted longer than some of the Guyton models, because
the wood did not directly suffer from the corrosive effect of the gas.58 The
54 Elena Serrano, Chemistry in the City: The scientific role of female societies in late eigh-
teenth-century Madrid, Ambix 60 (2013): 139-59.
55 Pedro Gutirrez Bueno, Informe, Memorial Literario, Agosto (1790): 73-8; Pedro Gutirrez
Bueno, Analisis de las aguas de Madrid (Madrid: Imprenta de Villalpando, 1800); Pedro
Gutirrez Bueno, Mtodo prctico de estaar las vasijas de cocina (Madrid: Imprenta de
Villalpando, 1803); See also Carrasco, Vida y obra, pp.107-114 (see note 50).
56 Pedro Gutirrez Bueno, Instruccion prctica para destilar las aguas fuertes (Madrid: Don
Blas Romn, 1787).
57 Pedro Gutirrez Bueno, Memoria sobre el blanqueo del lino, algodn y otras materias
(Madrid: Don Antonio de Sancha, 1790).
58 Anon., Memoria sobre las disposiciones tomadas por el Gobierno para introducir en Espaa
el mtodo de fumigar (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1805), 8, footnote; The author explained
that out of his thirty-five French portable models, the wooden cases of twenty-four were
cracked. For the models sold by Gutirrez Bueno, see Descripcion y uso del aparato perma-
nente para desinficcionar el ayre [sic] (Madrid: Imprenta de Villalpando, 1805).

120 Serrano
Figure 4.5 Fumigating machines made in Paris alongside those made in Madrid. Anon.,
Memoria sobre las disposiciones tomadas por el Gobierno para introducir en
Espaa el mtodo de fumigar (Madrid, 1805). Courtesy of Biblioteca de
Catalunya, Barcelona.
Spanish machines were first distributed in 1805 for the complete disinfection
of Cartagena.59
Marshalling with Enlightened Reformers
The Spanish fumigating machines were construed as material proof of the

providence, enlightenment, and effective oeconomic policies of the Govern
ment. In her poem about Guytons fumigations mentioned at the beginning of
this essay, Rosa Glvez not only praised Guyton, but also the Prime Secretary
Manuel Godoy for popularizing fumigation in Spain. In Galvezs words, Godoy
was a beneficent hero, who destroyed envy, false piety and vile superstition
(referring to clergymen who refused to fumigate churches).60 In fact, the
59 Anon., Memoria, p.9 and pp.27- 32 (see note 58).

60 Glvez, Oda, p.10 (see note 1).

Government issued substantial propaganda promoting its role in stopping the

yellow fevers. In 1805, it published a two hundred-page treatise, comprised of
an extensive narration and supporting documents, the Memoria sobre las dis-
posiciones tomadas por el Gobierno para introducir en Espaa el mtodo de
fumigar (Memoire on the dispositions taken by the Government for introducing in
Spain the fumigating method).61 These included descriptions of experiments,
readers letters from the infected cities to local newspapers, correspondence
between Godoy and the Supreme Health Board ( Junta Suprema de Sanidad)
and translations of foreign documents, such as the Napoleonic regulations of
military hospitals.
As illustrated in figure five, the treatise presented the Spanish machines side
by side with the Parisian ones, in a way that encouraged comparison.62 The
image suggested that the king had done a great service to the Spanish popula-
tion by promoting the benefits of oxy-muriatic disinfection. Moreover, on the
label that accompanied the bottles, the reader learned that the apparatus was
invented by a wise chemist [] adopted by all the educated nations of Europe
and prepared by order of the King, our Master.63
At that time, Spain endured great economic and political turmoil. The weak-
ness of the Monarchy was evident to Spaniards and foreigners alike. Alliance
with France in 1797 pulled the country into conflict with Great Britain with
devastating consequences for colonial commerce and state finances. The
changing relationship with France seriously damaged the uneasy equilibrium
between Spains three traditional political forces, namely, the church, the so-
called aristocratic party of the Count of Aranda, and the reformers. The
Inquisition gained power and former members of the Government were now
prosecuted. Defending the mineral acid fumigations for combating the conta-
gion was a convenient way for Godoy and the Spanish Crown to align with the
reformers, without thereby taking on additional political risks.64
61 Anon., Memoria (see note 58).

62 Ibid., figure 1.
63 Ibid., p. 9.
64 Emilio Laparra Lpez, La inestabilidad de la monarqua de Carlos IV, Stvdia histrica.
Historia Moderna 12 (1994): 23-34; Jean Ren Aymes, Espaa y la revolucin francesa (Bar-
celona: Crtica, 1989); Claude Morange, Las estructuras de poder en el trnsito del Anti-
guo al Nuevo Rgimen, Joseph Prez and Armando Alberola, eds., Espaa y Amrica entre
la Ilustracin y el liberalism (Alicante; Madrid: Casa de Velzquez- Instituto de Cultura
Juan Gil-Albert, 1993), 35-7; Emilio LaParra, La Alianza de Godoy con los revolucionarios
(Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientficas, 1992); Emilio LaParra, Ilustra-
dos e Inquisicin ante la Iglesia constitucional francesa, Revista de Historia das Ideias 10

122 Serrano
Disinfecting public spaces such as jails and hospitals was deeply connected
with new ideas about the role of the state in public welfare. In Spain, from the
1780s onwards, societies of friends of the country and scientific associations
translated foreign treatises and experimented on the disinfecting properties of
different acids. The Royal Academy of Medicine of Madrid translated Jean
Janins Lantimphitique and tested the disinfection power of vinegar. In Barce
lona, Carles Gimbernat championed disinfection with nitric acid. He invented
a heating lamp for evaporating the fumes of the acid, and translated Smyths
account of the disinfection of the Russian ship La Union.65 The bishop of
Barcelona, Pedro Daz Valds a cleric with sympathy for the Spanish Jansenist
movement, ordered the printing and distribution of Guytons disinfection
method.66 Valentn de Foronda, a member of the Economic Society of Vascon
gadas and author of numerous essays on political economy, translated Guytons
article from the Encyclopdie Mthodique.67
The Government took a very active role in promoting oxy-muriatic acid dis-
infection. In particular, it promoted public experiments. As scholars have
shown, engaging audiences was an effective means to circulate ideas and prac-
tices, selling instruments, gaining adepts, and legitimating experts.68 In July
1805, a commission of prestigious savants did experiments at three different
sites: the pharmacy of Gutirrez Bueno, the Real Casa Hospicio, which hosted
Madrid vagabonds and poor people, and its stables.69 The conclusion was that
fumigation with oxy-muriatic acid could be safely applied to goods, people,
and animals. These experiments were projected as crucial for the Spanish
economy. To prove the advantages that the practice of fumigation would bring,
the Memoria included the orders that the Supreme Board of Health ( Junta
(1988): 359-74; Gonzalo Anes, Economa e ilustracin en la Espaa del siglo XVIII (Barce-
lona: Ariel, 1969).
65 Jean Janin, El antimefitico (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1782); James Smyth, Relacin de los
experimentos hechos por Mr. Menzies (Madrid: Viuda de Ibarra, 1800).
66 Joaquim Puigvert, ed., Bisbes, Illustraci i jansenisme a la Catalunya del segle XVIII (Vic:
Biblioteca Universitaria, 2000); Juan Bada, Don Pedro Daz de Valds, obispo de Barce-
lona (1798-1807), Anthologica Annua 19 (1972): 651-74.
67 Jos Manuel Barrenechea, Valentn de Foronda, Reformador y Economista Ilustrado (lava:
Diputacin Foral, 1984).
68 Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Christine Blondel, eds., Science and Spectacle in the
European Enlightenment (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2005); Geoffrey Sutton, Science for
a Polite Society: Gender, culture, and the demonstration of enlightenment (Denver: West-
view Press, 1995); James van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
69 Anon., Memoria Informe de los Facultativos, pp.37-40 (see note 58).

Suprema de Sanidad) circulated in Malaga in 1804, and those circulated in

Cartagena in 1805 for readers to compare. The Malaga orders involved older
methods used to disinfect the city after the cordon sanitaire period ended.70
For four months, goods could not be taken out of the city and houses that shel-
tered sick people had to remain closed. Mattresses, linen and clothes were
burnt or buried in the waste grounds with lime. In the ports, quarantine was
imposed on all goods. Textile goods were hung in the sun and air for weeks;
other merchandise was kept in storehouses for months, or burnt. In contrast,
the measures employed in Cartagena in 1805 used machines designed by
Gutirrez Bueno. Twice daily, neighbourhood directors carried out domestic
fumigations.71 The disinfection was completed in a month.
In a way, the acid fumigating technology revived the circulation of goods
and people halted by the infection. The doctor Miguel Cabanellas designed
special fumigating machines for disinfecting clothes in the lazaretto of San
Joseph, Cartagena (figures 4.6 and 4.7). The first was a kind of big closed box
with a grid in the middle for letting the gas pass through the textiles. The sec-
ond was a kind of hut in which one sat while the fumes of the oxy-muriatic
acid percolated from below, and which included a breathing-tube for persons
worried about inhaling oxy-muriatic acid (item k in Fig. 4.7).
Cabanellas also designed a lazaretto that can be understood as a chemically-
based plant for recycling people and goods back to normal circulation (Fig.
4.8). The lazaretto was separated from the city by ditches and walls. It was orga-
nized in individual cells where the sick were placed for recovery.72 Special
units for disinfecting clothes and objects were strategically situated. Mattresses,
bedclothes, furniture, animals, and people were properly disinfected before
being returned to the other side of the ditch. Fumigating allowed goods to be
safely reintegrated in the ambient sociomaterial environment.73
There is one puzzling question that must be asked. Did the oxy-muriatic
acid work? A partial answer may be found in an apparently trivial comment of
Cabanellas. While fumigating the matrasses of the Cartagena lazaretto, he
noted that all the bedbugs and cockroaches died.74 The insecticide properties
70 Ibid., Nmero Sexto, pp. 33-5; Artiaga, La ciudad, (see note 40); Mariano Peset and Jos
Luis Peset, Muerte en Espaa. Poltica y sociedad entre la peste y el clera (Madrid: Semi-
narios y Ediciones, 1977); Esteban Rodrguez Ocaa, La cuestin del lazareto martimo
permanente en la Espaa del siglo XVIII, de Cdiz a Mahon, Asclepio 40 (1988): 265-76.
71 Anon., Memoria Nmero Quinto, pp.27- 32 (see note 58).
72 Quim Bonastra, Los orgenes del lazareto pabellonario. La arquitectura cuarentenaria en
el cambio del setecientos al ochocientos, Asclepio 60 (2008): 60-61.
73 On sociomaterial environments, see Lissa Roberts and Joppe van Driel, this volume.
74 Miguel Cabanelles, Defensa de las fumigaciones cido-minerales (Madrid: Repulls, 1814).

124 Serrano
Figure 4.6 Fumigating machine for objects in Anon., Memoria. Courtesy of Biblioteca de
Figure 4.7 Fumigating machine for people in Anon., Memoria. Courtesy of Biblioteca de

Figure 4.8 Ideal Lazaretto. Memoria. Courtesy of Biblioteca de Catalunya,

Barcelona.
of the oxy-muriatic acid were also described in other cases. So fumigations

may have been effective after all. As is well known, the virus that provoked yel-
low fever is transmitted by the bite of a tropical mosquito. The infectious
mosquito crossed the Atlantic in American ships, and due to the mild and
humid conditions of some Spanish towns, easily reproduced. The oxy-muriatic
acid (chlorine) may have inhibited the cycle of infection when used in isolated
environments, such as the closed neighborhoods of some southern Spanish
towns.
Making Political Propaganda
The fumigating machine was pictured by the Government as a political weapon

that could be wielded to win a battle that Spain had been forced to wage in the
middle of its sorrows and calamities. The Memoire on the dispositions taken by
the Government for introducing in Spain the fumigating method mentioned in
the former section finished with the following paragraph:
People around the world! The annihilation of the last germ of the yellow
fever is in your power. The Peruvian Bark and the mineral fumigations

126 Serrano
can achieve that important victory, and when you celebrate it, turn your
thankful eyes to Spain, which had such a great role in assuring it to you,
and who in the middle of its sorrows and calamities, enjoyed the advan-
tage of having the firm, noble and prudent character of the Prince of
Peace [ie. Godoy].75
Political propaganda was also disseminated through other media. In 1806, the
Semanario de agricultura y artes published several articles on acid fumigation
and on the crucial role of the Government.76 The official Mercurio de Espaa
circulated the letter in which the Ministry of War recommended the use of
fumigations in hospitals, lazarettos, jails, and military quarters.77 Moreover,
the Government censured opinions opposed to acid fumigations.78 There was
the notorious case of physician Juan Manuel Arjula, director of the Health
Board in Malaga, who had to cut out a whole chapter on the uselessness of the
oxy-muriatic acid for disinfection in his treatise on yellow fever.79 In December
of 1803, the Government ordered the closure of the popular journal El Correo
de Madrid, and arrested the publisher, owing to the way it depicted the Malaga
epidemics.80
Nonetheless, some sense of the medical opposition to fumigations may be
gained through the Libro de Juntas of the Royal Academy of Medicine in
Madrid, which contains the minutes of its weekly meetings. With a member-
ship including the most prominent doctors of the time, one of the academys
functions was to advise the Supreme Board of Health.81 In May of 1804, the
academy was consulted on whether the cases of fevers that appeared in Malaga
75 Anon., Memoria p.71 (see note 58).

76 Extracto de la Memoria que acaba de darse al publico, Semanario de Agricultura y Artes
20 (1806): 65-72; 89-94; 99-102; 121-128; 141-144; 159-160; 172-176.
77 Anon., Mercurio de Espaa 15/8/1806: 177-80.
78 Ballester and Carrillo, Repression (see note 8); Belmar and Bertomeu Espaa fumigada
(see note 9).
79 The chapter was in Arjula, Breve descripcin, (see note 42). He published it when the
Goverment changed: Memoria sobre la ninguna utilidad del uso de los gases cidos (Espar-
raguera: Imprenta del Gobierno, 1821). See Juan L. Carrillo, Juan Manuel de Arjula (1755-
1830). Estudio sobre la fiebre amarilla (Madrid: Ministerio de Sanidad y Consumo, 1986);
Garca Belmar and Bertomeu, Espaa fumigada (see note 9).
80 AHN. Consejos, 11975: Junta de Sanidad. 26-December- 1803. All the volumes were forbid-
den.
81 Luis Granjel, Historia de la Real Academia Nacional de Medicina de Madrid (Madrid: Real
Academia Nacional de Medicina, 2006).

constituted an epidemic or not.82 The long discussions that followed spotlight

the lack of agreement on the origin, treatment, and prevention of fevers that
existed in eighteenth-century medical circles.83
In 1805, the Government encouraged the academy to respond judiciously
to foreign works that denied the contagious character of yellow fevers. In par-
ticular, the Government specified works from Anglo-Americans who wanted
to confuse us.84 Notwithstanding this opposition, the Academy made honor-
ary fellows of the physicians Benjamin Rush from Philadelphia and Samuel
Lathan Mitchill from New York.85 The former defended the opinion that yellow
fever was not contagious, while the latter defended a doctrine of infection
incompatible with prevention by acids. Medical correspondence between
physicians who worked in the infected cities also suggested disagreement on
the uses of fumigations.86
A closer look to what lay people thought about fumigations is provided by
the irreverent manuscript Dilogo de los muertos (Dialogs of Dead) written in
Malaga in late 1803, when the city was still cordoned off.87 The Dilogo narrates
a conversation held by eight dead people French, English, Portuguese, Italian,
Catalan, Muslim, a Malaga citizen, and a sensible-man called Salomon. It is
an exceptional document, which openly criticizes the perceived arbitrary and
corrupt behavior of the authorities. The story reflects the inhabitants fears of
being unjustifiably secluded in the lazaretto, their animus against the prohibi-
tion of masses and religious parades, and their anger against bribed authorities
who allowed ships to skip quarantines and facilitated the spread of contami-
nated merchandise. But above all, the story expressed anger with governmental
measures, which the inhabitants of Malaga would later have to pay. Anger was
especially directed against fumigations: they robbed the people with the
82 Archivo de la Real Academia de Medicina de Madrid (ARAM): Junta Extraordinaria del

2 de Mayo de 1804.
83 Ward, Desire (see note 24). See also Jos Manuel Lpez, Dos textos epidemiologicos
ineditos de Antonio Amodvar Ruiz-bravo (1763-1823), Gimbernat 2003 (39): 55-67.
84 ARAM, Diario de Juntas, 19 September 1805.
85 ARAM, Diario de Juntas, 24 October 1805.
86 Jos Antonio Coll, Apuntes sobre la fiebre amarilla de Cadiz [Manuscrito]. Biblioteca
Histrica Universidad Complutense Madrid, BH Mss 853 (3). Doctor Jose Antonio Coll
wrote from Cadiz on the methods for preventing the contagion, including a handkerchief
of vinegar applied to the nose, quarantines, isolation of the sick, but he did not mention
fumigations.
87 Juan L. Carrillo, Jess Castellanos and Mara Dolores Ramos, Enfermedad y sociedad en la
Mlaga de comienzos del siglo XIX: El dilogo de los muertos en la epidemia de Mlaga
(c.1803) (Malaga: Universidad de Mlaga, 1980), 7-11.

128 Serrano
fumigations in the port and in the town. The French character as the stereo-
type of a revolutionary, proclaimed: When the rights of the citizen and the
free man are so greatly attacked, [] it is an heroic act to break the chains of so
shameful and vile a slavery.88
These opinions forcefully expressed in the Dilogo suggest that people did
not in fact universally perceive fumigations as either useful or liberating. Some
saw them instead as a burden. Ultimately it was the people of the villages who
had to pay for the cost of fumigations, mainly in the form of council taxes, so
that fumigations were perceived as a new form of corruption among the
authorities, as an excuse to generate wealth. Governmental propaganda was
clearly not universally persuasive, and may even have had a negative effect on
peoples opinions.
Conclusion
The fumigating machine embodied the power of the new chemistry, both in
its materiality newly-formulated, manufactured gases, the thick glass of the
bottle, the pneumatic techniques used for sealing its cover and controlling gas
emission and in its conception, which was grounded on the oxidation prop-
erties of acids, a feature of Lavoisiers chemistry. The machine also embodied
the belief that the agents of contagion were chemically sensitive entities, the
miasmas. Although their precise nature was unknown, they could be com-
bated chemically. The choice of the oxy-muriatic acid above other acids was
construed as the product of intelligent chemical design and careful experi-
ments. Moreover, Guyton stressed that the experiments were done by a trained
chemist who distinguished between destroying an odour and masking it,
emphasizing the distance between the muriatic oxygenated acid and other
domestic methods of fumigating.
The machine was thus presented as a scientific device, whose authority as
such was initially supported by its external appearance (expensive woods, con-
vincing technology, precision of manufacture and use) and the fact that it was
sold by famous instrument makers in Paris. It was advertized as a reliable
means of fumigation. The user did not need to bother about the quantities of
ingredients and time of fumigation because the machine provided a standard
way to proceed. It was a ready-to-use device, and so was pictured as giving lay
people operational independence from apothecaries and other knowledge-
able people. However, it simultaneously contributed to increasing the gap
88 Carrillo, Castellanos and Ramos, Enfermedad y sociedad, p.8 (see note 87).

between lay people and savants. As Simon Werrett argues in this volume, it was
a common practice for natural philosophers to work in domestic settings, and
ingeniously use everyday objects for their research. Fumigation with mineral
acids could probably have been done with adapted domestic devices. But
introducing a ready-to use machine eventually detached the knowledge of
fumigating techniques from domestic users, so that the knowledge became a
matter of expert production and commodity consumption, encouraged to a
degree enforced by government. Thus the supposed independence of the
newly responsible, operative citizen was mediated through an alienation
brought about by expert manufacture, and through new degrees and forms of
political-administrative control afforded to governmental and municipal
authorities. Godoy and the Spanish Bourbon court effectively transformed the
machine into a political tool.
Scholars have accounted for the changes that occurred in the eighteenth-
century in health policies as a general strategy of power. Using the Foucauldian
concept of biopower, they have documented the new practices that linked the
care of the individual and the social body to the processes of state formation.
However, as Claudia Stein has pointed out, it was not a straightforward linear
process replacing sovereign power [by biopower], but rather, a matter of strug-
gle and contestation within the eighteenth-century absolutist state.89 It was
certainly the case in Spain that degrees of intra-elite contestation and popular
resistance to the new regime of disinfection and public health were visibly
present, despite the propagandist efforts of government, despite the figuring of
the machine to convey values of patriotism, dedication and oeconomy, and
despite the public writings and public demonstrative experimentation of
chemists and physicians.
Finally, this essay has highlighted the importance of material culture for
explaining the embedding of knowledge in society. The fumigating machine
probably did more for spreading the new chemistry of acids and gases than any
textbook. The machine afforded a particular understanding of how knowledge
should be produced, a particular view of contagion and sickness, of the con-
nections between body and environment, chemistry and life, and of sickness
and social responsibility. Because it possessed these affordances, it also helped
to forge a new relationship between the power of the state and the citizen.
89 Claudia Stein, The Birth of Biopower in Eighteenth-Century Germany, Medical History

55 (2011): 331-37, on 335.

130 Serrano
Acknowledgments
My heartfelt thanks to Lissa Roberts, Simon Werrett, and John Christie for
being such perceptive and careful editors. I express my gratitude to Antoni
Malet, who helped me to shape my argument with his witty comments on
early versions. Thanks also to Oliver Hochadel, Jon Arrizabalaga, and Nina
Lerman for useful discussions. My wonderful colleagues in the Situating
Chemistry group and in my home institution MPIWG-Berlin provided inspira-
tion and joy, while the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung provided funds for a useful
workshop in 2013.

Arsenic in France 131
Chapter 5
Arsenic in France. The Cultures of Poison During

the First Half of the Nineteenth Century
Jos Ramn Bertomeu Snchez
This essay reviews the movement of poisons across different popular, medical
and legal cultures during the 1830s and 1840s in France. Many French people at
that time felt that they were living in a wave of poisoning crimes, mostly per-
formed by using arsenic, which was regarded as the king of poisons during
the nineteenth century. Poisons such as arsenic were common materials
employed in everyday life for different purposes in agriculture, industry and
medicine. They were also frequent protagonists in popular literature, folk tales,
theater plays, and other forms of popular culture. At the same time, many poi-
sons were both objects and tools of inquiry in medicine and science. Their
composition and deleterious properties had attracted the attention of doctors
and natural philosophers since ancient times. With the development of ani-
mal experimentation, poisons were increasingly employed as tools for research,
whose dramatic physiological effects were employed for investigating the vital
functions. From a legal point of view, poisons were criminal tools for perform-
ing silent murders, which were very difficult to prove in court. The testimony of
regular witnesses was useless due to the secret nature of poisoning crimes, so
judges frequently requested the advice of experts in medicine and chemical
analysis. Prompted by unexpected situations and puzzling questions, nine-
teenth-century toxicological research developed along with criminal investi-
gations during poisoning trials.1 The toxic effects of arsenic largely depended
on the nature of the compounds, the ingested quantity, the nature of the vic-
tim and the dosage (from acute to long-term poisoning). Consequently, arsenic
presented a great variety in the character, combination, and severity of symp-
toms, including also perplexing and misleading exceptions. For this reason, a
nineteenth-century professor of legal jurisprudence dubbed arsenic as the
1 These issues are discussed in J.R. Bertomeu Snchez, Animal Experiments, Vital Forces and
Courtrooms: Mateu Orfila, Franois Magendie and the study of poisons in nineteenth-century
France, Annals of Science 69 (2012): 1-26.
Jos Ramn Bertomeu Snchez, 2018|doi 10.1163/9789004325562_007


132 Bertomeu Snchez
very Proteus of poisons, that is, capable of producing almost every species of
poisonous action.2
Apart from its criminal uses, arsenic was employed in many other activities
in nineteenth-century France: wallpaper pigment, embalming, agriculture, rat
poison, veterinary treatments, medical drugs, and so on. Arsenic was among
the regular commodities that could be easily found in a nineteenth-century
rural house, commonly bought in pharmaceutical shops. And yet, arsenic
never enjoyed the material self-evidence of a slap in the face, which Lorraine
Daston attributes to quotidian objects.3 Its physical properties (white color
and mild taste) were ambiguous and misleading, transforming arsenic into an
elusive product, which could be confused with many other quotidian mate
rials: flour, carbonates, salts, and so on. Poisoners largely relied on these prop-
erties and terrible accidents and false accusations of poisoning were frequent.
Arsenic was also elusive from the point of view of its detection. As in the
case of many other early modern materials reviewed by Emma Spary and
Ursula Klein, the existence of arsenic was never contested, though the ways of
its identification as well as its meaning and values were subject to debate.4
Which tests were the most reliable ones and who was their right interpreter
(chemists, doctors, apothecaries) were matters of contention. In short, nine-
teenth-century arsenic was at once a quotidian material, scientific object,
criminal tool and legal concern. Its associated meanings and values were con-
tingent and varied considerably among forensic experts, lawyers, judges or
poisoners. However, the historically-located and locally-embedded ontological
nature of arsenic was plastic enough to be adapted to the varied needs and
expectations of different protagonists. In this sense, arsenic resembles other
boundary objects studied by historians of science: it could inhabit different
2 Summary of the lecture delivered by Dr. Donkin, Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at the
University of Durham, Pharmaceutical Journal 3 (December 14, 1872): 472, quoted by James
C. Whorton, The Arsenic Century: How Victorian Britain was poisoned at home, work, and play
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 15; For a popular account on the general history of
arsenic see John Parascandola, King of Poisons. A history of arsenic (Washington: Potomac
Books, 2012).
3 Lorraine Daston, ed., Biographies of Scientific Objects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2000), 2; See also Lorraine Daston, ed., Things That Talk: Object lessons from art and science
(New York: Zone Books, 2008).
4 Ursula Klein, Emma Spary, eds., Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between
market and laboratory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 7-10, on 9.

social and cultural contexts, encouraging exchanges and interactions among

legal, scientific and popular cultures.5
This essay explores some of these interactions, circulations and unequal
exchanges by following the traces of arsenic in nineteenth-century France. The
first section reviews the different uses of arsenic in everyday life, from agricul-
ture to medicine. I remark on its elusive nature regarding color, taste and smell.
I discuss also the first attempts of regulating the circulation of dangerous sub-
stances in France. The next section deals with the entanglement between the
ambiguous identity of arsenic and the different methods employed for detect-
ing mineral poisons during the 1830s. These methods provided different visual
and material forms of proof, which were employed for several purposes in
laboratories, academies and courtrooms. Attention is paid to the new high-
sensitivity chemical techniques such as the Marsh test. I also highlight the
persistence of old methods, which were employed in different contexts, some-
times for different purposes. The next section deals with expert controversies
emerging from poisoning trials and their circulation in newspapers, literature
and other forms of popular culture. In the last section, I claim that these move-
ments were multidirectional and involved new problems and challenges for
toxicologists in courts.
Ubiquitous: The Many Uses of Arsenic
Arsenic compounds were employed for a varied range of goals during the nine-
teenth century. Around 286,000 kg of different arsenic compounds (oxide and
5 On boundary objects, see the famous essay by Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer,
Institutional Ecology, Translations, and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and professionals in
Berkeleys Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-1939, Social Studies of Science 19 (1988): 387-
420; On issues related to scientific objects, everyday materials and commodities see Ursula
Klein, Wolfgang Lefvre, Materials in Eighteenth-Century Science. A historical ontology
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007) and Ursula Klein and Carsten Reinhardt, eds., Objects of
Chemical Inquiry (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2014); For a recent re-
view of the literature see Simon Werrett, Matter and Facts: Material culture and the history
of science, Alison Wylie and Robert Chapman, eds. Material Evidence: Learning from archaeo-
logical evidence (London: Routledge, 2014), 339-352. I am grateful to Simon Werrett for this
text; On the even more unstable identity of another toxic substance, see Astrid Schrader,
Responding to Pfiesteria Piscicida (The Fish Killer): Phantomatic ontologies, indeterminacy,
and the responsibility in toxic microbiology, Social Studies of Science 40 (2010): 275-306; For
different typologies of scientific objects see John Law and Vicky Singleton, Object Lessons,
Organization 12 (3) (2005): 331-355.

134 Bertomeu Snchez
sulfur minerals) were consumed annually in France around 1840 (most of these
products were imported).6 Around forty percent of this quantity was white
arsenic (or just arsenic), the popular term for what contemporary chemists
called arsenious oxide. The names of its sulfides (orpiment and realgar) had
ancient origins but these expressions were still popular in the nineteenth and
even twentieth century. Other names (such as Scheeles green) were more
recent but also very popular (in contrast with the scientific names such as arse-
nite of copper) due to its broad use as a pigment.7 Apart from being used as a
pigment, arsenic was employed as a component of popular nineteenth-century
drugs. The most famous was the Fowler liquor, an alkaline solution of white arse-
nic, which was introduced by Thomas Fowler during the 1780s and soon became
popular in many European countries, notably after being included in the London
Pharmacopeia under the name Liquor Arsenicalis in early nineteenth century.
It was employed for a broad range of health problems and remained in pharma-
copeias until the early twentieth century, when new preparations (the most
famous being Salvarsan) expanded the therapeutic applications of arsenic.8
Arsenic compounds were also broadly employed in other activities, for
instance, in veterinary pharmacy, taxidermy or funeral embalming. For centu-
ries, this latter practice had been reserved for royalty, but it gained popularity
during the 1830s among French bourgeois families. The new imaginary of death
emerged along with the discovery of cheaper chemical methods such as those
developed by Jean-Nicolas Gannal (1791-1852), a French military apothecary and
entrepreneur who became famous for this work. Many of the new methods were
based on arsenical solutions introduced by arterial injection. The new embalm-
ing technology was so popular and lucrative that many patent litigations took
6 Jules Barse and Adolphe Chevallier, Manuel pratique de lappareil de Marsh (Paris: Lab, 1843),
8-9; Frdric Chauvaud, Les experts du crime. La mdecine lgale en France au XIX sicle (Paris:
Aubier, 2000), 198-199, for more information on poisons in nineteenth-century France. On
Britain see Katherine Watson, Poisoned Lives: English poisoners and their victims (London:
Hambledon, 2004) and Whorton, The Arsenic century (see note 2).
7 See the diversity of names in a popular chemistry textbook: Thomas Brande, Chemistry
(Philadelphia: Blanchard, 1863), 439-446.
8 More details in Parascandola, King of Poisons, pp.146-151 (see note 2); Fowlers solution was
included in French pharmacopeias in early nineteenth-century. See Flix-Sverin Ratier and
Etienne-Ossian Henry, Pharmacope franaise ou Code des mdicaments (Paris: Ballire, 1827),
403-404; Codex Pharmacope Franaise (Paris: Bechet, 1857), 117; A limited group of arsenical
products were employed in veterinary pharmacy. See Philippe Lbas, Pharmacie vtrinaire,
chimique, thorique et pratique (Paris: Lelong, 1836), 49.

place during the 1830s and 1840s in France.9 This practice reinforced the popular
idea that arsenic possessed the astonishing power of preserving the decay of bod-
ies poisoned with it. Many observations of this kind had been reported in medical
literature and even animal experiments were performed with poisoned dogs.
After being buried for several months, their flesh and alimentary canal were
found red and fresh, as if pickled.10 In this light, suspicions of poisoning where
raised when a corpse was found un-decomposed after being inhumed several
months.
The uses of arsenic in the French rural world were also varied during the nine-
teenth century. A mixture of white arsenic and alum was commonly employed
for stepping vegetal grains (chaulage).11 The practice lasted throughout the
nineteenth century in spite of frequent accidental poisonings produced by this
method and subsequent attempts by the government to banish it. As the chemist
Jean-Baptiste Boussingault (1801-1887) acknowledged in 1856, the treatment of
grains with arsenic provided two important benefits to farmers: the preservation
of the grains and its effects as a pesticide. Even if non-toxic products (such as
sodium sulfate chalk or common salt) could easily replace arsenic regarding the
first goal, these non-poisoning products could not deter the action of rats and
other animals on grains, as many farmers who ever dared to abandon arsenical
compounds had dramatically experienced.12 This situation explains why arsenic
pesticides (such as the popular Paris green) lasted until the twentieth century in
agriculture, in spite of official regulations and frequent accidents. One of the
most dramatic cases took place as late as in 1887 in Hyres, when the contamina-
tion of vines with arsenic produced eleven deaths and poisoned more than four
hundred people.13
9 On this issue, see Pascale Trompette, Mlanie Lemonnier, Funeral Embalming: The
transformation of a medical innovation, Science Studies 22(2009): 9-30, on 9-14.
10 Robert Christison, Observations on the Duration of Cholera, the Taste of Arsenic, and its
Power of Preserving the Decay of the Bodies of Those Poisoned with it, Edinburgh Medi-
cal and Surgical Journal 28 (1827): 94-110, on 102-104, quote on 104.
11 Alphonse Chevallier, Sur la coloration des poisons, Journal de chimie mdicale 12 (1836):
600-609, on 605; Chevallier explains that the mixture for chaulage was made of 6 parts of
white arsenic and 2 of alum.
12 Jean-Baptiste Boussingault, Sur lopportunit de faire intervenir larsenic dans le chaul-
age des grains, Annales de chimie 46 (1856): 458-472; En dfinitive, le chaulage doit avoir
deux buts: lun de prserver la rcolte de la carie, lautre de la soustraire la voracit des
animauxnuisibles, quotation on 460; Frederic W.J. McCosh, Boussingault: Chemist and
agriculturist (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1984), 155.
13 On France see Nathalie Jas, Publich Health and Pesticide Regulation in France before
and after Silent Spring, History and Technology 23 (2007): 369-388; William R. Cullen, Is

136 Bertomeu Snchez
White arsenic was commonly employed in rural life during the 1830s as rat
poison, so when a person was put on trial under suspicion of a poisoning crime,
the defense frequently alleged that the defendant had indeed bought arsenic for
making mort-aux-rats. There were no strict regulations concerning its com-
merce and it was acquired in apothecary shops all over France. Poisons only
had to be in a locked and separated space under the surveillance of the
apothecaries, who were requested to limit access to well-known people who
could justify the use for their profession or other reasons.14 The broad range
of uses of arsenic made this restriction useless in practical terms, even if it
somehow denied access to indigents, prostitutes, beggars and other destitute
people. They could hardly enter an apothecary shop and ask for arsenic to use
as rat poison. This is one reason why the profile of poisoners was so different
from other common criminals during the nineteenth century, and not only
from the point of view of gender. Many poisoners were respectable people who
had never been imprisoned. Some of them were relatives or close friends of the
victims, so they could easily obtain poison for domestic use and administer it
at home without raising suspicion.
Nineteenth-century regulations also requested apothecaries to keep track of
the commerce of all poisonous substances, including arsenic. These docu-
ments reveal that some defendants in poisoning trials could obtain large
quantities of white arsenic without raising major suspicions. One of the most
famous of them, Marie Lafarge, could easily acquire around one hundred
grams of white arsenic (the lethal human dose is sometimes less than one
gram) in three different purchases made in apothecary shops during December
1839 and January 1840. She was so confident of being unsuspicious that she
included the following sentence in one of her letters to the apothecary: Dont
think that I want to poison the whole region of Limousin.15 Criminal records
confirm that many other defendants could easily purchase arsenic in apothe-
cary shops. The following year, another woman accused of poisoning three
direct relatives, Marie Bernardou, bought thirty grams of arsenic in an apoth-
Arsenic an Aphrodisiac? The sociochemistry of an element (Cambridge: RSC, 2008), 61-67.

14 The regulations are printed in Adolphe Trebuchet, Jurisprudence de la mdecine, de la
chirurgie et de la pharmacie en France (Paris: Baillire, 1834), 615-617. See also Guy Devaux,
Marchands de mort-aux-rats, Revue dhistoire de la pharmacie 92 (2004): 509-516.
15 Archives Dpartementales de La Corrze (ADC), 5U88, Testimony of Jean-Franois
Lafosse, witness number 39. His son was also interrogated (witness number 26). The reg-
ister of the apothecary Eyssartier was presented during his testimony in court. See ADC,
5U88, witness number 22. More details in Jos Ramn Bertomeu Snchez, La verdad sobre
el caso Lafarge. Ciencia, justicia y ley durante el siglo XIX (Barcelona: El Serbal, 2015).

ecary shop. Again, the information was kept in a register, which was offered to
the judge during the trial.16
After the wave of poisoning crimes which took place at the end of the
1830s, a magistrate and member of the Conseil dEtat, Louis-Marie de Lahaye,
vicomte de Cormerin (1788-1868), asked for more restrictive regulations
concerning the commerce of poisons. He recommended that druggists, apo
thecaries and grocers should no longer be allowed to sell dangerous substances.
But he foresaw many difficulties in replacing arsenical compounds with non-
dangerous substances having a similar range of uses.17 The French government
was also concerned with the problem and requested expert reports from
learned societies. By the middle of 1840s, new and more restrictive regulations
concerning commerce in poisons were adopted in France, similar to the ideas
adopted in the British Arsenic Act in 1851. The French decree of 29 October
1846 regulated the sale, purchase and use of poisonous substances, and explic-
itly forbade the use of arsenical compounds in the stepping of grains, the
embalmment of cadavers and the destruction of insects.18 The use of arsenic
compounds was only allowed for medical or industrial purposes. All arsenical
preparations had to be previously approved by learned societies or govern-
mental panels (the Paris School of Pharmacy, Alfort School of Veterinary,
Minister of Agriculture, and so on). The effect of these regulations was limited,
as the forensic doctor Ambroise Tardieu angrily complained: exceptions in
industry and veterinary were frequent, old practices in agriculture were diffi-
cult to change and new poisonous substances were introduced without further
regulation.19
16 Gazette des Tribunaux, 25 Janvier 1841. Another example is the trial of Victorine Jullien
accussed of parricide in Ozillac. Requested by the judge, the apothecary consulted his
register and noted that the purchase took place exactly on December 21, 1838. See Gazette
des Tribunaux, 5 May 1839.
17 Louis-Marie de Lahaye, Mmoire sur lempoisonnement par larsenic (Paris: Pagnerre,
1842), 25-28.
18 Louis Tripier, Les codes collationns sur les ditions officielles (Paris: Cotillon, 1852), 1344-
1345.
19 More details on the regulation of poisoning substances in France during the nineteenth
century are in Ambroise Tardieu, tude mdico-lgale et clinique sur lempoisonnement,
(Paris: Baillire, 1875), 150-162; On England and the arsenic act see Peter Bartrip, A Pen-
nurth of Arsenic for Rat Poison: The arsenic act (1851) and the prevention of secret poi-
soning, Medical History 36 (1992): 53-69; On India, see David Arnold, Toxic Histories:
Poison and pollution in modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) (I am
grateful to the author for sending me a preliminary version of a chapter).

138 Bertomeu Snchez
Elusive and Misleading: Fallacies of the Senses and Chemical

Essays
The popularity of arsenic during the nineteenth century was not only due to its
ubiquity and broad use in everyday life, combined with the easiness with
which it could be obtained in stores.20 Its features also fatally encouraged its
use by criminal hands. These included its effects inside the human body, its
resemblance to other common domestic products and its mild flavor, which
could be masked in soups and drinks when administered to the victim.21 All
these features, along with the ambiguities and uncertainties of detecting
methods, transformed arsenic into the king of poisons during the first half of
the nineteenth century.
The flavor of arsenic was supposed to be mild, even if, for obvious reasons,
information about this point was scarce. In fact, toxicologists disagreed regard-
ing the best way of characterizing this property. The most famous British
toxicologists, such as the Edinburgh professor Robert Christison (1797-1882),
performed risky self-experiments in which he placed the poison on his tongue
as far back as we thought safe and concluded that arsenic had hardly any
taste at all.22 In contrast, his French colleague Mateu Orfila (1787-1853), and
many other authors such as Foder or Thenard, described the flavor of arsenic
as acrid whereas other authors described it as having a nauseous sweetish
taste.23 Be that as it may, the flavor was easily masked by food and drink, and
victims rarely detected the existence of the poison in meals before it was too
late. Accidents were frequently reported in newspapers. For instance, in a ban-
quet celebrated in Sainte-Menehould, not far away from Luxemburg, a large
number of participants relished a tasty beef stew, which had mistakenly been
seasoned with arsenic after being cooked in an oven. Nobody realized that the
white powder was not salt or pepper but white arsenic. Only a few of the poi-
soned guests remembered perceiving a disgusting taste similar to sour
apples.24
20 Alphonse Devergie, Mdecine lgale thorique et pratique (Paris: Germer-Baillire, 1840),

vol. 3, 414.
21 Lahaye, Mmoire, p.18 (see note 17).
22 Whorton, The Arsenic Century, p.62 (see note 2).
23 Robert Christison, Observations on the Duration of Cholera, quoted on p.96 (see note
10); On the different views concerning the flavor of arsenic see Charles Flandin, Trait des
poisons (Paris: Bachelier, 1846-1853), vol. 1, 515.
24 Devergie, Mdecine lgale, vol. 3, p.414 (see note 20); See also Ren Lecanu, Adolphe Che-
vallier, Rapport sur la ncessit de colorer les substances toxiques dans le but de prvenir

Another dangerous feature of arsenic was its white color and texture, which
could be confused with many ordinary products such as salt, carbonates, sugar,
or flour. The resemblance caused many dreadful accidents such as the ones
previously mentioned. Many accidents (sometimes involving children) were
reported in cases where mixtures of arsenic were confused with sugar or salt.
The difficulties of reconnaissance also applied to doctors or even would-be
poisoners. For instance, a woman (who apparently wanted to kill her daugh-
ter) obtained in 1835 the poison from a colporteur, but she requested him to
check the nature of the white power and the colporteur poisoned a cat in front
of her. The confusion created many embarrassing situations during criminal
investigations. When suspicions were raised, any white and tasteless powder
could be mistaken for arsenic. During the 1830s, many authors suggested add-
ing pigments to white arsenic as a way to single it out from similar materials, in
order to reduce both poisoning accidents and crimes.25
Another means for detecting arsenic was the nose: metallic arsenic released
a garlic-like smell when sublimated. Many other chemical products were
detected by the nose in nineteenth-century laboratories, for instance, lead
acetate (with an odor similar to vinegar) and prussic acid (bitter almonds). As
Lissa Roberts has remarked, the uses of the senses in chemical practice was
broad and diverse: nineteenth-century chemists never stopped smelling, tast-
ing, touching, or listening in the service of their analytical activities.26 Even if
broadly employed, the sense of smell was far from being fully appreciated by
toxicologists and forensic doctors, at least when credible claims had to be pre-
sented in court. The famous French toxicologist Mateu Orfila admitted having
once deceived himself by his nose when performing an analysis with Nicolas
Vauquelin during a poisoning trial in which arsenic was never found by means
of chemical tests. He included in his textbook this cautionary tale for disap-
proving what was a common practice among doctors: they reported an arsenic
les empoisonnements, Annales dhygine publique et de mdecine lgale 24 (1840): 264-

283, on 278-279.
25 Gazette des Tribunaux (14-15 Septembre 1835): 1098; The other examples are reported in
Adolphe Chevallier, Sur la coloration des poisons, Journal de chimie mdicale 12 (1836):
600-609; See also mile Grimaud, De la coloration de lacide arsnieux, Bulletin de
lAcadmie de Mdecine 5 (1840): 403-418.
26 Lissa Roberts, The Death of the Sensuous Chemist: The new chemistry and the transfor-
mation of sensuous technology, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 26 (1995):
503-529, quoted on 507.

140 Bertomeu Snchez
poisoning case just because they had found in the digestive tract a substance
which spreads [when heated] a garlic-like odor.27
In spite of these warnings, the smell test was so popular that even common
people performed it at home when suspicions were raised. During the Lafarge
trial, relatives and friends of the victim affirmed that they had performed the
smell test during the days before the death of Charles Lafarge. They took sam-
ples of drinks and meals, placed them over burning charcoal and perceived a
garlic-like aroma, which they regarded as a confirmation of their worst fears.
Neither of them had any previous training in chemistry or medicine, which
suggests that the smell test was very popular at this time, even outside the aca-
demic community.28 Moreover, continued criticism in academic writings
suggests that the smell test was also widely used by local doctors and apothe-
caries during criminal investigations all through the nineteenth century.29
Colorful Tests and Black Stains
Arsenic could also be detected in toxicological research by means of a large

group of chemical reagents yielding characteristic colors and precipitates. As
Ernst Homburg has shown, the methods of analytical chemistry experienced a
substantial change between 1780 and 1840. New ideas of chemical composition
were developed alongside changes in material culture, the reduction of vessels
and samples, new test tubes, and further sophistication and more sensitivity
in analytical methods. More recently, Catherine M. Jackson has remarked that
these changes were prompted by a glassware revolution which took place at
the beginning of the nineteenth century. The changes involved a new mate-
rial environment based on glass and its properties (inertness, transparency,
and malleability), which prompted a new array of laboratory practices and
the spread of small-scale apparatus, which could be made by professional or
27 Mateu Orfila, Trait des poisons, (Paris: Crochard, 1826), vol. 1, 357; See also Mateu Orfila,
Rapport mdico-lgal servant de base une accusation dempoisonnement par larsenic,
Annales dhygine publique et de mdecine lgale 2 (1829): 405-430; For more details on
smells and legal medicine in nineteenth century, see Jos Ramn Bertomeu-Snchez,
Smell, Chemistry and Microscopy: Bloodstains and nineteenth-century forensic medi-
cine, Annals of Science 72 (2015): 490-516.
28 ADC, 5U88. Testimony of Anna Brun and Marie-Josephine-Amna Buffire.
29 Franois-Vincent Raspail, Accusation dempoisonnement par larsenic (Paris: Gazette des
Hpitaux, 1840), 33; Mateu Orfila et al., Triple accusation dempoisonnement: condamna-
tion la peine de mort, Annales dhygine publique et de mdecine lgale 28 (1842): 107-192,
on 110-111.

even amateur chemists with the required skills in glass tube-making.30 During
the following decades, the new tests were systematized and the reagents were
increasingly seen as parts of a single, highly versatile comprehensive meth-
odology [] for investigating the chemical composition of a substance.31
During the first third of the nineteenth-century, these analytical techniques
were organized in handbooks and special volumes on chemical analysis were
published.32
Chemical tests were regularly employed for toxicological research. Crime
scenes were a constant source of uncertainties and challenges, involving large
amounts of unknown impurities, misleading side-reactions involving complex
organic products, and requiring high standards of proof for supporting verdicts,
sometimes involving the death penalty. First of all, a sample had to be taken from
meals, vomits or liquids found in the stomach of the victim. If looking for mineral
poisons, samples were usually treated first with acids in order to destroy organic
substances, then boiled in water, and the extracts submitted to the action of par-
ticular reagents. In the case of arsenic, the most common reagent was hydrogen
sulfide, which was supposed to yield a characteristic yellow precipitate when the
sample contained arsenic even in very small quantities. This test posed practi-
cal problems, the most important being its slowness. Some authors reported
having waited hours or even days for the yellow precipitate to be formed.33 If
they were not patient enough, experts could be led astray by the lack of yellow
precipitates and might wrongly conclude that there was no arsenic in the ana-
lyzed samples. Indeed, a number of such mistakes were reported in contem-
porary toxicological papers.34
More problems arose from ambiguities in the identification of colors, which
could turn into false negatives or, even worse, false positives. The transmission
of information concerning colors was always complex in the black-and-white
30 Catherine M. Jackson, The Wonderful Properties of Glass: Liebigs Kaliapparat and the
practice of chemistry in glass, Isis 106 (2015): 43-69; For another example of the relevance
of the new glass instruments, see the essay by Serrano in this volume.
31 Ernst Homburg, The Rise of Analytical Chemistry and its Consequences for the Develop-
ment of the German Chemical Profession, Ambix 46 (1999): 1-32, quoted on 3.
32 An example in France is Jacques Thenard, Trait de chimie, (Paris: Crochard, 1813-1816);
This textbook became the most important reference book in France. See Antonio Garca
Belmar and Jos Ramn Bertomeu-Snchez, Louis Jacques Thenards Chemistry Courses
at the Collge de France, 1804-1835, Ambix 57 (2010): 48-63.
33 Alexander Bussy, Charles P. Ollivier and Mateu Orfila, Rponse aux crits de M. Raspail sur
laffaire de Tulle (Paris: Bchet, 1840), 24.
34 Mateu Orfila, Affaire dempoisonnement porte devant la cour royale de Maine-et-Loire,
Annales dhygine publique et de mdecine lgale 9 (2) (1833): 410-417, on 414-415.

142 Bertomeu Snchez
world of chemical literature, so toxicologists faced similar problems to other

authors working in areas in which colors played a major role in the nineteenth-
century.35 The identification of characteristic tones required many hours of
practical work at the laboratory and the mastering of a sophisticated chro-
matic language. A flavor of the copious language of colors is provided by the
following examples taken from the section on arsenic in a popular nineteenth
century toxicological textbook: brownish-red colour, yellowish-brown mud-
diness, a crumbly, foliaceous mass, having a pearly lustre, bluish-white
precipitate, a yellow colour with a faint tint of orange.36
Critics pointed out the difficulties of dealing with slight color nuances,
whose identification largely depended on the training, experience and visual
skills of experts as well as the rather capricious aptitudes of their organs of
vision. Franois-Vincent Raspail (1794-1878), one of these critics, affirmed that
phenomena related to coloration were very much illusory and variable.37 In
a similar vein, Adolphe Devergie (1798-1879), a toxicologist with much experi-
ence as a forensic doctor in poisoning trials, asserted in his authoritative
textbook on legal medicine, that nothing can be less certain than the colour of
a precipitate. The same colour can offer ten different nuances; four people
examining the colour of a precipitate can find four different colours.38
Chemical tests faced many other problems related to the undisciplined
nature of crime scenes. Even tiny quantities of organic substances could gener-
ate masking-effects altering the final color of solutions and precipitates.
Moreover, yellow precipitates (similar to those obtained with arsenical sam-
ples) could be obtained with many non-arsenical compounds, and dangerously
misled experts into false positive conclusions. The risks depended both on the
employed methods and the background, skills and experience of the experts.
Each test involved not only particular skills, but also different standards of
35 One of these areas was obviously spectroscopy. See Klaus Hentschel, Mapping the Spec-
trum: Techniques of visual representation in research and teaching (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2002); and, in more general terms, his later book Klaus Hentschel, Visual
Cultures in Science and Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
36 Robert Christison, A Treatise on Poisons (Edinburgh: Adam Black, 1832), 258-260.
37 Franois-Vincent Raspail, Sur les moyens, soit chimiques, soit microscopiques, quon a
tout rcemment proposs pour reconnatre les taches de sang en mdecine lgale, Jour-
nal gnral de mdecine, de chirurgie et de pharmacie 102 (1828), 335-350, quoted on 335.
38 Alphonse Devergie, Mdecine lgale thorique et pratique (Paris: Baillire 1852), vol. 3,
17-18: Rien nest moins certain que la coloration dun prcipit; quun mme couleur peut
offrir dix nuances diffrentes; que quatre personnes examinant la couleur dun prcipit
pourront lui trouver quatre couleurs diffrents.

proof and forms of evidence, which could be more or less suitable in courts,
where the results had to be presented to judges, lawyers and jurors.39
All these issues become evident in reviewing the first years of the Marsh test
for arsenic, which is commonly regarded as a landmark in the history of ana-
lytical chemistry. In fact, its introduction by no means eradicated previous
methods, including other similar reduction tests. Moreover, the apparatus
imagined by James Marsh in 1836 was substantially modified by chemists and
toxicologists in subsequent years. It was a good example of the plasticity of the
new small-scale glass apparatus. It required only a cheap, easy-to-construct
vessel, but involved hours of practice and advanced laboratory skills to use.
The sample was placed in a flask with zinc and sulfuric acid. If the sample con-
tained arsenic, a thin metallic film was obtained on a porcelain vessel.40
There were two alleged advantages to the Marsh test: its capacity for pro
viding plain matters of fact and its high sensitivity. In contrast with clinical
symptoms, post-mortem examinations or color chemical tests, the Marsh test
provided a material form of proof, namely the arsenical black stains obtained
on a porcelain vessel, which seemed to speak for itself without the mediation
of experts and could be dramatically presented in court as the corpus delicti.
Toxicologists employed these dramatic effects not only in courts but also in
classrooms and academies.41 The second major advantage was its high sensi-
tivity (beyond any imagination according to Justus Liebig). When skilled
hands were at work, the Marsh test could detect minute amounts of arsenic,
which would have remained unnoticed by earlier tests.42
The advent of the new test encouraged the marginalization, but never a
complete abandonment, of previous methods for detecting arsenic. Like DNA-
fingerprints in the 1990s, the Marsh test was employed for unveiling the fallacies
and exploring the limits of previous toxicological methods (such as color tests).
The introduction of the new test fueled expert controversies with the unwanted
result of questioning toxicology in general and the authority of particular
39 On this issue, see Ian Burney, Poison, Detection, and the Victorian Imagination (Manches-
ter: Manchester University Press, 2006).
40 For further details concerning the Marsh test see Jos Ramn Bertomeu-Snchez and
Agust Nieto Galan, eds., Chemistry, Medicine, and Crime: Mateu J.B.Orfila (1787-1853) and
his Times (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2014); On the glassware
revolution see Jackson, Wonderful Properties of Glass (see note 30).
41 Robert Christison, A Treatise on Poisons, fourth edition (Edinburgh: Black, 1845), 261; See
also Ian Burney, Languages of the Lab: Toxicological testing and medico-legal proof,
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 33 (2002): 289-314.
42 Jos Ramn Bertomeu-Snchez, Managing Uncertainty in the Academy and the Court-
room: Normal arsenic and nineteenth-century toxicology, Isis 104 (2013):197-225.

144 Bertomeu Snchez
experts in courts. In contrast with DNA fingerprints, the controversy over

chemical tests never reached a closure by the emergence of new technologies
granted with exceptional evidentiary status.43 The controversies lasted for
several decades and, in some cases, moved beyond the French medical com-
munity to be part of conversations in salons and other spaces of popular
culture.
Expert Controversies in Courts
Expert controversies were encouraged not only by the co-existence of different

chemical tests in toxicological practice.44 Other forms of proof were also com-
monly employed by forensic doctors (for instance, clinical symptoms and
post-mortem examinations) and sometimes this medical information was at
odds with the conclusions of chemical tests. The different background, experi-
ence and location of experts also fueled many controversies. In general terms,
local doctors tended to rely on clinical symptoms and autopsies, in part
because they had privileged access to these data. Local apothecaries were usu-
ally requested to perform chemical tests, while experts from Paris participated
in just a few of the trials, notably when different or inconclusive results were
obtained by the local experts. Apart from disciplinary barriers, the heteroge-
neous group of nineteenth-century experts on crime was affected by huge
inequalities concerning laboratory resources and academic power.
According to the French Criminal Code, the examining magistrate (juge
dinstruction) had to be assisted by one or two physicians when a violent
death was suspected. Under oath, the experts produced a written report
answering the questions of the magistrate concerning the circumstances and
nature of the crime. At the local level, even officiers de sant (the lowest cate-
gory of French doctors) could participate as experts in a trial. In most cases,
many of the local experts were the victims doctors and sometimes they par-
ticipated in courts as both experts and as regular witnesses. When reports were
inconclusive or different points of view were expressed, judges might request
43 The previous quotation was taken from the study on DNA fingerprints in Michael Lynch
et al., Truth Machine: The contentious history of DNA fingerprinting (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2008), 340.
44 The co-existence of different tests was common in the analysis of many nineteenth-cen-
tury products. See for instance the tests on the composition and quality of milk (including
organoleptic properties, tube tests and scientific instruments) in Peter Atkins, Liquid
Materialities: A history of milk, science and the law (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010).

new tests from another group of experts, or might accept proposals in that
sense from the defense or the prosecution. As a result, the participation of sev-
eral experts and the existence of multiple reports with opposing conclusions
was far from unusual in French courts.45
Some examples demonstrate how expert controversies arose in courts. In
1834, a young woman, Zlie Pejac, was accused of having poisoned her employer
in the small city of Eauze (Southwest France, near Toulouse). The victim had
experienced violent vomiting followed by sudden death after having ingested
a meal prepared by the defendant. A local physician (officier de sant) and an
apothecary performed an autopsy concluding that the victim had succumbed
to the effects of arsenic. Another group of experts, which included physicians
and apothecaries from the neighbouring village, was asked to produce a new
report. They unanimously concluded that there was a complete absence of
any arsenical substance. In this case, the chemical proofs (mostly negative)
were contrary to the medical evidence based on symptoms and autopsy
(mostly positive). The young woman was acquitted but, under the pressure of
the trial, she lost her mind and went insane.46
Apart from the magistrates, defense lawyers could also contact additional
experts when they thought that the reports were incomplete, biased, or con-
trary to the principles of the art. Without the constraints of official reports,
these consultations easily turned into long research papers, sometimes pub-
lished in medical journals.47 Consultations also opened the window to the
participation of experts without credentials, including those who were on the
fringes of the academic world or even radical critics such as Raspail. He was
rarely requested as an expert by judges during poisoning trials, in part because
he never received the title of medical doctor or pharmacist. Another reason
was his political activism. Raspail spent years in prison for his opposition to
the French monarchy. Lacking academic degrees, experimental skills and labo-
ratory resources, Raspail relied on skeptical arguments about toxicological
methods and the limits of scientific proofs in criminal justice to make his
arguments.
45 For more information about expert reports and the French legal system, see Frdric
Chauvaud, Experts et expertise judiciaire: France, XIXe et XXe sicles (Rennes: PUR, 2003),
192-198; The participation of multiple experts was also common in forensic psychiatry.
See Laurence Guignard, Juger la folie. La folie criminelle devant les assises au XIXe sicle
(Paris: PUF, 2010), 244, which mentions a trial in which ten different experts participated.
See also 233 and 241-242; For more details see Bertomeu Snchez, La verdad sobre el caso
Lafarge, chapter 4 (see note 15).
46 Gazette des Tribunaux (11-12 August 1834).
47 Mateu Orfila, Leons de mdecine lgal (Paris: Bchet jeune, 1823), vol. 1, 36-7.

146 Bertomeu Snchez
One of the most repeated critical arguments against the new high-sensitiv-
ity methods (such as the Marsh test) concerned ironically the small quantities
of arsenic detected in the analysis. In this homeopathic legal chemistry it was
hard to avoid all possible sources of minute impurities found in reagents and
vessels, graveyard soils, and so on.48 The most challenging of these impurities
was the so-called normal arsenic, that is, the tiny amount of arsenic which
was supposed to exist in normal that is, non-poisoned- human organs.
Playing with the ubiquitous nature of arsenic in nineteenth-century France,
Raspail employed his creative imagination to suggest as many potential sources
of arsenic contamination as possible. Arsenic might be passed onto buried
corpses by natural forces which chemical experiments at the laboratory were
unable to detect. Or perhaps unknown phenomena taking place during the
process of putrefaction might spread the insidious normal arsenic from the
bones to other parts of the corpse, making it a dangerous source of false posi-
tives. False positives were much more likely when using high sensitivity tests
than when old methods were employed.49
Raspail employed more general epistemological questions concerning the
differences between legal and scientific evidence. He highlighted tensions
between the open-ended character of scientific research and the necessary
closure and irreparable consequences of legal decisions, particularly in cases
in which the life of the defendant was at stake. In the midst of a famous poi-
soning trial, Raspail affirmed: Gentlemen, you must doubt the omnipotence
of legal chemistry because it refutes itself every six months.50 Even granting
that all known sources of error had been considered, Raspail wondered who
could positively affirm that subsequent studies would not discover new falla-
cies and problems in toxicological methods. After a death sentence, Raspail
argued, who could restore the guillotined head of the defendant when the
chemical error was finally acknowledged? In stressing these points, Raspails
skepticism regarding scientific evidence was in tune with growing concerns
about judicial errors in French legal writings during the nineteenth century.51
It was not the technicalities of chemical tests, but wide-ranging concerns
raised by critics such as Raspail which helped to move the controversy from
courts and academies to the public arena. Raspail was willing to transport the
48 The expression was employed in an anonymous essay published in American Journal of

the Medical Sciences 2 (October 1841), 403-417, quoted on 414.
49 See Bertomeu-Snchez, Managing Uncertainty(see note 42).
50 Gazette des Hpitaux (31 December, 1839): 609.
51 On the growing concern about judicial mistakes, see Chauvaud, Experts et expertises,
pp.230-240 (see note 45).

debate to these new scenarios, whereas other experts were clearly against this
circulation, maybe realizing that it was dangerous for their authority. In the
midst of a fierce debate in court concerning the value of tests for arsenic,
Raspail was challenged to present his conclusions before the members of the
Paris Academy of Medicine, where his claims could be judged by competent
men. Raspail soon answered with a letter to the journals, announcing that he
was willing to accept the challenge, but not in front of the members of the
Academy of Medicine. The judge, according to Raspail, should be all the
people, the public.52
From Courts to Academies and Salons
Although just a small percentage in the total number of murders in nineteenth-

century France, poisoning crimes attracted a great deal of public attention.
Courtrooms were crowded with large and varied audiences who avidly fol-
lowed the hearings and the rather dramatic expositions of prosecutors and
lawyers. The participation of local physicians or apothecaries aroused further
interest, and even more when the experts were famous doctors or toxicologists
from Paris. Public attention was also captured by the mysterious circumstances
of the crime, the uncertainties regarding verdicts, and not the least, the embar-
rassing details disclosed by criminal investigations of the victims or defendants
private lives. Newspapers often reported on these trials, sometimes including
documents such as the act of accusation, the plea of the defense, or summaries
of the trial offered by journalists. Judicial journals (such as the Gazette des
Tribunaux or Le Droit) published verbatim transcriptions of the oral hearings
and extracts from the expert reports. When poisoning trials became particu-
larly popular, books and leaflets were published with further details about the
protagonists.
The most famous nineteenth-century French poisoning trial took place dur-
ing September 1840 in Tulle (La Corrze). At the beginning of this year, Charles
Lafarge, the owner of a bankrupted forge, had died after a short illness and his
wife Marie was accused of poisoning him. A group of local physicians and
pharmacists were consulted. The autopsy offered some evidence of poisoning,
but chemical tests were inconclusive due to a common laboratory accident.
New analyses were performed by another group of experts from the capital of
the department (Limoges), but they could not retrieve any arsenic from the
corpse, even when they used the new Marsh test. The judge requested new
52 Gazette des Tribunaux (6,7,8 and 10 June 1840).

148 Bertomeu Snchez
tests performed by a joint group of first and second experts but they were also
unable to find traces of arsenic. After a long discussion, the prosecution man-
aged to obtain a fourth, definitive test by a group of experts lead by the most
famous French toxicologist, Mateu Orfila (1787-1853). He was the dean of the
Paris Medical Faculty, a member of many French advisory committees regard-
ing medicine and education, editor of influential journals, and, last but not
least, a well-reputed singer who organized popular musical soires in his salon,
which became a meeting point for musicians, physicians, lawyers, politicians
and other French notables during the reign of Louis-Philippe dOrlans.53
The participation of a Parisian celebrity like Orfila sparked the publics
interest in the trial of Marie Lafarge even more. Moreover, Orfila introduced an
unexpected and dramatic turn in the judicial developments, widely com-
mented upon in newspapers and further publications. Contradicting previous
expert reports, Orfila found very tiny quantities of arsenic in the victims
corpse, suddenly dashing the high hopes of the defense opened by previous
analysis. In a desperate move, Marie Lafarges lawyer attempted to contact
Raspail, but when he arrived in Tulle the legal proceedings were over and
Marie Lafarge had been indicted for murder and, later, imprisoned for life.
Raspail, however, wrote a long report contradicting the conclusions of Orfila.
Many other popular publications followed, in which public hearing debates
were transformed into rather literary reconstructions by journalists and other
commentators. Excerpts from medical reports and fragments of dialogs taken
from verbatim transcriptions of oral hearings were frequently employed, so
providing plausibility or amplifying the dramatic force of the narratives. Many
literary genres were mobilized, from autobiographies, letters, articles in news-
papers, poems, and theater plays, to different forms of academic literature,
including medical papers, proceedings of learned institutions, controversial
leaflets and expert reports. A review of some of the publications concerning
the Lafarge affair, which appeared in an English magazine in 1841, remarked on
the overlapping of fictional, medical and judicial literature dealing with poi-
soning trials:
We confess to having been singularly interested in [] the trial of

Madame Lafarge for the murder of her husband. As a Romance of Real
Life, it strongly exemplified the adage that Truth is stranger than Fiction;
for certainly no living dramatist could have invented such a plot, or such
characters, or such scenes as occurred in its progress. No extravagant
53 Jos Ramn Bertomeu Snchez, Classrooms, Salons, Academies and Courts: Mateu Orfila
(1787-1853) and nineteenth-century French toxicology, Ambix 61 (2014): 162-186.

German tale ever presented a wilder mixture of the revolting, the horri-
ble, and the ludicrous. It resembled one of our own Terrific Melodramas
of strong Tragic Interests.54
Thanks to these dramatic ingredients, the Lafarge drama soon turned into a
trending topic in French salons. Many other circumstances contributed to the
outstanding popularity of this affair. First, the extraordinary biography of
Marie Lafarge, a well-cultivated Parisian woman who was a friend of the writer
Alexandre Dumas and other French notables, and so hardly representative of
the poor and unknown people who were placed on the bench of the accused.
Her autobiography, published shortly after the trial, went through several edi-
tions and several translations appeared during the nineteenth century. The
translations, the reports by journalists, and the publication of many polemical
texts by forensic doctors and lawyers, helped to expand interest in this affair to
other countries. The prosecutor could affirm in court that the trial had captured
the attention of the whole [of] Europe. Celebrated writers such as Heinrich
Heine, Alexandre Dumas, Gustave Flaubert and many other authors wrote thou-
sands of pages on the issue.55
The fame of the experts (such as Orfila and Raspail), who were involved in a
fierce controversy, was an additional reason for the popularity of the trials. Their
opposition emerged for both scientific and political reasons. Raspail was a well-
known Republican activist whereas Orfila was a good representative of the
group of notables supporting the new Orleanist monarchy. The public who fol-
lowed the poisoning trials could not help mixing these political battles with
the debates concerning the reliability of chemical tests for arsenic. French
public opinion was divided into two groups: those supporting the innocence of
Marie Lafarge and those accepting the guilty verdict. In general terms, most of
the members of the first group were also Republican or, at least, critics of the
Orleanist monarchy (like Raspail), while the second group mostly included
people who accepted the political order (like Orfila). At the same time, these
positions involved contrasting views concerning toxicological methods. The
first group were more willing to hear the criticism of Raspail against the new
high-sensitivity tests for arsenic prompted by Orfila. On 14 September 1840,
almost at the same time that Orfila presented his surprizing final report in the
54 The New Monthly Magazine 3 (1841): 268; On the connections between literature and
crime fiction, see Lawrence Frank, Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence:
The scientific investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle (London: Palgrave, 2003) and Bur-
ney, Poison (see note 39).
55 Bertomeu Snchez, La verdad sobre el caso Lafarge (see note 15).

150 Bertomeu Snchez
court of Tulle, the duchesse de Dino noted in her diary that all conversations in
the salons were on the affair Lafarge. Here, she wrote, as everywhere, there
are quite contrasting views on this issue.56 The situation was captured by
Flaubert in one of the first passages of Sentimental Education. The hero of the
novel, the young Frdric Moreau, who had just graduated and was about to
start his studies of law in September 1840, was invited by his mother to have
dinner in her house in Nogent-sur-Seine, a village situated a hundred kilome-
ters east of Paris:
When he [Frdric] entered the drawing-room, all present arose with a

great racket; he was embraced; and the chairs, large and small, were
drawn up in a big semi-circle around the fireplace. M. Gamblin immedi-
ately asked him what was his opinion about Madame Lafarge. This case,
all the rage at the time, did not fail to lead to a violent discussion. Madame
Moreau stopped it, to the regret, however, of M. Gamblin; he deemed it
serviceable to the young man in his character of a future lawyer, and,
nettled at what had occurred, he left the drawing-room.57
These violent discussions in salons encouraged the popular interest in the

chemistry of arsenic. In November 1840, just a few weeks after the guilty ver-
dict, the large amphitheater of the Paris Faculty of Medicine was crowded by a
varied audience following Orfilas experiments on arsenic. During this time, a
Parisian pharmacist organized a soire at which he explained in front of some
twenty people, all the experiments regarding arsenic poisoning, reconstructing
the chemical analysis performed by the experts during the Lafarge trial and sup-
porting Orfilas views on this issue.58
The polemical writings of Raspail were also addressed to this popular audi-
ence. As noted above, he offered not only technical details concerning the
chemistry of arsenic and its methods of detection, but also dramatic details of
the story (which he regarded as proofs of the innocence of Marie Lafarge) and
bitter criticism against the all-mighty academic power of his opponent, Orfila.
His claims could be found in newspapers, letters and fictional works in this
period. One of the most popular arguments concerned the tensions between
the ubiquity of arsenic and the minute quantities of poison detected by the
Marsh test. When such minute quantities were involved, it seemed that arsenic
56 Quoted by Anne Martin-Fugier, La vie lgante ou la formation de Tout-Paris, 1815-1848

(Paris: Fayard, 1990), 170-71.
57 Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education (Kent: Wordsworth, 2003), 12-13.
58 LEsculape (19 November 1840): 125-126.

could be found everywhere, making the results of chemical tests either incon-
clusive or dangerously misleading. The writer George Sand, who like many
others passionately followed the news of the Lafarge trial, affirmed that posi-
tive results in chemical tests was far from being reliable proof of poisoning
crimes. Maybe Orfila will discover in the next six months that arsenic does
exist in the liver or in the brain of all corpses.59 Combining the ubiquity of
arsenic with the power of high-sensitivity tests, it seemed that arsenic could
be found everywhere, as Gustave Flaubert remarked in his unpublished
Dictionary of received ideas, in a brief paragraph on arsenic. Similar concerns
were conveyed in the engraving by Honor Daumier published around 1841, in
which Orfila says: I am so sure of my facts that now I am going to poison my
intimate friend [] and I will find arsenic in his spectacle lenses. If self-assured
experts could detect arsenic everywhere, what was the probatory value of the
Marsh test in courts?60
The German poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), who was exiled in Paris in
1840, offers another example of the varied reactions caused by the trial of
Marie Lafarge. Like many other left-wind activists, Heine employed the contro-
versy in order to question the bourgeois order implemented by the Orleanist
monarchy in France, in which Orfila occupied such a prominent position.
Heine disqualified Orfila as a flatterer of the powerful people and detractor of
the oppressed ones, as false in his talk as in his singing (ironically referring to
Orfilas fame as singer in salons). According to Heine, the poison was not in
Charles Lafarges remains but in Orfilas heart. However, he was hardly con-
vinced of the innocence of Marie Lafarge. Indeed, he thought that she had
committed a desperate act of legitimate defence against a rude and cruel
husband who had condemned her to many moral torments and mortal depri-
vations. Heine aimed to transform this affair into a starting point for revisiting
the situation of women in France.61
59 George Sands Letter to Eugne Delacroix, 22 September 1840, quoted by Chantal Sobien-
iak, Rebondissements dans laffaire Lafarge (Paris: Lucien Souny, 2010), 219-220.
60 Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia, Fine Art Collection (FA 2000.001.142);
Whorton, The Arsenic Century, pp.96-97 (see note 2), quotes a popular English novel by
Humphry Sandwith, Minsterborough: A tale of English life (London, 1876), in which the
same theme is discussed by an elderly physician These new-fashioned chemists [...] will
find arsenic [...] in your walking-stick; they will indeed. Ill lay my life, sir, that they would
extract arsenic from my hat.
61 Heinrich Heine, Lutce: lettres sur la vie politique, artistique et sociale de la France (Paris:
Levy, 1866), 123-126.

152 Bertomeu Snchez
Figure 5.1 Lamiti dun Grand Chimiste nest pas un Bienfait des Dieux. Hand-colored
lithograph caricature by Honor Daumier (1841). The character representing Orfila
(on the right) affirms, I am so sure of my facts that now I am going to poison my
intimate friend [] and I will find arsenic in his spectacle lenses. Gift of Fisher
Scientific International. Chemical Heritage Foundation Collections,
Philadelphia (FA 2000.001.142). For re-use, contact reproductions@chemher-
itage.org.

From Salons to the Courts
The former examples show how controversies over arsenic detection in courts
were intermingled with debates regarding other political and social issues. In
this way, poisoning trials created a propitious context for exchanges among
popular, legal and medical cultures in nineteenth-century France. Thanks to
these exchanges, a large number of people were acquainted with technical
details concerning the chemistry of arsenic and the methods for detecting it.
In fact, some of the controversial issues were raised in courts by lawyers, mag-
istrates and jurors without any previous training in legal medicine. Experiments
on absorption of poisons developed by the French toxicologist Mateu Orfila
between 1838 and 1840 offer an example. Orfila pursued a continuing program
of research on the absorption of arsenic by using the new possibilities opened
by the high sensitivity of the Marsh test. He performed experiments both with
poisoned dogs and with samples obtained during criminal investigations from
human organs. As his British colleague Robert Christison declared in 1845, his
research was pregnant alike with interesting physiological deductions and
valuable medicolegal applications.62 Regarding physiological deductions,
Orfila attempted to settle old debates concerning the action of poison, opening
the window to similar research on medicinal drugs. The main medico-legal
applications concerned criminal investigations involving long-buried corpses,
in which no liquids from the stomach were available and poisons needed to be
retrieved from the remains of internal organs (in which poisons could have
been absorbed).63
Several experiments performed by Orfila convinced him that arsenic might
also be found in very small quantities in the bones and organs of non-poisoned
animals, what came to be known as the problem of normal arsenic. In one of
these experiments, Orfila prepared a soup with beef and vegetables. After boil-
ing it for seven hours, he took a sample and introduced it to the Marsh apparatus,
so obtaining some arsenical black stains. In a letter addressed to the Academy of
Medicine in April 1839, Orfila concluded that if new experiments confirm this
result, it will be demonstrated that our everyday beef soups contain an arsenical
compound.64
62 See Christison, A Treatise on Poisons, pp.227-228 (see note 41).

63 Bertomeu-Snchez, Managing Uncertainty (see note 42).
64 Bulletin de lAcadmie de Mdecine 3 (1839), 682: Si de nouvelles expriences confirment ce
rsultat, il sera dmontr que le bouillon de buf que nous prenons tous les jours contient
une prparation arsenicale. The soup was made of cinq livres et demie de buf non

154 Bertomeu Snchez
Although it was a minor detail in his whole research on normal arsenic, the
distressing image of arsenic in regular beef soups was widely commented upon
in newspapers and soon captured the public imagination. Unsurprizingly,
these frightening results were also employed by Raspail as a proof that arsenic
could be found everywhere. Another critic of Orfilas methods creatively trans-
formed the experiment into alarming news for Parisian gourmand when he
wrote: On April 2, 1839, Orfila read at the Paris Academy of Medicine a paper
summarizing almost two hundred experiments aimed at demonstrating that
the broth consumed in different Paris restaurants was arsenical.65 In fact, these
two hundred experiments were on normal arsenic in general, and just one of
them was related to soups (which by no means were taken from any Paris restau-
rant but, as the article indicated, they were prepared by Orfila). However, the
image of arsenic in soups became so popular that it was even discussed dur-
ing some poisoning trials at the end of this year:
Judge: Have you not written that arsenic could be found even in soup?
Orfila: Yes, it comes from the normal arsenic contained in the bones, but,
remarkably, it is never found in the liver; and we found it [arsenic] in
the victims liver.66
The episode reveals the unwanted consequences of the public interest in toxi-
cological research, poisoning trials and celebrities such as Orfila. Academic
meetings were usually discussed in both the medical and popular press and
papers on poisons attracted further attention during the years of the famous
poisoning trials, at the end of the 1830s. In this situation, a particular and in-
conclusive animal experiment, when moved from laboratory to the academy
and from the academy to the public arena, could be transformed from an eso-
teric discussion of the absorption of arsenic into a frightening image concerning
soups in restaurants. These images were reintroduced in courts by skeptical
experts or even by lawyers, judges or jurors who read newspapers with reports
on trials or excerpts from academic meetings. This example offers further evi-
dence of how the circulation of information concerning arsenic was multi-
directional and involved creative exchanges among different legal, popular
dsoss, avec des carottes, des panais, des navet, des poireaux, de loignon brl, un clou de
girofle et du sel.
65 Devergie, Mdecine lgale, vol. 3, p.449 (note 20). Le 2 avril 1839, M. Orfila lut lAcadmie
de Mdecine un travail rsultant de prs de deux cent expriences pour dmontrer que le
bouillon pris dans les divers restaurants de Paris tait arsenical.
66 Gazette des Tribunaux (2-3 December 1839): 106.

and academic cultures. The new high-sensitivity methods for detecting arsenic
afforded additional possibilities towards new interactions, introducing new
images to be interpreted and discussed.
Conclusion
Arsenic in nineteenth-century France was simultaneously an object of medi-

cal and scientific inquiry, an everyday material employed for multiple purposes,
a criminal tool to be detected by toxicologists during legal investigations, and a
frightening ingredient in the public imagination, which aroused popular inter-
est in chemical tests and toxicologists. Occupying so many different worlds,
nineteenth-century poisons are good examples of precarious substances
which have no specific place in any given order of things. They were essen-
tially characterized by their dynamics and by the different ways in which their
effects were perceived and framed.67 The chemical and medical features of
arsenic were crucial insofar as they raised a broad range of opportunities and
constraints in connection with the interests, anxieties, and practices of diverse
protagonists including physicians, pharmacists, forensic doctors, lawyers,
magistrates, journalists, writers, and the general public who crowded court-
rooms and perused newspapers looking for information on poisoning trials.
The previous discussion offers many examples of the complex mixture of
sociomaterial features and cultural representations involved in the history of
materials such as arsenic and others studied in this book. From this point of
view, arsenic was during the nineteenth-century the very Proteus of poisons,
not only from the point of view of its varied poisonous effects and its elusive-
ness to chemical tests, but also regarding its place in both academic research
and public imagination.
The changing and multiple identities of arsenic were never completely iso-
lated thanks to the frequent transit of historical actors, objects, texts, practices
and values from one social setting to another. The diverse experts involved in
criminal investigations (forensic doctors, chemists, toxicologists, lawyers and
magistrates) played a crucial role in these transits and hybridizations. The role
of journalists was also very important insofar as they wrote broadly-read texts,
which both answered to and sparked public interest in poisoning trials.
Surrounded by a rather theatrical atmosphere, courtrooms were the privileged
67 Viola Balz, Heiko Stoff, Alexander v. Schwerin and Bettina Wahrig, eds., Precarious Mat-
ters: The history of dangerous and endangered substances in the 19th and 20th centuries
(Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2008), 1.

156 Bertomeu Snchez
places for these unequal exchanges among the different cultures of poison
during the first half of the nineteenth century. Experts were requested by law
to present reports on problems whose frame and focus were far from being
under their control. This puzzling situation emerged not only from the impure
and undomesticated nature of crime scenes, but also from the unexpected
questions asked by judges, lawyers and jurors, who could appropriate the toxi-
cological information provided by experts in very creative ways. As the last
section demonstrated, by reading newspapers and judicial journals, lay people
could also become acquainted with many details concerning, for instance,
chemical tests for poisons and the principal delusions concerning false posi-
tives. Expert controversies in courts such as that between Orfila and Raspail
generated further attention on poisoning trials and produced a broad range of
publications, which contributed to the creative circulation of many details
related to the toxicology of arsenic.
These circulations and exchanges had several features, including the
ubiquity of arsenic in the nineteenth-century French rural world, the lack of
strict regulations concerning its commerce and its elusive and somehow mis-
leading physical nature, and the different methods for detecting it. Many tests
co-existed, all of them with particular problems, assumed fallibilities, required
skills and areas of uncertainty. Data was obtained by means of medical exami-
nations, post-mortem autopsies, animal experiments and chemical tests.
When different methods were employed at the same time, contrasting conclu-
sions might fuel expert controversies. Historians have to take into account the
shock of the old technologies and their creative interaction with the cutting
edge of research in chemical analysis, moving from novelty-focused narratives
to use-centered histories of toxicological methods.68
At the end of the 1830s, toxicological methods employed in French courts
included traditional and very popular methods (such as the smell test), which
were never replaced even with the advent of the tube tests and the new
high-sensitivity technologies such as the Marsh test. Each method involved
uncertainties, dangerous fallacies and particular forms of proof, which had
to be converted into credible claims in both academic and legal contexts.
Controversies were also fueled by the participation of several group of experts
in poisoning trials. Consultations created another window for the participa-
tion of experts without credentials, including radical critics and activists such
as Raspail. They introduced new epistemological concerns about the reliability
of scientific proofs in criminal trials and other general topics related to science
68 David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and global history since 1900 (London:
Profile Books, 2006), xi-xiii.

and the law. Thanks to their participation in poisoning trials, public debates
concerning famous poisoning trials, such as the Lafarge affair, turned into fierce
discussions about French politics, the situation of women in France, the role
of jurors in poisoning trials and other issues related to criminal law, including
death penalty. These debates took place in newspapers and salons and excited
even more public interest in details about the toxicology of arsenic, encour-
aging new publications and even experimental demonstrations in salons and
amphitheaters. Many of these publications included literary reconstructions
of the most dramatic aspects of the poisoning crimes, along with technical
information about new chemical tests and highly polemic issues concerning
French politics or the administration of justice. In that sense, poisons such
as arsenic created unexpected links and creative exchanges among a heteroge-
neous range of actors, practices and discourses in different legal, medical and
popular settings during the nineteenth-century. Engaging culture and nature
in such different ways, the material affordances of arsenic were rather unsta-
ble, changeable and unpredictable.

158 Bertomeu Snchez

Part 2
Chemical Governance and the Governance
of Chemistry

160 Bertomeu Snchez

the State and the Chemical Industry in France, 1760-1800 161
Chapter 6
Relations between the State and the Chemical

Industry in France, 1760-1800: The Case of Ceruse
Christine Lehman
The transformation of relations between the royal government and industry is

an important feature of the history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries in France. Of course the states influence on industrial development started
long before the second half of the seventeenth century when it was reinforced
by Colberts reforms, which retained a significant influence during the eigh-
teenth-century.1 For example, the new regulation issued on 26 January 1699
appointed the Acadmie des sciences, founded in 1666, to evaluate all new
industrial machines: the principles of novelty and utility were reaffirmed and
remained the indispensable conditions for obtaining a royal privilege.
Created in the sixteenth century in order to break the restrictive framework
of corporations and guilds, a royal privilege gave an entrepreneur the right to
circumvent local regulations. It created an exclusive right to use a new process
for a given period of time; in other words, a temporary monopoly within a
specified region. An exclusive privilege gave its recipient the freedom to manu-
facture and sell a commodity in France or abroad without encountering
difficulties from competition. It was often complemented with production
premiums and exemption from taxes on buildings and employees, even when
the latter were migrant workers. Such privileges could also be granted to indus-
tries that had developed abroad, as was the case with the chemical production
of ceruse, which is analyzed in this essay.2 In France, throughout the eigh-
teenth century, from 1722 until the creation of French patents or brevets in 1791,
1 Jacques Isor, De lexistence des brevets dinvention en droit franais avant 1791, Revue his-
torique de droit franais et tranger 16 (1937): 94-130, on 125; Christiane Demeulenaere-Douyre
and David J. Sturdy, eds., Lenqute du Rgent 1716-1718: Sciences, techniques et politique dans la
France pr-industrielle (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008); David J. Sturdy, LAcadmie royale des
sciences et lenqute du Rgent de 1716-1718, Christiane Demeulenaere-Douyre and Eric
Brian, eds., Rglements usages et science dans la France de labsolutisme (Paris: Tec et Doc,
2002), 133-146.
2 Isor, De lexistence des brevets, pp.97-104 (see note 1); Jeff Horn, Privileged Enclaves:
Opportunities in eighteenth-century France, Proceedings of the Western Society for French
History 32 (2004): 29-45.
Christine Lehman, 2018|doi 10.1163/9789004325562_008


162 Lehman
the relations between the state and industry were managed by the Bureau du
commerce.3 The latters role was to substantiate inventors requests for privi-
leges and financial help from the Ministers of Commerce and Foreign Affairs.
These requests usually required the opinion of a scientific expert who had
to rule on the novelty of the inventions, their profitability and their impact
on national self-sufficiency through the raw materials used. Until 1770, the
requests for an expert evaluation that were successively addressed to academi-
cian chemists Jean Hellot (1685-1766) and Pierre-Joseph Macquer (1718-84),
mainly concerned dyeing, coloring materials and the associated chemicals
such as vitriol and lessive. From 1770, with Macquer and later with Louis-Claude
Berthollet (1748-1822), his successor at the Bureau du commerce, they increas-
ingly concerned the emerging chemical industry. After the Revolution, this
role was taken over by the Comit du commerce et de lagriculture that was itself
replaced by the Comit consultatif des arts et manufactures at the beginning of
the nineteenth century.
This essay deals with the states influence on innovation in chemistry; it will
focus on the end of the eighteenth century and on a particular chemical prod-
uct: ceruse and/or blanc de plomb. Focusing on ceruse is informative for two
main reasons. First, while the production of ceruse during the nineteenth cen-
tury has been the subject of many studies, its history in the eighteenth century
has not yet been studied.4 Second, this example provides an in-depth descrip-
tion of how the French administration functioned when evaluating requests
for industrial privileges, thereby setting the stage for a more accurate compari-
son with the British context, which is presented in the conclusion.
At the end of the Old Regime, ceruse production was still artisanal and had
only reached the proto-industrial stage. Its chemical formula was unknown in
France and its fabrication was not sophisticated; it required only very basic
equipment and workers were few and unskilled. Ceruse production is thus a
quite specific case that cannot be compared with the heavy chemical industry.
3 Pierre Bonnassieux, Conseil de commerce et bureau du commerce 1700-1791. Inventaire analytique

des procs-verbaux (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1900), Introduction, V-XXXIV; Harold T.
Parker, An Administrative Bureau During The Old Regime: The Bureau of Commerce and its rela-
tions to French industry from May 1781 to November 1783 (London: Associated University Press,
1993).
4 Laurence Lestel, Anne-Ccile Lefort and Andr Guillerme, eds., La cruse: usages et effets Xe-
XXe sicles (Paris: Centre dhistoire des techniques CNAM, 2003); Thomas Le Roux, Risques et
maladies du travail: Le Conseil de salubrit de Paris aux sources de lambigut hyginiste au
XIX e sicle, A.S. Bruno, E. Geerkens, N. Hatzfeld, C. Omns, eds., La sant au travail, entre
savoirs et pouvoirs (XIXe-XXe sicles) (Paris: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2011), 45-63, on
58-61.

Indeed glassmaking, porcelain manufacture, the steelmaking industries or sul-

furic acid and soda production used powerful furnaces and were organized in
separate workshops dealing with the successive operations.5 On the other
hand, relations between the state, that is to say the royal administration of
commerce, and entrepreneurs were quite similar to the case studied in this
essay.6 A remarkable characteristic is that the examination of requests from
both industrialists and craftsmen were treated by the same persons and the
same structure with the same care. Based mainly on an analysis of the files of
the Bureau du commerce, this essay presents Macquers and Berthollets evalu-
ations of the processes for producing ceruse, the necessary conditions for
obtaining privileges and the states involvement in its production, which
required importing lead, the customs duties of which increased the produc-
tion cost.7
Ceruse has been known since antiquity and was used as a cosmetic until the
mid-eighteenth century when, due to its recognized toxicity, it was banned by
medical doctors and abandoned by coquettes.8 Ceruse, or lead calx, was white
lead. It had also become an important pigment used both in the East and the
West over the course of centuries.9 In 1742, the Dictionnaire universel de com-
merce described two methods of fabrication and defined it as lead dissolved
by vinegar. The first involved chopping lead into strips, which were soaked in
vinegar, removed and scraped every ten days in order to collect a kind of crust,
namely white lead, formed on the strips and do this again until lead has totally
disappeared. The second, which we will call the Dutch method, was predomi-
nant in the Netherlands during the eighteenth century. It involved hanging
thinly beaten and rolled sheets of lead in a pot, at the bottom of which is
excellent vinegar, which is buried in dung; after thirty days the operation is
over.10
5 Charles Coulston Gillipsie, Science and Polity in France: The end of the old regime (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980); John Graham Smith, The Origins and Early
Development of the Heavy Chemical Industry in France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).
6 Gillipsie, Science and Polity, pp.463-78 (see note 5).
7 Liliane Hilaire-Prez, Invention and the State in Eighteenth-Century France, Technology
and Culture 32 (1991): 911-31, on 913-19.
8 Catherine Lano, Cruse et cosmtique sous lancien rgime, XVIe-XVIIIe sicles, Lestel,
Lefort and Guillerme, La cruse, pp.25-37 (see note 4).
9 Philiberto Vernatti, A Relation of the Making of Ceruse, Philosophical Transactions 12
(1677-1678): 935-36; C.M. Wai and K.T Liu, The Origin of White Lead From the East or
the West, Journal of Chemical Education 68 (1991): 25-27.
10 Jacques Savary des Bruslons, Blanc de plomb, Dictionnaire universel de commerce, Tome
1 (Genve: Cramer et Philibert, 1742); The Dutch process used horse dung instead of

164 Lehman
In spite of its harmfulness, ceruse became indispensable to painters because

it yielded an irreplaceable washable and bright white paint when mixed with
oil.11 In contrast with other countries, such as Spain where lime wash was used,
or the Netherlands and England where this paint was only applied to wainscot-
ing, doors and window frames, in France ceruse was very fashionable and was
used to cover both the internal and external walls of buildings. Even Toulouse,
the pink city built in brick, complied with this fashion by the end of the
eighteenth century.12 A sign of embellishment and sanitation, ceruse paint
beautified French cities. In 1787, the city of Paris alone consumed 300 tons of
ceruse per year and its consumption in the rest of the kingdom amounted to
about 700 tons.13
Because white lead was so expensive, the ceruse employed in France was
actually not a pure product but an equal mixture of white lead, imported from
Holland or England, with domestic chalk or white limestone. Consequently
the word ceruse was misused by French painters and manufacturers during
the second half of the eighteenth century. Indeed Berthollet clearly distin-
guished ceruse from white lead: Ceruse always contains ground chalk with
which white lead has been precisely mixed.14 This distinction tended to disap-
pear in the nineteenth century when white lead manufacturing became
common and its cost decreased. Its availability in France meant that French
painters then returned to the original meaning of ceruse.
Ceruse Manufactures under the Old Regime
France had too few white lead manufacturing plants to meet growing domestic
demand. The few attempts to import ceruse as early as in 1708 or to manufac-
manure and beer vinegar. At the end of the century, the thirty-five Dutch plants produced
4,000 tons per year of white lead, of which approximatively 1,000 tons were exported to
France. Ernst Homburg and Johan H. de Vlieger, A Victory of Practice over Science: Failed
innovations in the white lead industry (1780-1850), Archives internationales dhistoire des
sciences 46 (1996): 95-112, on 97-102.
11 It caused the cruel colic of Poitou or painters colic; Franois de Paule Combalusier, Obser-
vations et rflexions sur la colique de Poitou ou des peintres, Part I (Paris: de Bure, 1761).
12 Valrie Ngre, La peinture la cruse et lembellissement des villes du Midi, aux XVIIIe et
XIXe sicles, La cruse, pp.39-46 (see note 4).
13 Mmoire pour le Sieur Antoine Baille, Archives Nationales (AN) F122424.
14 Berthollet, Rapport sur un mmoire de Mr Valentino dans lequel il propose un nouveau
procd pour fabriquer le blanc de plomb et de cruse, 2 February 1787, AN F12 1507.

ture it in 1736 were strictly regulated by the Conseil or Bureau du commerce.15

In the mid-eighteenth century royal decrees or lettres patentes for setting up
ceruse fabrication plants could be obtained easily. For example in 1764, follow-
ing a simple request, the Baron Idlinger dEspller and his partner the Comte
de Varoc obtained permission to manufacture and sell blanc de cruse, minium,
cinnabar, crystallized verdigris and oil of vitriol for ten years, forbidding gro-
cers and others from disturbing or troubling them at a location specified by
the lieutenant gnral de police.16 Before registering dEspllers lettres patentes,
however, the Parlement of Paris requested an investigation by the Acadmie
des sciences.17 Macquer and the physician and chemist Hyacinthe-Thodore
Baron were appointed as commissioners. However, Macquers favorable opin-
ion, based solely on the need to replace foreign imports, was not shared by the
Acadmie which requested that the inventors communicate their processes.
The latter categorically refused because these were the secrets on which the
security and the success of their enterprise depended and they never set up
the factory.18 Until the patent law of 1791, addressed below, commissioners gen-
erally encountered resistance when they attempted to obtain the secrets of
inventions. It should also be noted that such a request for an evaluation by the
Acadmie was quite exceptional for this type of chemical industry, as, with the
exception of its interest in dyeing and at the end of the century in the fabrica-
tion of soda and saltpeter, the Acadmie did not show much interest in other
chemical industries.19 Thus, at the end of the old regime, developing ceruse
production was based on individual initiative. This development was done
15 Bonnassieux, Conseil de commerce, pp.37(b), 39(a) and 249(b) (see note 3).
16 Holker to Trudaine de Montigny, 25 October 1764, AN F122424; Decree of the royal council,
15 January 1765; Pierre-Joseph Macquer, Rapport sur les demandes des Srs Idlinger baron
dEspuler et du comte de Varoc, 26 May 1766, AN F122424; On the location of risky factories
see Thomas Le Roux, Le laboratoire des pollutions industrielles, Paris (1770-1830) (Paris:
Albin Michel, 2011), 25-68.
17 Archives of the Acadmie des sciences, Plumitif and Procs-verbal of 27 November 1765, fol.
386 v.
18 Macquer, Rapport sur les demandes des Srs Idlinger, (see note 16).
19 Ernest Maindron, Les fondations de prix lAcadmie des sciences. Les laurats de
lAcadmie (1714-1880), (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1881); Christine Lehman, Lart de la tein-
ture lAcadmie royale des sciences au XVIIIe sicle, Methodos 12 (2012), <http://metho
dos.revues.org/2874>; Between 1776 and 1782 the Socit libre dmulation also encouraged
inventors, but attention to chemistry remained limited to dyeing and distillation vessels,
AN T16016-22; AN T*1604-6; Liliane Hilaire-Prez, Linvention technique au sicle des Lumires
(Paris: Albin Michel, 2000), 209-20.

166 Lehman
by little-known artisanal entrepreneurs who are difficult to identify as their

names generally appear only in administrative correspondence.
Requests for privileges were usually submitted to the Bureau du commerce
through the Intendants, powerful royal officials who had wide-ranging respon-
sibilities for each of the gnralites into which France was divided. As discussed
below, the circulation of memoirs, reports, notes, evaluations and correspon-
dence reflects not only the pyramidal and hierarchical structure of the Bureau
du commerce but also the interactions between the various actors.20 It should
be noted that Macquers mission at the Bureau du commerce, where he had
been appointed commissioner in 1766, was very different from the function he
performed at the Acadmie. It was a permanent appointment to which the title
of academician was attached, but in this instance he was commissioned by the
state and, like Berthollet later, he was accountable to the state namely to the
Contrleur gnral for his evaluations.
Before the Revolution, France imported between three and a half and four
thousand tons of ceruse per year, mainly from the Netherlands.21 Consequently
all the applicants stressed the usefulness of their invention and the economic
interest of the nation. This is why Jean-Guillaume Laliaud asked the Bureau du
commerce in 1779 for the right to set up a plant at Rennes, close to the lead
mines of the region, which he argued would increase local employment of
unskilled manpower and the regions dynamism.22
His request was examined by Macquer who had to evaluate the quality of
ceruse samples sent by the Intendant of commerce Jean-Franois Tolozan
together with those of a Dutch competitor, Guillaume-Pierre dEspar (Willem-
Pieter Despar). Although Bergman had shown that ceruse was composed of
fixed air and litharge in 1774 his results were not yet known in France by 1779.23
Consequently Macquer followed established chemical knowledge and analyti-
cal practices and confined himself to identifying the nature of the earths that
20 The composition of the Bureau and its operation underwent many modifications between
1722 and the end of its activity in September 1791. See Bonnassieux, Conseil de commerce,
Introduction (see note 3); Parker, An Administrative Bureau (see note 3).
21 The figures vary depending on sources but remain in the same order of magnitude: more
than 1,000 tons in 1779 according to Laliaud (AN F121507); 2,409 tons in 1787 according to
the Journal des mines 1 (1794): 92; 3,000 tons in 1788 according to dEspar (AN F121507);
4,000 tons in 1790 according to Migneron de Tocqueville (AN F122424); 1,200 tons average
between 1787 and 1789, according to Hricart de Thury, Rapport du Conseil des travaux
publics du dpartement de la Seine sur la cruse de Clichy 1815.
22 Deliberation of the tats du Languedoc, 5 January 1781, Archives dpartementales de
lHrault, C7612, fols. 352-53; Jean-Guillaume Laliaud, Dossier Cruse, AN F121507.
23 See note 45 for details.

composed the sample substances and measuring their proportions. He deemed

both mens samples to be made of half white lead and half very white marly
earth (limestone and clay), rather weighty, well cleaned of sand and soft to the
touch.24 The general qualities of the two samples seemed to be identical to or
even higher than those from Holland. With regards to their practical use,
Macquer relied on the opinion of professionals (house painters, merchants
and colour makers), specifically on the renowned painter-gilder Jean-Flix
Watin.25 The specimens of ceruse submitted by both applicants passed
Macquers tests: they had a good covering capacity and body. Macquer gave his
favorable opinion because there were presently no manufactures for these
materials in France, demand was constantly increasing, the raw materials
needed for ceruse manufacturing were available domestically and the climate
was more favorable than in the Netherlands. But success also depended on
fresh capital, chemical knowledge and operational know-how. Laliaud had the
advantage here as he had already performed full-scale operations in a plant
he had acquired at Langoyran near Bordeaux. This was not the case for
dEspar, who had to prepare white lead and ceruse in the presence of specially
appointed commissioners.
Macquers opinion convinced the government, which granted Laliaud
authorisation on 15 February 1780 to establish ceruse and white lead manufac-
tures in Normandy, Orleanais, Provence, Languedoc and Guyenne, with
incentives for production in the form of tax exemptions and premiums.26
These locations had strategic importance: Orleanais and Normandy supplied
Paris, Languedoc and Provence promoted trade routes to the East and Guyenne
across the Atlantic. In order to balance the advantages given to Laliaud, dEspar
requested Brittany, the Ile de France, Champagne, Nivernais, Lyonnais and
Dauphin (see Fig. 6.1).27
For this purpose dEspar founded a company with two nobles from the
Nantes region, Jean-Louis dAdhmar de Montral and Philippe-Vincent-Roger
de la Mouchetire, lieutenant-gnral of the Nantes Admiralty, who provided
24 Macquer, Projets dtablissemens de manufactures de blanc de plomb et de cruse en

France, 7 September 1779, AN F121507.
25 Jean-Flix Watin, Art du peintre doreur et vernisseur (Paris: Grang, 1772).
26 AN F121506; Rponse des Intendants de province la lettre qui leur a t adresse le 24
janvier 1788, AN F121507.
27 DEspars memoir, AN F122424; Tolozans response is in a letter of 23 December 1779, AN
F121507.

168
Fl
a
A nd
rt r
oi es Lille
s
Cambraisis Valentino
1790-?
e
di Ile de France
an Amiens
Paris r m
Migneron 1794-? No Champagne de Villiers
Bre 1786-88
tag
Lagny near Paris ne Orlanais
Casauranc 1788-? Grenoble
~ 1780
Carnetin near Paris
NNi ivveerrnaai iss
Vve Lenain & Avenard
1786 Marseilles
Laliaud 1782
Lyo n n a i s
Langoyran Da
up Laliaud 1780
near Bordeaux hi
n
Zeran & co 1775-79
Guyenne
Laliaud 1779-?
dEspar-Guiraud 1780
Bordeaux c
o
ed Provence
Migneron 1790-94 u
g
L an Valentino 1787

Figure 6.1 Areas of white lead and ceruse privileges granted in 1780 and 1787 and locations of ceruse manufactures, 1780-1794.
Lehman
the necessary funding.28 This company was founded under the name of
Guiraud et compagnie. Jean Guiraud was a bourgeois of Paris, who brought his
influence and notoriety, that is to say his guarantee and his name, to support
the request for a privilege.29 On 18 July 1780, Guiraud et compagnie obtained
the privilege to make, distribute and retail white lead and ceruse in the
requested provinces for six years and with the same financial advantages as
Laliauds .30 With these sites distributed around the kingdom, the state
intended to match the national demand for ceruse while preventing other
plants from being set up.31 But both enterprises failed, first Laliauds, which
received 5,500 livres between 1781 and 1785, but produced little ceruse. The
reports, issued in 1788 by the Intendants in the various provinces involved,
underscored the failures: Laliauds plant, established in Marseilles in 1782, had
just changed ownership and the one in Dieppe had produced nothing yet;
meanwhile dEspar-Guirauds manufactures had not been created. Conse
quently, in 1788 there was still hardly any white lead production, despite the
states will and generosity. Not only did the privileges and financial help granted
to Laliaud and dEspar and company not succeed, their exclusivity, forbidding
the establishment of other plants, frustrated the industrys development.
The case of Damelon, a former cavalry officer, demonstrates this contradic-
tion. Damelon claimed to draw his knowledge of the fabrication process from
his many travels to Venice, Holland and especially Nuremberg. As Laliaud and
dEspar-Guirauds manufactures had not been exploited after five years, on
8 august 1785 he applied to the Contrleur gnral for the repeal of Laliauds
privilege and for the same financial aid. After gathering the necessary funds, he
intended to develop this essential business [] that we can take from our jeal-
ous neighbours.32 In response to this request, the requirements of the Bureau
28 Contract dated 9 June 1780, AN, MC/ET/XLIV/545; George V. Taylor, Types of Capitalism in
Eighteenth-Century France, The English Historical Review 79 (1964): 478-97, (on 495-96).
29 Contract dated 15 February 1781, MC/ET/XLIV/549; AN, MC/ET/XLIV/545; See also the con-
tract of 4 February 1783 between a painter, Antoine Meraud who held the secret, and a
priest Jean-Franois Girou de Montdsir, who provided funding and took care of obtain-
ing the privilege for establishing a white lead and ceruse plant near Paris, AN, MC/ET/
LXV/461.
30 AN, MC/ET/XLIV/545.
31 Such as the one from Desomer on 18 March 1780, (AN F122424) or Dubreuil de la Gueron-
nire who on 18 July 1783 was refused permission to install a plant in the abbey of Cercan-
ceaux near Nemours, AN F121507.
32 Damelon to Merelliers?, 16 October 1785, AN F12 1507.

170 Lehman
du commerce were still the same: give evidence of both knowledge of the pro-
cess and support by funders.33
The experiments were performed before Berthollet, who had first to check
whether Damelons process was different from Laliauds and carry out a profit-
ability analysis. In his report, Berthollet gave a favorable opinion, although
three attempts were required before getting an acceptable result from painters.
On condition that Damelon improved the grinding by using new mills,
Berthollet judged that the enterprise could compete with foreign competition
if prudently managed. Damelons process was the well-known Dutch method
and therefore not original. Nonetheless Berthollet added what became a leit-
motiv, that it would be beneficial to take away this branch [of industry] from
foreigners.34 After Berthollets positive assessment, Damelon still had to pro-
vide evidence of his financial support. He responded by withdrawing his
request for support, arguing that:
If it succeeds, he [Damelon] will have acted for the good of the state since
he will prevent several millions per year from leaving the kingdom to pur-
chase this substance from abroad. If it does not succeed, it will have cost
the state nothing.35
Damelon relied instead on his influential protectors: Brissault de la Chapraie,

who promised to secure the necessary funds; Monsieur (the Kings brother),
who was ready to grant a piece of land south-east of Paris, upon which to
establish the manufacture; and the Comte dAlsace, who invoked the threat of
losing know-how to the benefit of England, which the French believed to be
practicing freedom of trade.36 Disappointed by the previous agreements con-
cluded with dEspar-Guiraud and Laliaud, who had just sold his privilege, the
minister waited for a better guarantee from the funders before giving Damelon
a favorable answer. But by now Damelon had competitors. In 1785 Valentino, a
chemist at Lilles military hospital, submitted a request for a privilege.37 The
following year someone named Caille made a similar request for Paris and sev-
eral other provinces and de Villers established a plant in Amiens without state
33 Merelliers? to Damelon, 21 January 1786, AN F12 1507.

34 Berthollet, Rapport sur une prparation de blanc de plomb et de cruse pour laquelle Mr
Damelon demande un privilge, 14 July 1786, AN F12 1507.
35 Damelons memoir, undated, probably the middle of 1787, AN F12 1507.
36 Comte dAlsace to Tolozan, 5 August 1787, AN F12 1507.
37 Bonnassieux, Conseil de commerce, p.449(a) (see note 3).

help.38 In 1788 dEspar sought to recover the privilege he had been granted in
1780 and to establish a new manufacture near Bordeaux.39 Due to the similar-
ity of these applications, the Bureau du commerce decided to consider ceruse
production from a more general viewpoint. In July 1788, it carried out a new
examination of the various means of introducing and maintaining the fabrica-
tion of ceruse in France and rejected Damelons request.40 The commissioners
realized that the profitability of ceruse fabrication was closely related to cus-
toms duties on lead. However, decreasing these duties would prejudice French
mining entrepreneurs and it was decided that lead extraction was more nec-
essary than ceruse fabrication. Finally Damelon did not install his ceruse
manufacture and withdrew his file on 2 July 1792, seven years after his initial
application.
In August 1785, Liborio Philippe Valentino (1741-1803) also applied to open a
ceruse manufacture. Unlike Damelon, Valentino was a chemist.41 An Italian
immigrant, he had settled in Lille in 1779 where he was apothecary at the mili-
tary hospital. As the director of a large-scale manufacture of oil of vitriol and
aqua fortis he already possessed industrial know-how.42 In 1785 he was involved
in the creation of a learned society, the Collge des Philalthes, which grew out
of the masonic lodge Les amis runis. These ties with freemasonry and the
industrial world enabled him to get financial support from three of Lilles most
powerful merchants and one of the citys notables. Due to the cost of raw mate-
rials, lead and vinegar, it seemed impossible to match foreign competition.
Valentino answered this challenge by proposing an innovative method for
manufacturing white lead, in which vinegar was replaced with brine. Since the
gas analysis of native ceruse from English mines yielded only fixed air, why not
imitate nature? He therefore poured salted water onto heated lead at a heat
sufficient enough to set paper alight. After scraping the crust that formed, he
exposed this lead to air for a relatively long time while drizzling it regularly
with brine. The operation was repeated until all the lead was consumed.43
(See Fig. 6.2.) Interestingly, a similar process was patented in Great Britain a
few years later in 1797 by the Scottish chemist Archibald Cochrane, Earl of
38 Note of 9 August 1786, AN F12 1507; Bonnassieux, Conseil de commerce, p.455(b) (see note
3).
39 Ibid., pp.453, 454(a) and 455(b).
40 Ibid., pp.459(b), 460(a).
41 Chimiste pensionn du Roy at the Lille military hospital, AN F12 1507, dossier Valentino.
42 Valentino to the Ministre dtat, 1788, AN F12 1507.
43 Nouveau procd pour fabriquer le blanc de plomb et la cruse sans faire usage du vinaigre,
par Valentino chimiste penssionn du roy la suite de lhpital militaire de Lille en Flandres,
AN F12 1507.

172 Lehman
Figure 6.2 Valentino, New process for manufacturing white lead and ceruse without using
vinegar (AN F12 1507). Courtesy of Archives nationales, Pierrefitte-Sur-
Seine.

Dundonald, by reacting muriate of potash (another chloride) instead of brine

with lead calx before exposing it to a flow of carbonic acid gas or atmospheric
air.44 It was only after Torbern Bergmans analysis of white lead in 1774, which
showed that it was a compound of fixed air and litharge, that these empirical
methods of manufacture became understandable.45 However this research
seems to have been unknown in France, noted neither by Macquer nor
Berthollet.
With the support of Charles-Franois-Hyacinthe dEsmangart, Intendant
des Flandres et dArtois, Valentino applied for a ten year exclusive privilege and
10,000 livres to cover his research costs.46 The answer was not long in coming:
Valentino was required to have his process checked and in the event that his
process is recognized as new and useful by gens de lart as well as by the council
Sr Valentino will be treated favourably.47
Berthollet provided a qualified opinion, criticizing Valentinos lack of preci-
sion and adding that his experiments did not announce a chemist enlightened
by an exact theory.48 He nonetheless advised having examinations carried out
by reliable persons, and Valentino complied with this new requirement. After
building a new furnace in April 1787, he again performed his process before
two experts commissioned by the Intendant of Lille. The verification took
place almost every day from 7am to 8pm. Seals were applied and everything
was weighed and measured: the number of brushwood stacks used for fire and
the quantities of heated lead, coal and marine salt. The dephlogisticated lead
(the name often given to white lead) that was extracted during the course of
operations was thrown into a barrel filled with water. On the following day the
solid parts were washed, weighed and packed. The ceruse prepared by mixture
with various proportions of Champagne chalk was also placed in sealed boxes
to be sent to the Bureau du commerce. Valentinos process was deemed much
more economical than the Dutch one: marine salt was less expensive than vin-
egar; the charcoal used in the furnace in order to melt the lead and perform the
44 Archibald Earl of Dundonald, Methods of Making Ceruse or White-lead, 18 August 1797,

The Repertory of Arts and Manufactures 8 (1798): 377-81.
45 Klaproth replicated this analysis and found 84% litharge (lead oxide) and 16% carbonic
acid. White lead was therefore lead carbonate. Homburg and Vlieger, A Victory of Prac-
tice, p.103 (see note 10); Grard Emptoz, Un procd de fabrication de la cruse issu de
la chimie moderne au dbut du XIXe sicle, Lestel, Lefort and Guillerme, La cruse,
pp.49-60 (see note 4).
46 The Intendant of Lille even proposed contributing half the financial support, dEsmangart
to Blondel on 27 December 1785, AN F12 1507.
47 Note by Cotte dated 22 March 1786, AN F12 1507.
48 Berthollet, Rapport sur un mmoire de Mr Valentino (see note 14).

174 Lehman
necessary operations was less expensive than dung; lead was used in ingots as
extracted from mines and did not need to be cast into thin blades and wound
into spirals. It was also less time-consuming, taking twenty-four hours with a
well-designed workshop versus eight to ten months for the Dutch process.
Apart from the advice to operate the furnace continuously, the verdict totally
favored Valentino.49
After complying with the orders of the government, Valentino submitted his
requests to the Bureau du commerce. In addition to financial assistance of
20,000 livres that would enable him to meet his expenses, pay back his credi-
tors and borrow again, he applied for the exclusive privilege to manufacture
and sell his ceruse in the provinces of Flanders, Hainault and Cambraisis, tax
exemption on drink and living costs for the workmen and especially exemp-
tion from customs duties on lead and other raw materials that would help him
to compete with British ceruse. Indeed, in addition to readily available lead
mines, the latter was also benefiting unfairly from premiums granted by the
British government: from five to ten per cent for some articles of all goods
exported to foreign countries.50 Moreover, as he had revealed his secret to
experts who had not been sworn in, he feared being dispossessed of the secret,
should it to be disclosed. Valentino therefore considered it impossible to start
his enterprise without the states help. As with Damelon, the threat of his secret
being leaked to foreign countries was repeatedly invoked by dEsmangart to
pressure the government into granting the requested help.
I know that foreign traders informed by this chemists discovery and the
advantages of his process for fabricating white lead and ceruse have
made him considerable and advantageous offers in order to incite him to
cross to their side and create his establish there.51
When the government compels the inventor of a profitable discovery to

disclose the process, it seems to tacitly commit itself to granting him
compensation in proportion to the sacrifice of a secret which is his own
property.52
49 Report by Merlin physician at the Lille military hospital and Boudin chemist apothecary
at Lille, Procs-verbal ordonn par Monsr Esmangart, Intendant des Flandres et dArtois, et
excut par le Sieur Valentino chymiste attach lhopital militaire de Lille pour la fabrica-
tion de la cruse, 25 mai 1787 (copy dated 26 September 1788), AN F12 1507.
50 Valentino to dEsmangart, 25 May 1787, AN F12 1507.
51 DEsmangart to Tolozan, 25 February 1788. See also dEsmangart to Blondel, 27 December
1785 and to Tolozan, 27 October 1787, AN F12 1507.
52 DEsmangart to Tolozan 7 December 1787. Valentino was strongly supported by dEsman
gart who was acting for the development of his province and intervened with the Bureau

On 31 October 1787, the government finally responded by granting Valentino

the exclusive privilege of manufacturing, selling and distributing in Flanders,
Artois, Hainault and Cambraisis for five years only, while forbidding distur-
bance of the owner in the operation of his manufacture. (See Fig. 6.1.) This
exclusive privilege was all the more easily granted since this region did not
overlap with those of Laliaud and dEspar-Guiraud, which was not the case for
Damelon. Paradoxically, Valentino refused the privilege saying that its dura-
tion was too short and would prevent him from making the installation
profitable. Moreover, his request evolved over time. In 1788, he mentioned the
purchase of a large piece of land on which he built his manufacture, claimed
the title of Royal Manufacture and maintained his requests for the exemption
of excise duty on his consumption and his workers as well as exemption from
customs duty on lead and other raw materials. It was this stubborn request for
getting both the commercial privilege and the tax exemption on lead that cre-
ated tension between Valentino and the government.
Let us look first at the exclusive privilege. In order to ensure equity as well as
a harmonious and balanced distribution of plants of this type throughout the
kingdom, the Bureau du commerce inquired about the presence of other ceruse
plants in the north of France and the possible privileges granted to them. It
was in this context that the Intendant of Amiens reported that a ceruse plant
using the Dutch process had been established there by de Villers in 1786. Apart
from the fact that Valentinos request seemed excessive with respect to de
Villers, the deputies of the Bureau du commerce agreed on the position that
distributing premiums should only be done in extreme situations, which was
not the case for ceruse because the art of making ceruse is not a secret, all
chemists know it.53 Although they did not jeopardise the exclusive privilege in
the provinces already granted to Valentino, they declared that in the future
these kinds of favours would have no other results than holding industry back
and preventing other establishments that we would like to see increase in
number.54 This shows that the commissioners had come to consider the attri-
bution of exclusive privileges as potentially harmful to the countrys industrial
development. In the end, in spite of his stubbornness and supporters, four
members of the Bureau du commerce, the Intendant of Flandres and the
administrators of the department du Nord, Valentino obtained no other
du commerce on several occasions, 24 September 1788, AN F12 1507.

53 Draft note on a letter of 15 March 1788 and Deliberation of the dputs du commerce,
3 June 1788, AN F12 1507.
54 Avis des dputs du commerce sur la demande de deux fabriquants de cruse [Villers et Val-
entino], 9 May 1788, AN F12 1507.

176 Lehman
encouragement. Indeed, from 1790, the financial situation of the central gov-
ernment was no longer favorable and it now became the responsibility of local
administrations to support their manufactures.55
Furthermore the request for exemption from customs duties on foreign lead
reflects a real difficulty. Valentino claimed that the problem of ceruse manu-
facturing came from the fact that only a part of the lead used could come from
French mines, which made lead very expensive for those who would attempt
such an undertaking in France. Indeed there was an imbalance between the
customs duties on lead imported from England, 4 livres 10 sols per quintal, and
the much lower ones paid by Dutch manufacturers. This was not balanced by
customs duties on foreign ceruse, 1 livre 2 sols 6 deniers per quintal.56 Thus
France could not match countries that had lead mines and granted premiums
on the ceruse that they exported. During their deliberation of 3 June 1788, the
commissioners recognized this difficulty. They acknowledged that the failures
of ceruse plants came from the excessively high customs duties on lead and the
overly low ones on ceruse, which penalized national ceruse production, and
they confessed to having forgotten a basic principle of trade administration:
This principle is that one must propose a much higher import duty on the
fabricated product than on the raw material it is made from. We have lost
sight of this principle when taxing lead at a rate three times higher than
the one applied to ceruse & this oversight has caused all the enterprises
we have established to fail.57
The deputies then proposed to reduce the customs duties on foreign lead and
to increase the duties on ceruse. The advice of the Bureau du commerce reflects
the commissioners hesitations. Some of them were in favor of premiums
granted to ceruse manufacturers such as exempting them from lead duties;
others thought that it would probably be more advantageous to develop lead
extraction in France by creating new mines in order to meet national demand.58
The enquiry carried out by the Inspecteurs gnraux des manufactures showed
that 80,000 quintaux of lead and 24,000 quintaux of ceruse were imported in
1784.59 One of the Inspecteurs des mines, Jean-Pierre-Franois Guillot Duhamel,
55 Tolozan to Valentino, 9 juillet 1790, AN F12652.

56 Avis des dputs du commerce, 9 May 1788 (see note 54); See the case of de Villers estab-
lishment, draft letter by the Bureau du commerce, AN F12 1507.
57 Avis des dputs du commerce, 9 May 1788 (see note 54).
58 Deliberation of 22 October 1788, AN F12 1507.
59 Antoine-Marie Hron de Villefosse, De la richesse minrale (Paris: Levrault, 1810), 397.

evaluated the production of national mines to be just one fourth of national

consumption.60
Although customs duties on lead were decreased to 3 livres and those of
ceruse increased to 3 livres 10 Sols per quintal on 1 June 1789, Valentino main-
tained his demand of a total exemption from customs duties on lead.61 His
stand was supported by all ten administrators of the dpartement du Nord.62
However, the decision of the deputies of the Bureau du commerce on 13 May
1791 remained the same: there was no reason to favor Valentino over other
manufacturers. Indeed:
This type of fabrication is not profitable enough to push the Treasury to

make the financial sacrifice it would demand. Besides, a more important
consideration would further militate against the requested exemption,
that is the interest of the national mines which could no longer be oper-
ated if foreign lead, whatever its final destination, entered France without
paying duties.63
The Minister also advised Valentino to turn to the Comit dagriculture et du

commerce.64 Thus Valentinos factory, in operation from the beginning of 1790,
seems to have received no help from the state. It is not known how long it
remained in operation.
The increase of customs duties on ceruse imports remained a reason for
refusing all new privileges for ceruse or white lead manufacture. This is why, in
1790, Migneron de Brocqueville was dismissed when he applied for an exemp-
tion from internal taxes and export duties and for a premium on the ceruse
produced in his Bordeaux factory with a Dutch cruzier.65 Yet this ceruse had
been favorably evaluated by the academicians of Bordeaux. It was very white
and friable and its analysis showed that it was a true lead calx, with no
60 Avis des Inspecteurs gnraux du commerce sur les demandes des Srs Valentino, de la
ville de Lille; et du Sr Villers, de la ville dAmiens, 10 July 1788, AN F12 1507; At the end of the
eighteenth century, France produced 2,000 tons per year of raw lead, while Great Britain
extracted 10,000 tons. Lynn Willies, Derbyshire Lead Mining in the Eighteenth and Nine-
teenth Centuries, Mining History 14 (1999): 31-33.
61 Arrt du Conseil dtat du Roi du 23 avril 1789 (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1789).
62 Administrateurs du directoire du dpartement du Nord to Tolozan, 1 February 1791, AN F12
1507.
63 Avis des dputs du commerce, 13 May 1791, AN F12 1507.
64 Mmoire soumis lAssemble nationale par le Sr Valentino, 27 June 1790; Valentino to the
deputies of the Comit dagriculture et du commerce, 26 July 1790, AN F12 652.
65 Neckers answer to the letter sent by Migneron on 6 March 1790, AN, F12 2424.

178 Lehman
addition of marly earth or other material, so that it could be easily reduced to

lead.66 One can see that, as early as 1790, what was called ceruse had started to
become pure white lead again. In deference to the Intendant of Bordeaux who
had sent the samples, Mignerons ceruse was evaluated by Berthollet but this
was a mere formal exercise since the privilege had been refused from the
beginning. Thus Berthollet only judged the external qualities of this ceruse
that in his opinion did not look enough like the Dutch product, once again
revealing the force of painters habits. Dutch ceruse had become the standard,
which created an additional handicap for all attempts at producing it nation-
ally. In any event, the lack of competitiveness of French ceruse was irreducible.
As Berthollet noted, France could not stand up to foreign competition due to
economic combinations and the modest profits accepted in several Dutch
establishments, echoing Mignerons criticism, according to which increasing
the customs duties on ceruse did not balance the low cost of manpower in
Holland in comparison to its high cost in France.67
The Revolutionary Period
From the beginning of the new Republic the problem of the supply of ceruse
became crucial as France was at war with both England and the Netherlands
from 1793. Paradoxically, the same Migneron who had suffered a categorical
refusal by the Bureau du commerce now got support from the state and, instead
of a financial grant, received material help to install a new factory in Paris. For
example he was given 200 quintaux of lead thanks to the support of the Comit
dagriculture et du commerce and the National Convention. His process was
derived from the Dutch method, but instead of earthen pots he used lead
boxes, the construction of which and their arrangement in dung were specific
to him, which required a large quantity of lead. The implementation of the
process was placed under the oversight of two chemists, Bertrand Pelletier and
Nicolas Leblanc.68 The country was at war and he was only granted the lead
after the Commission des armes et poudres agreed.69 Favors did not stop there.
The Comit des finances assigned him a house belonging to the state, which
he rented from 10 nivse an III (30 December 1794) and in which he set up
his establishment. The Commission du commerce supplied him wood, coal,
66 Report dated 7 February 1790, AN, F12 2424.

67 Berthollets report, 6 April 1790, AN, F12 2424.
68 AN, F12 2424 and AF/II/11.
69 Thury, Rapport du Conseil des travaux publics, tats de limportation du plomb (see
note 21).

candles, oil and products of basic necessity. Finally, the Committee of Public
Safety allowed him to use marble from former tomb covers in order to make
the millstones for grinding the calcined lead while protecting his workers
health.70 Thus under the auspices of the newly founded Republic, from the
end of July 1794 to the end of February 1795, Migneron successfully installed a
ceruse factory in Paris, which would have been practically impossible at the
end of the Old Regime, given the price of lead and the absence of aid from the
state.
Another entrepreneur, Simon-Lon de Casauranc de Saint Paul, was less
lucky although he had been running a ceruse manufacture since 1788 at Lagny
near Paris and had applied for a patent in 1792.71 The specificity of his process
was sieving limestone and washing it with water from the fountain in Lagny
market before mixing it with ready-made white lead, which the patent appli-
cation claimed deserved the title of perfectionneur (improver). His request for
increasing the customs duties on ceruse was rejected by the Comit du commerce
that wanted to ensure competition with foreign ceruse in order to maintain the
quality of French ceruse. As regards his request for used lead, he was directed
to the war ministry.72 Since the lead needed for manufacturing white lead was
requisitioned, its supply was left to the goodwill of the Commission des armes
et poudres. During the revolutionary period the creation of ceruse plants was
limited by a restricted supply of lead and, even with a patent like Casaurancs,
getting help from the state was difficult for an entrepreneur.
The system of privileges granted by the King following the examination
of a request by the Bureau du commerce was entirely recast in 1791 and the
two laws of 7 January and 25 May reduced the power of the crown and gave
increased protection to the inventor. The law of 7 January dealt with the pat-
ente dinventeur and established the property rights of the inventor in his
invention while that of 25 May stated that national patents called brevets
dinvention would be delivered by the King on a simple request and without
prior examination.73 The protection of the secret of the invention during a
period of five, ten or fifteen years was a significant step forward if recalling
dEspllers refusal to disclose his processes to Macquer in 1765 and Valentinos
long hesitations, but it had to be described by a specification of the process.
70 AN, F17 1037; Nouvelles manires de prparer le Blanc de plomb ou Ceruse, Annales des
Arts et manufactures 1 (1800): 48-63, 55-58.
71 Brevet dinvention de cinq annes pour la fabrication du blanc de cruse faon de Hollande
au Sr Casaurans perfectionneur, 19 January 1792: n1BA1942.
72 Casauranc to the representatives of the Comit du commerce, 19 pluvise an III (7 Febru-
ary 1795), AN F12 2424.
73 On the change brought by the laws of 1791, see Isor, De lexistence des brevets,
pp.97-104 (see note 1).

180 Lehman
In the middle of the eighteenth century, disclosing ones secret implied a risk,
as during the full scale tests required for industrial implementation the inven-
tor was not protected against possible indiscretions by workers. Moreover
the granting of a royal privilege was more stringent as it required not only
novelty but also examination by an expert (Macquer or, later, Berthollet) in
order to evaluate its commercial profitability in view of a possible industrial
implementation and, lastly, the obligation to build and operate the plants that
were approved, as we have seen in the cases of Laliaud and of the association
Guiraud and company founded by dEspar. Beneficiaries of privileges also had
to prove the robustness of their enterprise and of their funders. In return, the
state was generous and proposed real financial support for development and
production. However, after the laws of 1791, while inventors remained the own-
ers of their secrets, they were still compelled to find private funds to found
their enterprise, as the state granted no financial aid to the applicants. On the
contrary, the latter had to pay a tax of 300 livres for a patent of five years, 800
livres for ten years or 1,500 livres for fifteen years.74 Furthermore patents did not
require strict novelty as an importer of a foreign process had the same rights as
an inventor.75 Indeed, when looking at the patents dealing with white lead and
ceruse fabrication filed between 1791 and 1820, it appears that they were not
always exploited and often borrowed from abroad.76
Conclusion
Although the ceruse industry was only emerging, the study of this particular
chemical industry in the last decades of the eighteenth century reveals the
conditions for obtaining a royal privilege. Without technical know-how or
financial support and with no influential connections, it was difficult to get a
privilege. The extensive file devoted to Valentinos case, held in the Archives
Nationales, contains more than one hundred documents, which provide
insights into the functioning of the Bureau du commerce and its evolution
during the pre-revolutionary period until its disbanding in 1791. It can be repre-
sented in a simplified way by the following diagram. (See Graph 6.1).
74 Valrie Marchal, Brevets, marques, dessins et modles. volution des protections indus-
trielles au XIXe sicle en France, Documents pour lhistoire des techniques (2009): 106-16,
on 111.
75 Isor, De lexistence des brevets, p.103 (see note 1).
76 Institut national de la proprit industrielle [INPI], base de donnes des brevets franais
du 19e sicle, <http://bases-brevets19e.inpi.fr/> (accessed 31 March 2016).

LEGEND Decree of 1789:
Change of lead and ceruse The King Request
Relation customs duties for amending
customs duties
17
Hierachical link
ROYAL PRIVILEGE Request with
(Royal decree) favourable opinion
14 13
Request
Prime Minister for amending
Foreign affairs
General customs duties
Minister
16
Controller
Request
(Necker) for amending
Request with
customs duties
favourable
15
Request for opinion
Privilege 12
2
Intendant of the Information request 6 Intendant of the Bureau
Intendants of
(Flandre Province or 7 Information report du Commerce
Commerce (North)
+ Artois) Gnralit 11 Evaluation Report Request for
Evaluation Report amending
request 5 customs duties
8
Report Request for Request for
10 privilege, scientific
Evaluation Economic
financial help,
3 evaluation
Local experts tax exemption
1
the State and the Chemical Industry in France, 1760-1800
Scientific Deputies of
Evaluation experts Commerce
Oversight
9

Evaluation
4
Inventor
(Valentino)
181
Graph 6.1 Request for a privilege: decision-making route.

182 Lehman
This diagram shows that the Intendant in the province was only an inter-
mediary and that the members of the Bureau du commerce, as well as the
Contrleur general, had an advisory role only. The final decision was exclusively
in the kings hands and the privilege was granted by a royal decree. However
the diagram also shows a real freedom in the multiple exchanges between the
applicant, a private individual, such as a chemist-apothecary at a hospital in
Lille, the Intendant of the city, the intendants and commissioners of com-
merce and the minister. This enlightened organisation contrasts with the usual
image of the absolutist state. One can also note the fairness, the seriousness of
the answers and the patience of the Bureau du commerce, which took pains to
rule three times on Valentinos requests.77 The six-year duration of Valentinos
case also shows the evolving position of the government and the difficulty
of reconciling the need for free trade of lead with the national income gen-
erated by the mines of the kingdom. On one hand, the applicant owned his
secret and could threaten to exploit it abroad. On the other hand, the state had
the power to grant the privilege and the financial aid associated with it, but
it had to cope with the complexities of international trade, protective tariffs
and competition between various production sectors such as lead mines and
ceruse manufactures.
The exchanges that preceded granting a privilege as a compensation for a
service performed by the inventor for the well-being of the nation, argue
against the current idea of a French absolutist state as opposed to the British
system, which was deemed to be liberal due to the fact that it was based on
individual right78. It should be noted that eighteenth-century Britain was still
not free from monopolies, the damaging effects of which were highlighted by
Adam Smith.79 Before being superseded by the 1791 patent laws, French royal
privileges were very different from the monopolies to which Smith referred
and should rather be compared with Britains patent system in spite of their
differences. Both were granted by the king and created a temporary monopoly.
Both needed a full description of the invention but, in contrast with British
patents, which required no preliminary examination, the novelty and use
fulness of French inventions had to be established by means of scientific
77 On 6 March, 3 June 1788 and on 13 May 1791, just before it was disbanded on 27 December
1791, AN F12 1507; Bonnassieux, Conseil de commerce (see note 3).
78 Christine MacLeod, Inventing the Industrial Revolution. The English patent system (1660-
1800) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
79 Monopolies were suppressed in 1624, with exception of temporary invention monopolies,
which were granted for fourteen years. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes
of the Wealth of Nations (London: Wordsworth Classics of World Literature: 2012).

evaluations.80 Finally, British patents were not free of charge; they thus
frequently entailed a heavy financial burden on provincials and were conse-
quently often restricted to Londoners and those with wealthy patrons or local
connections.81
In spite of the dramatic change of the French institutions during the Revo
lution, one can observe continuity in the governance of industrial development.
The promotion of industry and the shift towards a liberal system continued to
be driven by the same decision-making bodies the Comit dagriculture et du
Commerce replaced the Bureau du commerce and by chemists and other
members of the scientific community, who believed that they could be directly
useful to industry, still continuing to carry out evaluations and thus taking part
in the decision-making process.
Acknowledgments
I would particularly like to thank John Perkins for his precious advice and Lissa
Roberts for her precise review of this essay and for her comments and sugges-
tions which resulted in important clarifications. I would also like to thank John
Christie for his bibliographical suggestions and Ernst Homburg for the data he
gave me on the ceruse industry and for the constructive exchanges we had on
the various meanings of the word ceruse.
80 Hilaire-Prez, Invention, pp.93-144 (see note 7).

81 Such as official fees and accommodation in London (see note 78).

184 Le Roux
Chapter 7
Between Industry and the Environment: Chemical

Governance in France, 1770-1830
Thomas Le Roux
Chemistrys visibility in the historiography of the first industrialization remains

minimal.1 The traditional view is that the first industrialization centered on
the textile and steel industries, while energy and technological systems driven
by steam engines symbolise the revolution of productive systems. Even the
historiographies that emphasize slow, integrated changes, the intensification
of know-how, and the rise of consumption, insisting on an industrious revolu-
tion rather than an industrial revolution, rarely refer to chemistry.2 This reflects
the facts that there were few large chemical companies until the mid-nine-
teenth century and that chemical processes are often invisible, incompre-
hensible and dangerous three traits that explain why chemistry is often
ignored. Yet chemistry was (and remains) at the heart of many processing
operations and played a vital role in production processes and the encourage-
ment of technical development.3 More than physics or mechanics, the
discipline of chemistry progressed rapidly in the last third of the eighteenth
century, accounting for many industrial experiments and advances. While
much has been written about a chemical revolution, embodied particularly
by Antoine Lavoisier, his colleagues and protagonists, chemically based activi-
ties amongst craftsmen and tradesmen are too often overlooked. Many crafts,
however, used chemical substances that were indispensable for production
and its improvement. Organic and mineral acids, chlorine, ammonium chlo-
ride, various pigments and sodium hydroxide were all chemicals promoted to
improve the manufacturing of consumer goods. Especially from the 1770s
1 For a more detailed presentation of this essay, see Thomas Le Roux, Chemistry and Industrial
and Environmental Governance in France, 1770-1830, History of Science 54 (2016): 195-222.
2 Liliane Hilaire-Prez, La pice et le geste. Artisans, marchands et culture technique Londres
au XVIIIe sicle (Paris: Albin Michel, 2013); On chemistrys importance in the first industrializa-
tion: Andr Guillerme, La naissance de lindustrie Paris. Entre sueurs et vapeurs: 1780-1830
(Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2007).
3 Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Isabelle Stengers, Histoire de la chimie (Paris: La Dcouverte,
1992); Sacha Tomic, Comment la chimie a transform le monde. Une histoire en 7 tableaux (Paris:
Le Square, 2013).
Thomas Le Roux, 2018|doi 10.1163/9789004325562_009


Chemical Governance in France, 1770-1830 185
chemical manufacturing drastically changed industrial processes. This not

only had adverse effects on workers health, it more broadly altered European
societies relationship with their environment.4 Revolutionary events ampli-
fied this process by freeing the productive sphere from a number of constraints,
encouraging all kinds of technical improvements and giving chemists a crucial
role in matters of governance.
This essay examines how chemists contributed to the technological reor
ganization in France at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the
nineteenth century, how they justified using potentially harmful or polluting
processes by stating that this would contribute to national prosperity, and how
the idea of improvement helped legally and rhetorically to build a production
regime that disqualified traditional precautionary attitudes to certain artisanal
and industrial processes. This resulted in a new regime of environmental gov-
ernance devoted to the advancement of chemistry and industrial production.
The Acids Revolution and Value Shift
In the 1770s in France, a silent revolution took place in the relationship between
chemical production and both its environment and medicine. Alain Corbin has
shown that this decade was a turning point in medical and olfactory attitudes
towards certain products.5 Broadening this line of enquiry by considering
the art of governing populations, it appears that chemistry played a crucial
role in social and political representations as well as in governance systems.
Previously, faced with the hazards, nuisances and disadvantages involved, reg-
ulatory authorities had been wary of laboratory and artisanal chemistry. The
police, who traditionally saw to matters of public health and community safety
and comfort, particularly resisted the use of aggressive acids. Reflecting this
distrust, several trials took place in Paris against craftsmen who made nitric
acid, the only strong acid produced on an industrial scale before 1770, known
then as aqua fortis. In 1768, for example, Police Superintendent Jean-Baptiste
Lemaire, with the backing of the Faculty of Medicine, summoned a nitric acid
distiller who operated in the city center before the police court, on a charge
4 Thomas Le Roux, Le laboratoire des pollutions industrielles, Paris, 1770-1830 (Paris: Albin Michel,
2011).
5 Alain Corbin, Le miasme et la jonquille. Lodorat et limaginaire social, XVII-XIXe sicles (Paris:
Aubier, 1982).

186 Le Roux
of endangering the publics health.6 Under the continued influence of the

miasma theory, police protocol through the end of the ancien rgime called for
keeping close tabs on manufacturers of aqua fortis and acids, viewing them as
sources of ill health and pollution.7 Workshops and factories that offended the
senses and contaminated the air and water underwent strict preventive inves-
tigations known as commodo et incommodo.8
The manufacturing of chemicals, and acids in particular, was banned from
cities and often carried out in small-scale and home-based production facili-
ties, where hazards were none the less significant, as the case of nitric acid
reveals. Before the growth of sulfuric acid, nitric acid was used in most indus-
tries, from tanneries to metal works9. A key product for industrialization and
highly corrosive, it was made in Paris beyond the Porte Saint-Denis in small
isolated workshops guarded by the police. Despite their products fundamental
contribution to industrialization, these spaces remained untouched by large
capitalist investment and exuded a sort of toxic domesticity. In the 1770s, how-
ever, a new way of seeing chemistry was emerging. Of course, even chemists
generally recognized nitric acids corrosive nature. In 1773, describing the art of
the aqua fortis distiller in Description sur lart du distillateur deau forte, Jacques-
Franois Demachy described its suffocating fumes and very dangerous
manufacturing processes.10 The accompanying illustration, however, reveals a
purpose quite other than promoting care when working with dangerous sub-
stances. A worker is pictured only to show the scale of the place, which is
depicted without any chemical substances; the devices shown were to be
understood, not experienced, and the heat, hazards and acid-soaked atmo-
sphere were hidden to suggest an idealized vision of technical know-how.11
There was neither activity nor matter, just production tools, which were the
pedagogical focus of this books representation of work. (See figure 7.1)
6 Archives Nationales (AN), Y 9471B, report by Superintendant Lemaire, 5 August, 1768; AN,
F12 879, Rapport fait la Facult de mdecine [] pour examiner le laboratoire du Sieur
Charlard, et juger les inconvniens qui peuvent rsulter pour les maisons voisines, de la distil-
lation deau-forte, by Bellot, de la Rivire, des Essartz, de Vallun, 1774, 16-17.
7 Nicolas Des Essarts, Dictionnaire universel de la police, 8 vols. (Paris: Moutard, 1786-1790),
vol. 6, 1-2.
8 Le Roux, Le laboratoire, chapter 1 (see note 4).
9 John Graham Smith, The Origins and Early Development of the Heavy Chemical Industry in
France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).
10 Jacques-Franois Demachy, Lart du distillateur deaux-fortes (Paris: impr. de Delatour
1773), 37-38.
11 Ibid., Part 2, Plate 1, Figure 2.

Figure 7.1 Jacques Franois Demachy, Art du distillateur deaux fortes etc. Laboratoire pour les
eaux fortes, Description des arts et mtiers (Paris, 1773), Part 2, Plate 1, Figure 2.
Illustration courtesy of Conservatoire national des arts et mtiers.
Just like the Description des arts et mtiers commissioned by the Academy of
Science, which included the study of aqua fortis distillers, the Encyclopdies
plates were based on facilities in Paris: their representations of work reflected
a technological and universal order that wished to discipline bodies and
become free from the constraints of particular locations.12 This was a world
ruled by scientists and technicians, who increasingly imposed their authority
on the world of craftsmen and related physical practices. The stakes were all
the higher because acids were a key industrial product, and government had
begun ardently to promote acid manufacturing.
The main change came with sulfuric acid production. Despite having simi-
lar uses to nitric acid, sulfuric acid was only produced in small quantities
12 William Sewell, Visions of Labour: Illustrations of the mechanical arts before, in and
after Diderots Encyclopdie, Steven Kaplan and Cynthia Koepp, eds., Work in France. Rep-
resentations, meaning, organization and practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986),
258-286; Georges Friedman, LEncyclopdie et le travail humain, Annales, histoire, sci-
ences sociales 8 (1953): 53-68; Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and enlighten-
ment in France, 1763-1815 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

188 Le Roux
before the late 1760s, mainly in laboratories where it was condensed in expen-
sive and delicate glass jars during the final production stage. Sulfuric acid was
absolutely essential for cotton printing, on which the government had recently
lifted its ban in 1759. Simultaneously, in the United Kingdom, John Roebuck
broke new ground by using lead chambers to condense sulfuric acid. The
room-sized lead-lined chambers allowed sulfuric acid production on an indus-
trial scale, which soon challenged nitric acids preeminent position. The
technology was introduced in France by the Englishman John Holker, a factory
inspector employed by the French monarchy, who in 1768 set up a sulfuric acid
factory next to his printed cotton factory in a suburb of Rouen.13 Over a period
of some months, the gases discharged by the chambers corroded by the strong
acid caused breathing problems for neighbours and damaged surrounding
vegetation.14 According to police jurisprudence, this kind of nuisance was not
tolerated near homes and, in 1772, Holker was prosecuted in Frances first great
industrial pollution trial. After several months of proceedings in the Parlement
de Rouen (then called Conseil suprieur), the accused parties, supported by
Jean-Charles Trudaine, the Commerce Director, obtained a hearing at the
finance royal council. There Trudaine had to argue against Minister Henri
Bertin, a former Paris Lieutenant-General from 1757 to 1759.15Economic
interest prevailed over Bertins arguments: in September1774, the plaintiffs
case was dismissed and henceforth, no one was allowed to trouble or disrupt
the factorys operation.16
The lead chamber was therefore not only a technological development: it
occasioned a shift in the order of industrial and environmental governance.
Firstly, it required major investment, which made any production stoppage
problematic. Secondly, it was supposed to be a perfect device that replaced
multiple operations by the workers with a simple system in which leaks could
be better controlled. The same argument was used for both health benefits and
economic profits, as any leak was treated as a loss of value.17 Lastly, it led to a
change in the representation of sulfuric acid manufacturing, presented from
then on through its technology, such as by a technical drawing or a model
showing only the mechanisms external envelope. Devices appeared, in the
13 Smith, The Origins (see note 9).

14 L.-G. de la Follie, Rflexions sur une nouvelle mthode pour extraire en grand lacide du
soufre par lintermdiaire du nitre, sans incommoder ses voisins, Observations sur la phy-
sique 4 (1774): 336.
15 AN, F12879, vitriol oil factory in Rouen, letter from Bertin to Trudaine, 11 December 1773.
16 Ibid., order of the royal council, 20 September 1774.
17 de la Follie, Rflexions, p.336 (see note 14).

first representations of this kind of factory, like magical boxes where every-
thing took place according to the scientific processes of physics and chemistry.
Through representations of the working world and especially of artisanal and
industrial chemistry, the last ancien rgime decades witnessed the inevitable
fading out of the proximity of arts and crafts. In its place arose a technical,
disembodied order that would celebrate technical drawings during the nine-
teenth century, the seeds of which were already present in the encyclopaedic
initiative and in scientific encouragement.18
While chemistry transformed the governance of industry and especially the
governments attitude to nuisances, the root causes of this change should be
sought in the governments economic policy as well as in the changes chemists
were introducing to medical aetiology. The groundwork was laid by the chem-
ist Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau from Dijon. In March 1773, he was
contacted by the Dijon Cathedrals authorities, who could not get rid of the
mephitic stench emanating from the decaying corpses in one of the buildings
vaults. Applying the theory on the combination of ammonia, whose presence
could be deduced from the smell of decay, with an acid to produce a neutral
salt, he fumigated the vault with muriatic (hydrochloric) acid and managed to
neutralise the smell. In the medical community, among which the miasma
theory was predominant, this removal of a smell was considered a victory over
putrid infection and the experiment had a huge impact.19 It was the first time
acid fumigation was used in France as a way of controlling fermentation and
its smell. The novel procedure broke with traditional conceptions about the
corrosive and dangerous nature of acids. Until then, acids had never been
thought of as a disinfectant; instead physicians recommended fumigation with
odoriferous herbs, the spraying of vinegar or starting of a fire or a powder
explosion to disperse and destroy miasmas. The fact that acid fumigation was
not widely taken up, at least not immediately, is not important. The signifi-
cance of these experiments and the publicity surrounding them in 1773 and
1774 was not that they immediately led to routine therapeutic use, but that they
profoundly altered the perception of acids, a product that was crucial for
industrial development.
18 Nicolas Pierrot, Les images de lindustrie en France, peintures, dessins, estampes, 1760-
1870, (Doctoral dissertation in History, Universit Paris I Panthon-Sorbonne, 3 vols.,
2010).
19 Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, Nouveau moyen de purifier absolument, et en trs-
peu de temps, une masse dair infecte, Journal de physique 1 (1773): 436 and 3 (1774): 73;
Thomas Le Roux, Du bienfait des acides. Guyton de Morveau et le grand basculement de
lexpertise sanitaire et environnementale (1773-1809), Annales Historiques de la Rvolu-
tion franaise 383/1 (2016): 153-175; For the further history of Guytons fumigating machine,
see Elena Serranos essay in this volume.

190 Le Roux
Because acid promotion was at the heart of a governmental scheme to

encourage production in order to boost industrial development, Guyton de
Morveaus experiments were a godsend and allowed medicine to progress
hand in hand with economic development. In 1774, Vicq dAzyr prescribed acid
fumigation to treat epizootic diseases in the south of France, and the following
year, the academicians Etienne Mignot de Montigny and Philibert Trudaine de
Montigny also recommended this disinfection method in two separate notices
and enquiries.20 The chemist Antoine Parmentier, senior scientific advisor to
the police lieutenant-general, observed that acid vapours combined with
other elements in the air to contribute to its cleanliness.21 He further extolled
the virtues of spirit, acid and corrosive fluids, which could be released to
destroy or neutralise the miasma supposed to be dispersed in the air.22 The
link between medicine and chemistry was strengthened specifically during
this decade: one after the other, the physicians Claude Berthollet, Antoine
Fourcroy and Jean-Antoine Chaptal stopped practising medicine to study
chemistry, and all played a predominant role in the development of industrial
chemistry, especially in relation to acids. Fourcroy became an expert and regu-
lar government advisor, assessing nuisances caused by chemical factories. For
instance, he was commissioned by the Royal Society of Medicine in 1783 to
write a report on a sulfuric acid factory in Rouen. In this report, he strongly
defended the manufacturer, dismissing his opponents as prejudiced and igno-
rant about chemistry.23 From then on, the Bureau du Commerce (Trade Office)
relied on these new ideas to encourage and at times force the establishment of
acid factories in close proximity to cities. To override public objections, trade
officers used a combination of medical and chemical arguments, claiming that
sulphur vapours, far from being hazardous, are very healthy. They purify
unhealthy air. They prevent epidemics.24 This was a reasonable stance to take,
especially as the chemists Macquer and then, from 1784, Berthollet were mem-
bers of the Bureau and greatly contributed to spreading these ideas.
20 Etienne Mignot de Montigny, Instruction et avis aux habitans des provinces mridionales
de la France, sur la maladie putride et pestilentielle qui dtruit le btail (Paris: Imprimerie
Royale, 1775); Philibert Trudaine de Montigny, Avis aux peuples des provinces, o la conta-
gion sur le btail a pntr et ceux des provinces voisines (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1775).
21 Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, Dissertation physique, chimique et conomique, sur la
nature et la salubrit des eaux de la Seine (Paris: impr. de J.-G. Clousier, 1775), 9-10.
22 Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, Dissertation sur la nature des eaux de la Seine (Paris: Buis-
son, 1787), 104.
23 AN, F12 1507, folder I-1, report by Fourcroy and Thouret, 2 November 1783.
24 AN, F12 1506, folder 5, factory in Javel, department of trade documents, undated [1777-
1778].

Chemistry not only contributed to the idea of improvement in arts and

crafts, but also in society and the economy. Many chemical substances were
used to produce semi-luxury and luxury goods, especially in the non-ferrous
metal industry. This was the case, for example, for silver and gold plated prod-
ucts and in the new platinum industry. In a letter to Guyton de Morveau, dated
November 1786, Lavoisier mentioned that he was working with the innovative
gold and silversmith Jacques Daumy. To treat platinum for craftsmen and man-
ufacturers, they refined, dissolved, precipitated and revived the metal with
hydrochloric and nitric acid, ammonium chloride, borax, lead, bismuth, anti-
mony and arsenic.25 More generally, the integration of new chemistry with
luxury goods production occurred through precision metalwork on precious
metals, the artistry of which was perfected through very delicate chemical
operations and relatively challenging processes for the workers.26 The new
Paris Mint, built between 1771 and 1775, served as a laboratory, not only for
making coins but also mastering the chemistry behind refining, cupellation
and alloying assays to make all kinds of gold and silverwork pieces. In this field,
with a similar argument as that used for sulfuric acid, the matter of goldbeat-
ing was raised before the royal council in 1773. Gold beaters in Lyons were
accused by the police of using furnaces within the city, as well as treating gold
with antimony and corrosive sublimate (a mercury compound), two danger-
ous substances. Both activities violated manufacturing and public health laws.
The beaters defended themselves by appealing to the king and arguing a num-
ber of economic points: to uphold the restrictions and the broadly prohibitive
law would condemn their industry to decline; and it was only by violating
restrictions contrary to the public interest that their art has improved.
According to them, violations were brutal procedures enforced by an unin-
formed police officer. The king was convinced and agreed to authorize the use
of furnaces as well as antimony and mercury for metal refining, to support the
main factories in Lyons, by an order of the Council dated 29April1773. The
orders preamble stated that the petitioners had a duty to preserve their indus-
try for the state and to perfect it.27
Chemistry thus contributed to transform physicians and scientists percep-
tion of mineral acids and other chemical substances, which until then had
been feared for their corrosive effects. It demonstrated the medical usefulness
of these acids, thereby helping to overcome the usual precautions and spurring
their industrial use. This reversal had an effect on industrial nuisance policy in
25 Antoine Lavoisier, uvres (Paris, 1854-1868), vol. 5, 340.

26 AN, K 903, Monnaie, file 108, Observations sur le projet ddit de Mr de F, undated (1770s).
27 Essarts, Dictionnaire, vol. 7, p.434 (see note 7).

192 Le Roux
the medium-term. During the Revolution, the Consulate and Imperial years, it
translated into fundamental reports and regulations, which tied medical
expertise, chemistry and industrial development together.
Chemical Governance and the Environment (1789-1810)
In 1791 liberalism, which was already perceptible at the end of the ancien
rgime, inspired several steps to facilitate the setting up of industries whatever
their nuisances. While the disruption that occurred in 1789 implicitly resulted
in more freedom for industrialists, who took advantage of the dismantling of
former regulatory institutions, the new legislation permanently released
industry from several controlling regulations.28 Commodo et incommodo inves-
tigations were stopped, and the dAllarde Law of March1791 abolished arts and
crafts guilds and their statutes.29 In September1791, the Bureau and industry
inspectorate were dismantled. In October1791, letters patent granting exclu-
sive privileges were abolished, which did away with preliminary investigations
in use under the ancien rgime. Consequently, industrialists were free to set up
factories wherever they wanted and manufacture products using whichever
processes they wished. Legislators ruled that the courts only had jurisdiction
to address property damage.
However, the revolutionary period was also characterized by a strengthen-
ing of the value shift occurring in the public interest domain. Public interest
was no longer concerned first and foremost with safeguarding public health,
but was permanently associated with economic development. Chemists
became the new official experts on assessing pollution and contributed to the
policies of the successive republican governments. Thus in 1791, when the
Academy of Science investigated the pollution caused by an ammonium chlo-
ride factory established in the middle of a populated neighbourhood near
Valenciennes, the reports authors (chemists Louis Cadet, Fourcroy and Ber
thollet) conceded that pollution had disadvantages, but considered that the
smoke could be tolerated in the interest of national industry and general
welfare.30
28 Alain Plessis, ed., Naissances des liberts conomiques, 1791-fin XIXe sicle (Paris: Institut
dhistoire de lindustrie, 1993).
29 Philippe Minard, Le mtier sans institution: les lois dAllarde-Le Chapelier de 1791 et leur
impact au dbut du XIXe sicle, Steven Kaplan and Philippe Minard, eds., La fin des cor-
porations (Paris: Belin, 2003), 81-95.
30 Archives de lAcadmie des Sciences, Registre des procs-verbaux de lAcadmie des
sciences, fol 371-373, 28 June 1791.

Moreover, with the outbreak of war, scientists legitimized exceptional

industrialization. Lazare Carnot, Fourcroy, Guyton de Morveau and Pierre-
Louis Prieur took an active part in the decisions taken by the Comit de Salut
Public (Public Safety Committee), including the decision to employ reputed
chemists such as Gaspard Monge, Berthollet, Jean Darcet, Bertrand Pelletier
and Chaptal in the war effort.31 This patriotic mobilization led to the idea that
national production should be boosted in the context of war and economic
competition. Requisitioning and military orders caused the reconversion
of factories and the adoption of foreign processes: hatters converted their
workshops to make varnished helmets; the need for uniform buttons led to
the setting up of workshops for copper treatment and acid gilding; and textile
workshops were set up under the supervision of the agency for republican mil-
itary clothing to make cloth, sheets and military dress.32 In a more obvious way,
the arms industry flourished in the capital, where the Manufacture de Paris was
set up in the autumn of 1793 as a huge cluster of workshops including a small
arms testing and improvement workshop established in April1794 under the
authority of the weapons commission, headed by Guyton de Morveau.
A few flagship products illustrate the involvement of chemists in industry.
In addition to armaments manufacturing, leather, copper and pigments are
worth noting. From the autumn of 1793, the revolutionary government was
looking for a way to produce leather goods for the troops as fast as possible
and entrusted the task to the chemists. The Comit de salut public instructed
Berthollet to take charge of tanning improvement, and named Armand Seguin
to conduct several experiments. Fourcroy praised Seguins revolutionary tan-
ning method, which involved replacing previously used weak organic acids
with a concentrated solution of sulfuric acid, in his report to the Convention,
noting that the new process sped up manufacturing considerably.33 The new
method was employed at the state-financed tannery established in late 1794 on
the Svres Island in the Paris suburbs, with used acid discharged into the Seine.
31 Patrice Bret, LEtat, larme, la science. Linvention de la recherche publique en France, 1763-
1830 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002); Charles C. Gillispie, Science and
Polity in France. The revolutionnary and Napoleonic years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2004); Nicole Dhombres and Jean Dhombres, Naissance dun nouveau pouvoir:
sciences et savants en France, 1793-1824 (Paris: Payot, 1989).
32 Jean-Franois Belhoste and Denis Woronoff, Ateliers et manufactures: une rvaluation
ncessaire, Franoise Monnier, ed., A Paris sous la Rvolution, nouvelles approches de la
ville (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2008), 79-91.
33 Antoine-Franois Fourcroy, Rapport, au nom du Comit de Salut Public, sur les arts qui ont
servi la dfense de la Rpublique, et sur le nouveau procd de tannage dcouvert par le
citoyen Armand Seguin (Paris: impr. Nationale, 1795).

194 Le Roux
A similar mindset was applied to copper production. From 1791, the govern-
ment requested gold and silversmith Daumy to melt and refine bronze bells
to make coins, and then cannons, in a new factory on the le de la Cit using
chemical processes requiring large amounts of nitric, sulfuric and muriatic
acid.34 Here too, toxic remains were discharged into the river.
The example of minium, a lead-based pigment used to make porcelain,
shows how chemists used pollution charges to promote industrial innovation.
Neighbours alleged that the lead oxide discharged from a minium factory in
the Parisian neighbourhood of Bercy in June1793 polluted the area. Simul
taneous to Bercys council banning the factory, the government entrusted an
expert report to the chemists Pelletier and Petit, who argued that the problem
could be reduced by improving manufacturing processes. Guyton led a second
inspection, with the understanding that minium production was valuable
for the Republic and useful for arts workshops. Fourcroy, then a National
Convention member, advocated that the owner should be protected in his fac-
tory given that minium could no longer be procured in Britain or Holland.35
Confirming that there was a public health issue, Guytons report resulted in an
order to demolish the factory, but the owner was encouraged to improve his
manufacturing processes with the help of well-placed chemists and physi-
cians, who also lobbied successfully for generous government compensation
to rebuild the factory.36 This case exemplifies what became a pattern of techni-
cal improvement under the guise of chemical scientific expertise, initially only
seen with sulfuric acid factories, now fixed by Guyton de Morveau and Four
croy.37 From the Napoleonic regime, members of the Conseil de salubrit would
take it upon themselves to make this the core of environmental regulation.
Two important considerations emerged from chemists involvement: public
interest was equated with economic development and technical solutions
were proffered as the best way to reduce nuisances from craft production. It
thereby became possible to divest the traditional police of its prerogative pow-
ers and to bypass the judicial reasoning of the ancien rgime.
After peace returned in 1795, Frances economic expansion was driven by its
chemical industry. In Paris alone, dozens of factories were working inside the
city walls and suburbs. Growth was especially embodied in four flagship plants
34 Bibliothque Historique de la Ville de Paris, Ms 929, Manufacture Daumy.

35 Procs-verbaux du comit dinstruction publique de la Convention nationale (Paris: Impr.
Nationale, 1891-1907), vol. 2, 792; Archives parlementaires (Paris: CNRS, 1980-), vol. 79, 153-
154.
36 AN, F12 1509, Comit agriculture, folder Ollivier, 1794.
37 On this case, Le Roux, Le laboratoire, pp.204-212 (see note 4).

that were largely established between 1795-99 by chemists who were (or
became) academicians. The factory owned by Chaptal in Ternes was a particu-
lar focus of public attention and began raising protests while it was being built.
However, having become Interior Minister, Chaptal rejected all complaints
year after year and generally became the key agent for unifying science and
administration. Before the Revolution, he was a chemical entrepreneur in
Montpellier, producing especially sulfuric acid, and in 1790 was sued for pollu-
tion by local residents. Berthollet recruited him to be involved in the republican
administration, and he headed the gunpowder factory of Grenelle, when it
exploded, killing 550 workers.38 Prior to becoming Interior Minister in 1800,
Chaptal built his famous sulfuric acid factory in Ternes and wrote Essai sur le
perfectionnement des arts chimiques [Essay on the Means of Perfecting Chem
ical Arts], both a treatise on applying the latest chemical discoveries to industry
and a guide for entrepreneurial leadership.39 As Minister, academician, chem-
ist, entrepreneur and member of the Conseil dEtat, he embodied the con-
junction of scientific expertise, entrepreneurial experience and emerging
administrative standards through which industrialism and liberalism became
associated.40
Between 1802 and 1804, Chaptal worked to build a coherent framework to
serve industry. He began by founding the Conseil de salubrit in 1802, an institu-
tion with scientific expertise mainly chemists with a soft spot for industry
to advise the Parisian authorities. In agreement with the owners of the facto-
ries and workshops, members often denied that industrial fumes were noxious
or deleterious to plaintiffs health. In the case of chemical factories, they
pointed out that the waste gases were valuable and that it was in the interest
of the manufacturer to prevent them from escaping. Pollution, thus, was con-
strued as the result of unintended accidents rather than daily practice.41
Meanwhile, economic affairs were entrusted to new or reorganized institu-
tions, such as the Mint, which became a veritable laboratory for testing the
38 Thomas Le Roux, Accidents industriels et rgulation des risques: lexplosion de la pou-

drerie de Grenelle en 1794, Revue dHistoire Moderne et Contemporaine 58/3 (2011): 34-62;
Claire Barill, Thomas Le Roux and Marie Thbaud-Sorger, Grenelle, 1794. Secourir,
indemniser et soigner les victimes dune catastrophe industrielle lheure rvolution-
naire, Le Mouvement Social 249/4 (2014): 41-71.
39 Jean-Antoine Chaptal, Essai sur le perfectionnement des arts chimiques en France (Paris:
Dterville, undated [1799]).
40 Jeff Horn, The Path Not Taken. French industrialization in the age of revolution, 1750-1830
41 Le Roux, Le laboratoire, chapters 7 to 9 (see note 4).

196 Le Roux
science/administration alliance.42 Inside the Socit dencouragement pour

lindustrie nationale (SEIN, Society for the Encouragement of National Industry)
founded in 1801 by Chaptal, Guyton chaired the committee for chemical arts.
There, he regularly saw Berthollet, Fourcroy, Nicolas Vauquelin, Parmentier,
Darcet and Deyeux, under the general chairmanship of Chaptal that is, all
the academician chemists of the time, all supporters of industrial develop-
ment and almost all editors of the leading journal Annales de chimie. During
these years, the state apparatus particularly supported acid chemistry. The
Directory had already recognized its considerable value, emphasizing in 1798
that acids are like a reservoir of very powerful forces, which nature has made
available to man to produce effects that would be impossible to obtain using
mechanical force.43 Under the Consulate, acid promotion increased.
However, everywhere in France as in Paris, trials against owners of chemical
factories accused of pollution threatened to disrupt the steady industrial pro-
duction. After Chaptal was replaced by Jean-Baptiste de Champagny as the
Interior Minister in August 1804, the authorities contemplated a national
response to this recurring issue. In November1804, the new Minister asked the
French institute about factories exhaling an obnoxious smell and the risk that
they posed for public health; the institute entrusted the report to Guyton de
Morveau and Chaptal.44 A second report followed in 1809.45 Together they pro-
vided the basis for the law of 1810 on polluting industries.46 The 1804 report
argued against the necessary validity of complaints by claiming a distinction
between industries with processes based on organic putrefaction, which
released smells that were disturbing or toxic fumes, and those with processes
42 Patrice Bret, Des essais de la Monnaie la recherche et la certification des mtaux: un

laboratoire modle au service de la guerre et de lindustrie (1775-1830), Annales Histo-
riques de la Rvolution Franaise 320/2 (2000): 137-148.
43 AN, F12 2234, information provided to the Conseil des Cinq-Cents by the Directory, 31 Janu-
ary, 1798.
44 Rapport [] sur la question de savoir si les manufactures qui exhalent une odeur ds-
agrable peuvent tre nuisibles la sant, 17 December 1804, Procs-verbaux des sances
de lAcadmie des sciences (Hendaye: Impr. de lObservatoire dAbbadia, 1910-1922), vol. 3,
165-168.
45 Rapport sur les manufactures de produits chimiques qui peuvent tre dangereuses, 30
October 1809, Procs-verbaux vol. 4, pp.268-273 (see note 44); Subsequent citations not
referenced in the notes are from these reports.
46 For details, Genevive Massard-Guilbaud, Histoire de la pollution industrielle, France 1789-
1914 (Paris: Editions de lEHESS, 2010), 34-45; Le Roux, Le laboratoire, pp.255-261 and 274-
283 (see note 4); Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, Lapocalypse joyeuse. Une histoire du risque
technologique (Paris: Le Seuil, 2012), 150-165.

based on fire, which emitted vapours or gases that were uncomfortable to

breathe, but usually only inconvenient. In particular, factories that were well
run, might release an obnoxious, but certainly not a harmful smell. As a matter
of fact, they wrote, the smell released by sulfuric acid factories was not dan-
gerous in the least for the workers who breathed the smell daily, and no
neighbours complaint could be deemed well founded. As for nitric and hydro-
chloric acid factories, their characteristic smell could not affect human
breathing; the men who work there every day were not at all inconvenienced
and it would be very wrong of the neighbours to complain.47 Another hydro-
chloric acid expert, the industrialist Robert OReilly, contradicted their
assertions. In his Essai sur le blanchiment [Essay on Bleaching], OReilly re-
ported witnessing in a very large plant near Paris, the cruel suffering endured
by [the] wretched [workers] because of the suffocating fumes. I saw them
writhe on the floor in pain; often these first effects of oxy-muriatic acid can
cause even serious illnesses.48 In fact, Chaptal knew that occupational health
was at stake in the workplace. In 1798, in his Essay, he argued that the various
tasks in a workshop are not all equally easy or pleasant; and since young men
are too often minded to refuse difficult or repulsive tasks, a coercive force is
needed to compel them to carry out these tasks and this force can only be
found in the ties that bind them to the workshop and keep them at the disposal
of their superiors.49 Politics and productivity won the day in his view.
The 1804 reports fundamental stance was that the central government
needed to protect Frances chemical industries. Obstructions would be at
once unfair, persecutory, harmful to the advancement of the arts and would
not address the harm caused by the operation. Chaptal and Guyton thereby
turned the Ministers question on its head, moving away from a public health
issue to a concern of political economy by defining an entirely new program.
[P]rosperity of the crafts absolutely requires that boundaries are set to put an
end to arbitrary decisions by magistrates by drawing a circle around industrial-
ists, inside which they will be able to ply their trade freely and securely.50 The
1809 report followed similar reasoning, but the context had changed. On the
one hand, since its foundation in 1802 and its specialization in industrial affairs
in 1806 (with chemists Deyeux and Cadet de Gassincourt as its authorized
experts), the Paris Conseil de salubrit had acquired an undeniable legitimacy.
47 Quotations from Rapport (1804) (see note 44).

48 Robert OReilly, Essai sur le blanchiment (Paris: Bureau des Annales des arts et manufac-
tures, 1801), 99.
49 Chaptal, Essai, pp.9-10 (see note 39).
50 Quotations from Rapport (1804) (see note 44).

198 Le Roux
On the other hand, for several months, an ongoing problem had been caused
by sodium hydroxide factories, in which sea salt was broken down by sulfuric
acid using the Leblanc process, discharging large quantities of muriatic acid.
Several soda plants, managed by distinguished chemists who would become
members of the Conseil de salubrit or were very close to them, were built, in
the Parisian suburbs after1800. The irreversible damage caused by acid vapours
and the utter destruction of crops and orchards around these factories was
obvious. Faced with a fresh spate of pollution cases in 1809, the Minister was
forced to commission a second report from the institute. The new committee
membership had a similar industrialist flavor: alongside Chaptal and Guyton
de Morveau, the entrepreneurs Fourcroy and Vauquelin also owned a sizeable
chemical factory in the center of Paris, while the chemist Deyeux made no
bones about his industry bias in the Conseil de salubrit.
The Minister urged its authors to strike a balance between the interests of
industrialists and those of neighbouring property owners. No longer simply
cast as victims, industrialists were required to choose factory locations care-
fully. The reports conclusion thus called for a consensus, proposing to group
industries into three classes according to their degree of nuisance. The chem-
ists suggested introducing specific administrative enquiries for the purpose of
authorizing factories in each group, to pre-empt most pollution problems.
However, the spirit of Guytons 1793 report on minium was not forgotten; on
the contrary, the report promoted technical improvement for the chemical
industry as a means of moving from one class to another to lighten constraints
and government control. These conclusions were included in the law of Octo
ber1810 on insalubrious industries.
Pollution and Governance through Chemistry
The decree of 1810 aimed to establish a regulatory framework by separating

industries into three categories depending on their level of noxiousness.
A great deal was at stake in how a factory was categorized; being moved from
the first meant that the factory was no longer considered noxious and could
avoid the Conseil dEtats long and strict authorisation procedure. The decree
was therefore supposed to promote innovation and the perfection (a word very
often used) of processes.51 Conseil de salubrit members, who completely sup-
51 Thomas Le Roux, La chimie, support du dveloppement de lindustrie perfectionne

sous la Rvolution et lEmpire, Natacha Coquery, ed., Les progrs de lindustrie perfection-
ne (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Midi, 2017), 26-35.

ported their founders industrialism, were soon convinced by the principle of

process improvement as a way of avoiding production restrictions. From 1811,
the Conseil de salubrit linked industrial improvement and public health.
In the years after the decree was first implemented, Conseil de salubrit
members expressly encouraged the building of chemical plants in Paris, as
shown by numerous reports supporting the four flagship factories mentioned
above. These factories belonged to the first class according to the decree, but
had been set up prior to it. Their assessment by the Conseil de salubrit was
spurred by complaints from neighbours. Impressed by these magnificent fac-
tories for which substantial capital had been raised, the Conseil systematically
ruled in their favor. Complainants were discredited as reflecting the much-
admired entrepreneurs reverse image, their complaints deemed even less
reasonable because at each inspection, improvements were observed. To
explain why complaints persisted, the Conseil blamed exuded fumes on acci-
dents, themselves considered rare and due to worker negligence, an increasingly
standard response from the nineteenth century. Hopes about further improve-
ment rested on the wager that scientific theorizing and laboratory tests could
and would be confirmed on an industrial scale. Despite multiple protests, none
of the main factories were threatened with closure.
Instead, the chemical industry became a pillar for industrial governance,
with chemists and other scientists given a crucial role. On one hand, they were
granted authority through claims of how they stimulated further industrial
innovations. On the other hand, they were asked to exercise that authority as
arbiters of the governmentally sponsored drive for national prosperity and
perfection of the arts while attending to matters of public health. Like Achilles
spear, chemistry was thus poised to cure the wound it had inflicted.52 In call-
ing for grouping insalubrious industries together in certain areas, for example,
the Conseil de salubrit member Parent-Duchtelet showed the way:
[A] special government official will be able to supervise them effectively

and implement the conditions required to ensure public health. We
stress the importance of the latter point, to show that large manufactur-
ing centres will not become, as we might have feared, sites of infection by
expelling their poisonous atmosphere far away, but will contribute to the
52 Victor de Molon, ed., Rapports gnraux sur les travaux du Conseil de salubrit de la ville
de Paris et du dpartement de Seine. Annes 1802-1839 (Paris: Bureau du Recueil industriel,
1828-1841), vol. 1, 207-208.

200 Le Roux
advancement and sanitizing of factories, and perhaps also to the improve-

ment of the arts.53
This sanitizing by chemistry was carried out in several ways, depending on the
industry, through disinfection, smoke consumption or condensation. In indus-
tries using putrescible matter, disinfection was one of the preferred means of
applying the recommended procedures. The first large-scale trials were carried
out in Parisian gut factories using chlorinated products, in a decisive battle
against putrid infection. In 1820, the Socit dencouragement pour lindustrie
nationale created an award for manufacturers who could dress guts without
prolonged maceration or noxious smells. The model gut factory in Clichy near
Paris became a site for testing disinfection, using the new method of the phar-
macist Antoine Germain Labarraque. The guts were steeped in a soda chloride
bath, which removed the smell straight away. Though expensive, the method
was quicker than the old one and succeeded in sanitizing the factory. In
October1822, Labarraque was awarded the prize and the Conseil de salubrit
recommended the method to every new gut factory, assuming that it would
also be adopted in older factories in a few years.54 The disinfecting properties
of acids were also put to use, thanks to their powers of decomposition. Darcet
tested the use of sulfuric acid himself for melting tallow in the new Parisian
slaughterhouses after 1818. In the 1820s, the acid was also used to purify oils in
many Parisian workshops, distilleries and potato starch factories, where it
immediately turned starch to syrup, and in beet sugar refineries, where it pre-
vented decay. Darcet began to use muriatic acid in 1815 to extract gelatine from
bones, and encouraged strong glue manufacturers to adopt his method.55 With
regard to smoke consumption in furnaces, he was once more at the heart of
technological change to cut down the amount of industrial smoke. To reduce
the incidence of industrial smoke increasingly criticized by city dwellers, espe-
cially as the use of fossil coal had begun to spread in Parisian industries, the
Conseil dEtat strove to recommend the construction of smokeless furnaces.
Having witnessed the first lasting attempt to build a smokeless furnace at
the mint in 1808, Darcet continuously encouraged the adoption of this kind
53 Alexandre Parent-Duchtelet, Hygine publique (Paris: Baillire, 1836), vol. 2, 326.

54 Molon, Rapports, vol. 1, pp.141-142, 163 and 319-322 (see note 52).
55 Jean-Pierre Darcet, Antoine Germain Labarraque, Jean-Baptiste Huzard, and Henri-Fran-
ois Gaultier de Claubry, Rapport sur lexamen comparatif de la fonte des suifs feu nu,
et par lintermdiaire de lacide sulfurique, Annales dhygine publique et de mdecine
lgale 24 (1840): 54-78; Mmoire sur divers emplois de la glatine extraite des os, par le
procd de M. dArcet, Annales de lindustrie nationale et trangre 7 (1822): 276-285.

of smoke burning furnace with improved combustion and perfected the

technology.
Finally, the expansion of the chemical industry in the Paris region forced
manufacturers to take technical measures to preserve the surrounding areas.
Condensing, absorbing, dissolving and closed-system production were all
complementary methods implemented to coerce or retain the vapours pro-
duced by the manufacturing or use of chemicals by industry. In the 1820s, the
Conseil de salubrits efforts to condense acid vapours increased. Whenever
possible, closed-system production was encouraged in acid factories. Woulfes
apparatus, in which gases were forced to pass through a series of tubes and
vessels filled with water or liquid absorbents, was recommended in nitric acid
workshops.56 Other condensation devices were proposed for various indus-
tries that implemented chemicals and acids in particular. This was the case for
precious metal refining, for instance. Gold and silver refining, no longer
restricted by a Directory government monopoly and performed subsequently
with less expensive methods using sulfuric acid instead of nitric acid, was car-
ried out in several Parisian workshops after1815. Having observed various
technical processes at the mint, Darcet set out to prove their harmlessness pro-
vided a number of steps were followed to ensure gas condensation. Therefore,
industrys presence within cities hinged on the manufacturers ability to pre-
vent the discharge of acid gases. In 1827, Darcet himself designed a model
refining workshop and its furnishings. In the refining furnace, five closed plati-
num vessels allowed acid gases to discharge through a lead pipe and flow into
a single pipe under the workshop towards three refrigerated lead boxes, where
the sulfuric acid fumes condensed. Uncondensed sulfuric vapours remaining
in the gas were then removed by directing the gas into a box filled with hydrated
lime, which rotated on itself when operated by a crank and a gear system. This
mixed the lime and improved contact with and absorption of the sulfuric acid.
Finally, a pipe discharged any remaining vapours from the box into the main
workshop stack.57
The same reasoning was applied to recycling. In the 1820s, the chemists
Charles Derosne and Anselme Payen embarked on producing depurative
56 Molon, Rapports, vol. 1, p.160 (see note 52).

57 Jean-Pierre Darcet, Instruction relative lart de laffinage (Paris: impr. de Huzard-Courcier,
1827); Jean-Pierre Darcet, Seconde instruction relative lart de laffinage (Paris: Bachelier,
1828); Thomas Le Roux, Dclinaisons du conflit. Autour des atteintes environne-
mentales de laffinage des mtaux prcieux, Paris, annes 1820, Thomas Le Roux and
Michel Lett, eds., Dbordements industriels dans la cit et leurs conflits, XVIII-XXIe sicles
(Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013), 179-198.

202 Le Roux
organic compounds (bone-black and animalized carbon) from animal residue.

Recovered animal waste was made into chemicals with sanitizing properties,
for example to clarify and purify beet sugar, while partly addressing the prob-
lem of refuse disposal. Against charges of polluting the neighbourhood, the
Conseil de Salubrit praised Derosnes operation for recycling wastes, boosting
production and sanitizing the environment:
This animal matter [livestock blood], which used to be wasted and often
spoiled the air as it decayed, is now carefully collected to be used in
numerous sugar refineries [] and will be turned into a worthwhile
export industry; the fortuitous benefit of an industry in operation, which
extracts a useful product out of a worthless substance and turns an
unhealthy cause into a new source of wealth.58
Like Derosne, Payen was involved in the chemistry of recycling animal waste,
which he distilled in his Grenelle plant to make ammonium chloride.59 By
1820, the factory had become a huge industrial complex, also manufacturing
soda chloride, lime chloride, animalized carbon, sugar, and so forth. While pol-
lution from recycling on such a large scale was frequent and at times permanent,
the Conseil de Salubrit found a convenient answer in proposing to recycle the
recycling plants main waste, empyreumatic oil, which they offered to gas fac-
tories. These could distil the oil into lighting gas, in exchange for which the
soda chloride factory could then treat the ammoniated waste that they pro-
duced.60 Therefore, most of the time, sanitizing processes combined waste
recycling and its profitable reclamation.
This insistence on promoting technical improvement explains why chem-
ists became so fond of engraved technical drawings, which were soon adopted
by the Bulletin de la Socit dEncouragement pour lIndustrie Nationale. From
the first issue published in 1802, the Bulletin included copper-engraved plates
as inserts, showing the emerging graphical art form that was developing
around the Conservatoire des arts et mtiers.61 Unlike representations by artists,
who had distanced themselves from production sites during the revolutionary
decades, technical drawing was a political undertaking in itself. As a tool for
58 Molon, Rapports, vol. 1, p.286 (see note 52).

59 Sabine Barles, Linvention des dchets urbains: France, 1790-1970 (Seyssel: Champ Vallon,
2005), 38-39.
60 Molon, Rapports, vol. 2, pp.15-17 (see note 52).
61 Yves Deforges, Le graphisme technique. Son histoire et son enseignement (Seyssel: Champ
Vallon, 1981).

rationalization, it introduced a new symbolic order that established technol-

ogy as superior to work places and physical movements.62
Chemistry was at the heart of the combination of technical devices and law:
environmental governance simply conformed to the necessities of competitive
industrial production. In March 1815, to explain the shift to local prefects, the
government tried to clarify the new approach and the spirit that should guide
their decisions on implementing the 1810 law: Before, the existence of chemi-
cal factories was precarious in some respects [] In reviewing authorisation
applications [the local authorities] will most certainly rise above petty inter-
ests; and driven only by reasons of public interest, they will give opinions based
on considerations of a higher order.63 Sulfuric acid production improved con-
tinuously as greater numbers of lead chambers appeared; they symbolized the
analogy between economic growth, political economy, chemistry and techni-
cal and environmental devices. Increasingly effective lead chambers were one
of the advanced industries that could better prevent acid vapours, and was
typical of scientists discourses. According to Chaptal, in 1819, this technology
had reached perfection, as not one sulphur atom was lost in the operation as
proven by the analysis carried out on the acid produced.64 Without any loss of
acid, and therefore, no loss of value for the manufacturer, virtuous profit was
combined with environmental protection, Chaptal claimed.
Conclusion
Thus, linked to industrial production and scientific improvement, chemistry

contributed to change environmental perceptions of the industrial world by
the turn of the nineteenth century. The mistrust widely shared by local author-
ities, social observers and citizens regarding factory and workshop emissions
was replaced by a new definition of harmfulness and harmlessness as industri-
alization imposed its pace, in order to adapt to the claimed imperative of
62 Ken Alder, Innovation and Amnesia: Engineering rationality and the fate of interchange-
able parts manufacturing in France, Technology and Culture 38 (1997): 273-311; Eda Krana-
kis, Constructing a Bridge: An exploration of engineering culture, design and research in
nineteenth-century France and America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Olivier Lavoisy
and Dominique Vinck, Le dessin comme objet intermdiaire de lindustrie, Pierre Del-
cambre, ed., Communications organisationnelles. Objets, pratiques et dispositifs (Rennes:
Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2000), 47-63.
63 Archives de la Prfecture de police, DB 134, instruction by the Director-General for Agri-
culture, Commerce, Crafts and Industry to the department prefect, 4 March 1815.
64 Jean-Antoine Chaptal, De lindustrie franaise (Paris: Renouard, 1819), vol. 2, 65.

204 Le Roux
economic growth. While this shift was perceptible from the 1770s with the first
regulatory exceptions for strategic products, the 1810 decree imagined,
designed and implemented by chemists perpetuated chemistrys role as an
environmental regulator. Chemistry and its practitioners helped build an
industrial world at a time when its arrival was not universally welcomed. After
1815, there was no doubt that industrial advancement had become a value
shared by many actors. Through their experiments as well as their discourses
and involvement in industrial applications for their discoveries, chemists par-
ticipated in this expansion more than others. The authorities provided a great
deal of support, especially in resolving conflicts about pollution caused by the
chemical industry, by conceiving an administered regulatory framework that
justified industrialism. In 1816, in a retrospective essay on industrial growth
since the Revolution, Chaptals first assistant Claude-Anthelme Costaz sang
the merits of the 1810 decree: We are not afraid to say that it has been of great
benefit to owners and manufacturers [] [who] [] are now assured not to be
bothered when carrying out their business once it has been authorized by the
authorities: which is not inconsequential for the prosperity of chemical
factories.65
65 Claude-Anthelme Costaz, Histoire de ladministration, en France, de lagriculture, des arts

utiles, du commerce, des manufactures (first edition 1816; Paris: Vve Bouchard-Huzard,
1843), 375-376.

Renegotiating Debt: Chemical Governance and Money 205
Chapter 8
Renegotiating Debt: Chemical Governance and

Money in the Early Nineteenth-Century Dutch
Empire
Andreas Weber
When Johannes Goldberg, head of the Netherlands Department of Trade and

Colonies (Departement van Koophandel en Kolonin), left his office in The
Hagues city center in early spring 1816, he was full of expectations. After
months of reflecting on how to mitigate the high level of debt accrued from the
colonies in Southeast Asia, he had just dispatched instructions for a complete
monetary reform program to the governor general in Batavia, the administra-
tive seat of the Dutch in the Indonesian Archipelago.1 Since the demise of the
former Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1799, colonial debt had become a
heavy burden for the Dutch treasury.2 Goldberg hoped that the introduction of
a new currency, the colonial guilder, would help resolve this problem by capi-
talizing on Java and the neighbouring islands agricultural wealth.3 However,
establishing trust in the new money in maritime Southeast Asia turned out to
be a challenging endeavor, not least because the actual realization of monetary
policy depended on the practices of locally situated mint masters, assayers and
other chemical practitioners who engaged with the production and circulation
of paper notes and metal coins both at home and in the colonies. This essay
demonstrates that, instead of simply serving their metropolitan masters, these
historical actors and material objects had a direct hand in shaping imperial
policies through their involvement in localized processes of chemical
governance.
As explained in the introduction to this volume, the concept of chemical
governance enables us to follow the various ways in which chemical knowl-
1 The report, which is dated 12 March 1816, and all additional material is now stored at the
National Archive [=NA], The Hague, collectie Goldberg, 162.
2 On the tremendous public debt after the Napoleonic Wars, Wantje Fritschy, De patriotten en
de financin van de Bataafse Republiek. Hollands krediet en de smalle marges voor een nieuw
beleid (1795-1801) (s-Gravenhage: Stichting Hollandse Historische Reeks, 1988), 40-41.
3 The idea of using a new currency to renegotiate debt has a long history and goes at least back
to China in the ninth century AD. Philip Coggan, Paper Promised: Debt, money and the new
world order (New York: Public Affairs, 2012).
Andreas Weber, 2018|doi 10.1163/9789004325562_010


206 Weber
edge, know-how and substances were harnessed sometimes in quite

mundane ways to realize the mediating embodiment of policy-making mea-
sures. In some cases this entailed the experimental construction of material
standards and instruments for the policing of commodities through tests for
purity and adulteration, or the establishment of excise and taxation regimes.4
In other cases, such as that examined in this essay, it entailed the production of
objects that materialized systems of value and exchange, enabling the instan-
tiation and authorization of these systems through the combination of their
mobility and durability, on one hand, and leaving them subject to local nego-
tiation and appropriation on the other.
By approaching Goldbergs monetary reform through the lens of chemical
governance, this essay develops two closely related components discussed in
this volumes introduction. First, it draws attention to the activities of actors
whose practices and products were mundanely responsible for giving materi-
alized form and substance to policies. Chemistry and knowledge of materials
turned out to be critical to what might appear to be a rather abstract financial
policy. Putting their specialized knowledge and skills regarding inks, papers
and alloys to work, mint masters and assayers translated initial policy pro-
nouncements into the notes and coins whose circulation determined how
policies actually unfolded. This meant that those who engaged in chemical
practices on a more local level away from metropolitan centers could none-
theless exert formative influence over global policies. This chapter moves
outside Europe to show that processes of chemical governance were by no
means confined to the European stage. Far from simply enabling or constrain-
ing policy enforcement, this essay argues, the locally made choices of metallic
composition, symbolic decoration and the like ascribed values to currency that
might differ from those which were originally conceived in the metropolitan
capital.5
This account adds a chemical element to Michel Foucaults notion that
power is better seen operating in geographically complex fields of operation
than via the hands of a few government ministers and administrators. Power
does not reside in individuals but is dispersed, in this case through varied acts
4 Joppe van Driel and Lissa Roberts, Circulating Salts: Chemical governance and the bifurcation
of nature and society, Eighteenth-Century Studies 49 (2016): 233-263; William Ashworth,
Customs and Excise: Trade, production and consumption in England, 1640-1845 (Oxford: Oxford
5 Referencing the work of Madeleine Akrich, Michel Callon writes succinctly, Without the
material device the operating instructions are meaningless. Michel Callon, What Does it
Mean to Say that Economics is Performative?, CSI Working Papers Series 5 (2006): 1-58, on 12.

of circulating and manipulating materials.6 In place of considering the metro-

politan state as the centralized motor of empire building, this essay reveals the
geography of policymakings practical field to have been polycentric and
rooted in decisions about materials. At the same time, however, the decentral-
ized character of imperial policymaking was often obscured. The outcomes of
local initiatives and acts of appropriation, which shaped the realization of pol-
icy, became associated for better or worse with the metropolitan actors
under whose policy jurisdiction they officially fell. While chemical practice
could thus alter the content and consequences of centrally conceived policy
and policymakers, it takes effort to recover its traces.7
Goldbergs responsibilities for the establishment and policing of colonial
policy began in 1814 when the Dutch king asked him he was at that time head
of the Court for Commerce in The Hague (Rechtbank van Koophandel) to set
up and instruct a new colonial government in Batavia. Following the British
occupation of Batavia between 1811 and 1815, Willem I and his advisors hoped
that Goldbergs expertise and skill as an administrator would help turn the
colonies into a financially rewarding annex of the Dutch kingdom.8 Similar to
the French revolutionary governments decision to introduce assignats the
French revolutionary currency with which Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier was
involved two decades before, the Dutch king requested Goldberg to intro-
duce a new paper currency in the colonies. Goldberg and the Crown hoped
that the colonys proto-bankers would accept this new currency in exchange
for silver and gold coins that could be used to pay colonial debts at home. In
order to endow Goldberg with the authority and status to master this chal-
lenge, the king not only installed him as the well-paid head of the Netherlands
Department of Trade and Colonies but also made him a member of the Dutch
nobility. Within a couple of months, Goldberg became one of Willem Is most
6 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977(New York:
Pantheon, 1980).
7 As such, the chapter might be seen as a chemical version of Michel de Certeaus celebrated
account of resistance in Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
8 For the Dutch kings high expectations regarding the colonys revenue, see Thomas Stevens,
Van der Capellens koloniale ambitie op Java. Economisch beleid in een stagnerende conjunctuur,
1816-1826 (Amsterdam: Historisch Seminarium van de Universiteit van Amsterdam, 1982), 216-
219; For Goldbergs earlier involvement in organizing the monetary system at home, see
Roland Uittenbogaard, Evolution of Central Banking? De Nederlandsche Bank 1814-1852
(Dordrecht: Springer 2015), 50-55.

208 Weber
important advisors regarding the management of Dutch possessions in the

Indonesian Archipelago.9
As in the history of assignats, Goldbergs monetary reform program points
to the inherently political nature of administrative expertise. Again similar to
Lavoisier, Goldberg was confronted with the following challenge: how to con-
vince proto-bankers and plantation owners in the colonies to link their private
capital to that of the Dutch state, which faced heavy colonial debts?10 Ironically,
perhaps, there was a fundamental difference between their chosen solutions.
Lavoisier considered paper money issued by a privately owned bank as the
best solution to mitigate debt. Goldberg, on the other hand, opted for a pro-
gram that was inseparably composed of chemical and political components. In
order to convince the colonys proto-bankers to accept the new currency,
Goldberg saddled the colonial government with the task of supplementing the
introduction of his new paper money in total six million guilders with spe-
cially minted silver and copper coins. As Goldberg put it, only if the colonial
government were able to prove publicly and repeatedly its ability to exchange
paper money for silver and copper coins would the colonys proto-bankers
gradually accept the new currency as a trustworthy medium of exchange.11 In
practice, this meant that establishing trust in the new currency rested on gain-
ing the support and cooperation of mint masters, assayers, skilled artisans and
wealthy investors.
In the end, Goldbergs efforts led to little. Owing to his inability to recruit
and control local chemical expertise, the entire project turned out to be a
costly failure. Instead of stabilizing his position as one of the main voices in
Willem Is inner circle of advisors, Goldberg found himself shifted to a less
influential position as the king decided to dissolve the Department of Trade
and Colonies.12 As a consequence, Goldberg continuously suffered from severe
financial problems. Even after his death, his family was exposed to creditors
claiming money from his bequest.13
9 W.M. Zappey, De economische en politieke werkzaamheid van Johannes Goldberg (Brussels:

N. Samson, 1967), 99-100.
10 On Lavoisiers involvement in developing a new currency in France, see Charles Gillispie,
Science and Polity in France: The revolutionary and Napoleonic years (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2004), 84-86. For a more recent analysis, see Rebecca Spang, Stuff and
Money in the Time of the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2015), chapter 2.
11 NA The Hague, collectie Goldberg, 162A, letter Goldberg to General Committee (Commis-
sie generaal), s Gravenhage, 18 March 1816.
12 Zappey, De economische en politieke werkzaamheid, p.170 (see note 9).
13 Ibid., p.193.

By analysing Goldbergs failure through the lens of chemical governance,

this essay differs from other studies on scientific inquiry in the context of the
early nineteenth-century Dutch empire.14 While older numismatic scholarship
has laid important groundwork, others have based their narratives on issues
such as the diffusion and failure of enlightened science in the colonial Indo
nesian Archipelago (Lewis Pyenson, Andrew Goss and Pieter Boomgaard).15 In
particular Goss attempt to separate science and governance analytically into
two independent narratives has received scholarly criticism.16 Boomgaards
approach is more nuanced but shares the disadvantage that it also relies on a
normative notion of how science should have developed in the Indonesian
Archipelago. For him, the key point is that the lack of metropolitan financial
and organizational support led to a lack of scholarly excellence in the early
nineteenth-century Indonesian Archipelago.17 Unlike historians such as Pyen
son, Goss and Boomgaard, this essay does not divide the analysis of governance
and science into metropolitan and local colonial trajectories; neither is it
interested in making normative judgments about scientific quality. By con-
ceptualizing chemical governance as a process in which chemical practice was
used to intermediate between local interests (for example of mint masters and
assayers) and goals formulated in Europe, this essay uses Goldbergs experi-
ence to shed light on the particularities through which chemical practice
14 For a similar use of the concept in a European context, see Van Driel and Roberts, Circu-
lating Salts (see note 4).
15 For the first see John Bucknill, The Coins of the Dutch East Indies (London: Spink, 1931);
Cornelis Scholten, De munten van de Nederlandsche gebiedsdelen oversee, 1601-1948
(Amsterdam: J. Schulman, 1951). For the latter see Lewis Pyenson, Empire of Reason. Exact
sciences in Indonesia 1840-1940 (Leiden: Brill, 1989); Andrew Goss, The Floracrats. State-
sponsored science and the failure of enlightenment in Indonesia (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2011); Peter Boomgaard, ed., Empire and Science in the Making. Dutch
colonial scholarship in comparative global perspective, 1760-1830 (New York: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2013).
16 See, for instance, Robert E. Elsons review of The Floracrats in the American Historical
Review 116 (2011): 1469 and Robert-Jan Wille, The Coproduction of Station Morphology
and Agricultural Management in the Tropics: Transformations in botany at the botanical
garden at Buitenzorg, Java 1880-1904, Denise Phillips and Sharon Kingsland, eds., New
Perspectives on the History of Life Sciences and Agriculture (Cham: Springer International
Publishing, 2015), 253-275; For a criticism of Pyenson, see Paolo Palladino and Michael
Worboys, Science and Imperialism, Isis 84 (1993), 91-102.
17 Boomgaard, ed., Empire and Science, p.18 (see note 15).

210 Weber
shaped governance in Europe and Southeast Asia in the early nineteenth

century.18
To carry out this analysis, this essay focuses on two episodes of chemical
governance. By zooming in on the production of the new money in the
Netherlands, the first episode shows how Goldberg struggled to acquire local
support for the introduction of a new currency. While the Haarlem printers
Joh. Ensched en Zonen considered Goldbergs governance scheme an ideal
opportunity to capitalize on their accumulated chemical skills, the mint mas-
ters and assayers in Utrecht read it as a threat to their status and authority. In
particular Goldbergs attempt to circumvent the Utrecht mints monopoly by
relying on a consortium of private manufacturers stirred tensions between the
government and mint masters there.
While the mint in Utrecht openly refused to collaborate with Goldberg, the
mint master and assayer in the Dutch East Indies chose a more subtle reaction,
which provides the focus of this essays second episode. Here, Goldbergs
dream of reducing public debt in the Netherlands by introducing a new cur-
rency system in the colonies was transformed by the colonial mint master and
assayer, who used chemical practices to appropriate his project for the pursuit
of local interests. Taken together, the two episodes show that conferring
authority over and value to money required a heavily managed and globally
distributed process that was often built on quite mundane decisions about
chemical practice.
Co-operation and Resistance in the Netherlands
The production of Goldbergs money first required chemical expertise in the

Netherlands. While the national mint in Utrecht was tasked with producing
silver and copper coins, the paper money was produced by the Haarlem com-
pany Joh. Ensched en Zonen. Since 1795, the company regularly supplied the
government with a large amount of promissory notes and paper bills.19 It was
18 This definition resonates with what governance scholars have conceptualized as de facto
governance. See Arie Rip, De Facto Governance of Nanotechnologies, Morag Goodwin,
Bert-Jaap Koops, and Ronald Leenes, eds., Dimensions of Technology Regulation (Nijme-
gen: Wolf Legal Publishers, 2010), 285-308.
19 N.L.M. Arkestijn, Met de bajonet op de keel. Inkopen met ongedekt papiergeld, in E.H.P.
Cordfunke and H. Sarfatij, eds., Van Solidus tot euro: Geld in Nederland in economisch-his-
torisch en politiek perspectief (Hilversum: Verloren, 2004), 139-146. For a broader history of
the production of bank notes, see Colin Narbeth, Robin Hendy, and Christopher Stocker,
Historische bankbiljetten en aandelen (Baarn: Moussaults Uitgeverij, 1979), 29-44.

therefore relatively easy for Goldberg to activate the printers support. The pro-
duction of Goldbergs new currency in Haarlem emerged from negotiations
involving chemical expertise and deep knowledge of different raw materials.
In order to provide printers such as Joh. Ensched en Zonen with suitable
paper, paper manufacturers in Boxtel and the Zaan area had teamed up with a
chemist in Amsterdam to develop and work with liquid bleaching agents that
had been described by the French chemist Claude Louis Berthollet a few years
before.20
The production of durable and whitish paper, which was compatible with
different inks and letter types, was chemically challenging for paper makers
and printers. While one-guilder notes were printed in black, higher denomina-
tions were printed in red and blue, requiring consideration of the substances
used to make the colours. Some of the notes were marked with a printed stamp
that had a reddish-brown colour (Fig. 8.1).21
Moreover, since some of the bills had to be signed by government officials in
the colonies, the paper had also to be coated with a special layer of gelatin to
keep the ink from bleeding. Solutions to these chemical problems demanded
the establishment of highly disciplined spaces and personnel. In order to guard
chemical and other expertise, the company erected a secret print shop
(Geheimdrukkerij) in 1795. Access to this branch of the company was only
allowed for selected staff members who had sworn an oath to remain silent
about the chemical composition of value-bearing papers.22
The production of the new silver and copper coins turned out to involve
even more challenges. Chemical practitioners might unexpectedly cease to
support policy demands. Initially, the Utrecht mint master confirmed his will-
ingness to assist with Goldbergs plan and produced at least one sample of the
new silver guilder (Fig. 8.2). But subsequently Utrecht became unwilling to
cooperate. Following the dissolution of district mints in 1806, the mint in
Utrecht was the only site in the Netherlands where minting took place. When
Goldberg requested Gideon Langerak Du Marchie Servaas, mint master in
20 NHA Haarlem, collection Van Gelder, inv. 1108: Proeven om bleekwater te vervaardigen
(1813). Domestic paper money was apparently also printed on special paper. B.W. de Vries,
De Nederlandse papiernijverheid in de negentiende eeuw (s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff,
1957), 271.
21 For more details on the production of the bills, see Theo van Elmpt, Netherlands East
Indies. Paper currency, 1815-1827 (Uithoorn: Elran Express, 2009), 1-44; A.M. van de Waal,
De oudste bankbiljetten. Eerste relatie van de Nederlandsche Bank met Joh. Ensched en
Zonen, Ontwikkelings- en ontspanningsvereniging De Nederlandsche Bank 8 (1953), 4-14.
22 Frans Willem Lantink et al., Voor stad en staat, vol. 1: Plattegrond (Amsterdam: Joh.
Ensched, 2003), 42.

212 Weber
Figure 8.1 Sample of paper money with the value of one colonial guilder. The musical notation
in the margin was based on a special letter type which the German type cutter J.M.
Fleischmann had developed exclusively for Johan Ensched in Haarlem in the 1770s.
(NA The Hague, collectie Goldberg, inv. 162). Image published under CC-BY by
the National Archive, The Hague.
Figure 8.2
Sample of new colonial guilder produced at the
mint in Utrecht in 1814 or 1815. Image used by
the kind permission of De Nederlandsche
Bank.

Utrecht from 1797, to produce the necessary silver alloy, the latter rejected the
order by referring to the mints limited capacity.23
While historians have simply reiterated the mints claim of limited capacity
as a valid explanation, it seems more likely that the mint masters rejection
mirrors growing friction between the government and the mint.24
At the time when Goldberg began searching for producers of the new silver
coins, tensions between the mint in Utrecht and the government in The Hague
were rising. In particular, the governments decision to request that a consor-
tium of private entrepreneurs take on the production and minting of copper
coins irritated Yman Dirk Christiaan Suermondt, who had succeeded Du
Marchie Servaas as mint master in 1815.25 The consortium included the Amster
dam silversmith Hendrik de Heus, who had previously produced 175 tons of
copper coins for the Southeast Asian colonies in 1802, and copper millers from
the Veluwe.26 In the course of 1815 they produced thirty-five tons of copper
coins for a price that undercut the Utrecht mint.27 De Heus could offer low
prices since he had successfully equipped his workshop with steam driven
machinery for the flattening of coins. Circumventing the mints monopoly was
not a new phenomenon, for Suermondt and his colleagues in Utrecht had
previously complained about the governments decision to hire private entre
preneurs instead of supporting their monopoly.28
The mints growing resistance against Goldbergs plan to produce a new cur-
rency created other governance challenges. While paper money with the value
of one guilder in the metropole was officially backed with silver coins contain-
ing 9.614 gram of fine silver, Goldberg struggled to determine the colonial
23 For a good contextualization, see Marcel van der Beek, s Rijks Munt en de aanmuntingen
door De Heus, De Beeldenaar 2 (1995): 357-366.
24 For the first see, for instance, Copius Hoitsema and F. Feith, De Utrechtsche munt uit haar
verleden en heden (Utrecht: Oosthoek, 1912).
25 Pieter Hendrik van der Kemp, De teruggave der Oost-Indische kolonin 1814-1816 (s-Graven-
hage: M. Nijhoff, 1910), 234; Pieter Hendrik van der Kemp, Episodes uit de geschiedenis
der aanmuntingen ten behoeve van Oost-Indi, 1802-1807, Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en
volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indi 70:2 (1915): 227-440, 310.
26 J. MacLean, Koperindustrie in Nederland, 1750-1850, Economisch en social-historisch
jaarboek 43 (1971): 39-63, 42.
27 Van der Kemp, Episodes uit de geschiedenis, pp.331-338 (see note 25). On Van Heus and
his company, see H.A. Diederiks, Hendrik de Heus. Een Amsterdamse ondernemer in het
begin van de 19e eeuw, Amstelodamum 56 (1969): 58-65, and MacLean, Koperindustrie in
Nederland, pp.39-63 (see note 26). For a fascinating micro-history of one of the involved
copper mills in the Veluwe, see Henri Slijkhuis, De kopermolen in Zuuk (Vorchten: De
Bekenstichting, 2015).
28 Van der Kemp, Episodes uit de geschiedenis, pp.288-300 (see note 25).

214 Weber
equivalent.29 He wished to avoid a situation whereby the new coins would sim-
ply end up in China and other parts of Asia where the silver was used for
artwork or religious purposes. Eventually Goldberg advised the Dutch crown
to produce silver guilders, which contained about 20 percent less fine silver
than the ones which were used in the Netherlands.30 Owing to the aforemen-
tioned tensions with the mint in Utrecht, he chose not to base this decision on
the expertise of the mint master. Neither did he turn to Willem Adriaan Arnold
Poelman, inspector and assayer general in Utrecht since 1814. Poelman, who
had served previous governments as a mint expert, only assayed two colonial
silver coins for Goldberg.31 Since these coins had been produced in the years
before the British took over Java in 1811, the mints assay did not help Goldberg
to assess the current situation in Java. Resistance from chemical practitioners
led Goldberg to rework his plans. Instead of drawing upon Poelmans experi-
ence and contacts with metal traders, assayers and inspectors of weights and
measures in Batavia, Goldberg chose to base his decision on policy documents
taken from the archives of the VOC and the Council for the Asian Possessions
and Establishments (Raad der Aziatische Bezittingen en Etablissementen),
which contained the opinions of former colonial government officials.32
In turn, Du Marchie and Poelmans reluctance to support Goldberg cannot
be justified by referring to the technical complexity of the chemical examina-
tion of coins. Although assays could sometimes take several days, they involved
a standard technique of precision which mint masters usually employed in
29 Jean Hendrik van Swinden, Bedenkingen over het muntwezen (Utrecht: Het Geldmuseum,
1997; transcription of an unpublished manuscript dated 1815), 11.
30 For the first see Willem G. Wolters, The Doit Infestation in Java: Exchange rates between
silver and copper coins in Netherlands India in the period, 1816-1854, in Hans Ulrich
Vogel, ed., Money in Asia (1200-1900): Small currencies in social and political contexts
(Leiden: Brill, 2015), 108-139, 126-127. Pieter Hendrik van der Kemp, De Nederlandsche-
Indische proefgulden van 1815, Tijdschrift voor munten penningkunde (1913): 21-60, 24
labels Goldbergs decision as unnatural.
31 For a short biography of Poelman, see Albert A.J. Scheffers, Om de kwaliteit van het geld.
Het toezicht op de muntproductie in de Republiek en de voorziening van kleingeld in
Holland and West-Friesland in de achttiende eeuw (PhD diss., Leiden University, 2013),
vol. 2, 443-444.
32 For the global character of material expertise see Albert A.J. Scheffers, Johan Sebastiaan
van Naamen, Muntmeester van Batavia 1764-1768 en Utrecht 1782-1797 in perspectief, De
Muntkoerier 42 (2013): 18-19; and Simon Schaffer, Assay Instruments and the Geography
of Precision on the Guinea Trade, Marie-Nolle Bourget, Christian Licoppe and H. Otto
Sibum, eds., Instruments, Travel and Science. Itineraries of precision from the seventeenth to
the twentieth century (London: Routledge, 2002), 20-50.

their small laboratories.33 The result of the assay depended heavily on the
availability of bone ash cupels and precise balances which were used to weigh
the coin material before and after the analysis.34 In order to separate fine silver
from copper and other base metals, the assayer melted each of the coins and
then put them together with a piece of lead in a cupellation furnace, designed
for high temperatures. After the oxidation and evaporation of the base metals,
the remaining piece of fine silver (koninkje) was then soaked in nitric acid in
order to remove the last remnants of other materials. By comparing the weight
of the koninkje with the weight of the original coin, assayers were able to calcu-
late the metal content of the assayed coins.
Owing to the lack of additional information, the Dutch crown simply fol-
lowed Goldbergs advice. After Willem I decided to circulate two coins (one
domestically, the other in the Indonesian Archipelago) with the same denomi-
nation and weight but with a different content of silver, another governance
challenge arose.35 Although the king had reserved sufficient funds for the new
money, Goldberg now struggled to find a suitable production facility. Since his
initial plan to rely on the mint in Utrecht for producing silver coins did not
materialize, he opted to delegate the production to the colonial mint in
Surabaya on the Northeast Coast of Java. Although the Surabaya mint had only
limited experience in supplying the colonies with coins, a frustrated Goldberg
could do nothing more than order the colonial government in Batavia to start
the minting as quickly as possible. Goldberg now had to engage with the mate-
rials of chemical practice himself in order to carry through his policy. To
facilitate the production of coins in Java, Goldberg added additional minting
equipment, such as castings for the production of the dies and pencil drawings
to the shipment of metal he sent to get things started.36 Chemical practitioners
added further frustration to this plan. When Goldberg tried to send the Utrecht
die cutter J.P. Schouberg with the silver to Batavia, Schouberg claimed that his
health would not allow him to travel to Java.37
33 For a description of the process, see Scheffers, Om de kwaliteit, vol. 1, pp.131-134 (see
note 31); and John S. Forbes, Hallmark. A History of the London Assay Office (London: The
Goldsmiths Company, 1999), 20-24.
34 For an in-depth study on gold and silver balances, see Michael A. Crawforth, Weighing
Coins: English folding gold balances of the 18th and 19th centuries (London: Cape Horn
Trading, 1979). Contemporary assay manuals stress the importance of precise assay bal-
ances and equal cupels. Louis N. Vauquelin, Manuel de lessayeur (Paris: Chez le citoyen
Bernard, 1799), 6-14 and 21-24.
35 NA Den Haag, collectie Goldberg, 162: Royal decision 8 November 1815, no. 39.
36 Van der Kemp, De Nederlandsche-Indische proefgulden, pp.33-34 (see note 30).
37 Ibid.

216 Weber
As the next section demonstrates, similar problems beset Goldbergs scheme

once production was transferred abroad. Instead of simply following Goldbergs
orders, the mint in Surabaya and Batavias colonial administrators became
entangled in a struggle regarding the new moneys composition and manage-
ment. The acts of chemical practitioners operating within a complex local
political environment then proved transformative for the realization of
Goldbergs distantly formulated policy.
Balancing Interests in Surabaya
When Goldbergs currency arrived in Java, the colonial government in Batavia

was in an ambiguous position. On the hand, there were men on the spot who
wished to follow Goldbergs orders and add the crates of bills and barrels of
coins to the local circulation.38 On the other hand, Goldbergs plan met severe
local resistance from the colonys elite. Material concerns over silver content
were at the heart of these anxieties. While Goldberg considered the low silver
content of his coins as a tool for preventing them from draining off to other
parts of Asia, the local elite feared that it would devalue the local currency
the rupee which had a much higher silver content. According to British
regulations, one rupee in Java had to contain 10.896 gram of fine silver, which
is almost 30 percent more than Goldbergs coins.39 Since the introduction of
new money formed a serious threat to locally accumulated capital, it is unsur-
prizing that there was resistance. Many local elites had profited heavily from
the export of cash crops such as coffee, indigo and sugar, which they produced
on their large private estates in the hinterland of Batavia.40 With those profits
38 John S. Galbraith introduced the term man on the spot in his pioneering attempt to
understand the active role played by locally situated colonial administrators who sought
to represent colonial rule in a context of required readiness to respond to local exigencies.
See John S. Galbraith, The Turbulent Frontier as a Factor in British Expansion, Com-
parative Studies in Society and History 2 (1960): 150-168.
39 Pieter Hendrik van der Kemp, De zilveren Java-Ropijen van de jaren 1816-1817, Bijdragen
tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indi 67 (1913): 275-366, 304; N.P. van
den Berg, De kwestie over den geldsomloop in Nederlandsch-Indi (Batavia: H.M. van Dorp,
1863), 63-66.
40 On the importance of British, American and Chinese merchants in the region, see
J.R. Fichter, So Great a Proffit. How the East India trade transformed Anglo-American capi-
talism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), chapters 3-6; Leonard Bluss, Vis-
ible Cities. Canton, Nagasaki, and Batavia and the coming of the Americans (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 60-64.

now threatened, conflicts and negotiations would ensue over how the colonys
mint should go about assaying and producing new coins. Chemical practice
thus again became the focus around which Goldbergs policy would be enacted,
resisted and revised.
Local resistance and redirection came in different guises. When news about
Goldbergs monetary reform program spread in Java in late 1816, Batavias mer-
chant elite gently reminded the colonial government that money with the
name of guilders was unknown in the area. Two earlier attempts to produce
and circulate guilders had remained on a small scale and had been short-
lived.41 Moreover, they hinted that the introduction of a new currency would
further threaten the local populations belief in the governments ability to act
as a trustworthy broker of value. In particular, their fears were grounded in the
precedent set by earlier British attempts to issue copper coins of inferior qual-
ity, which had destabilized the situation in Java.42
Since the colonial government depended on the support of these elite mer-
chants many of whom also held high administrative positions colonial
government representatives eventually agreed with some of their concerns
and decided to opt for a compromise. In order to counter their fears of devalu-
ation, the colonial government made two important changes to Goldbergs
plan. First it decreed that the raw silver which had been shipped at Goldbergs
behest should be used to produce silver rupees rather than silver guilders.
Moreover, they ordered the colonys mint master to increase the rupees con-
tent of fine silver to 9.6 grams a value which split the difference between
what Goldberg had expected them to be (7.968 grams) and the local norm
(10.896 grams).43 Since silver coins in the Netherlands also contained 9.6 gram
of silver, the colonial government thus hoped that this compromise would also
be well received at home.
41 Van der Kemp, De zilveren Java-Ropijen, pp.291-292 (see note 39).

42 ANRI Jakarta, Arsip Varia (K 64), Stukken betreffende het muntwezen, box 2, varia 191:
Resident of Rembang to colonial government, 16 July 1825; J.P. Moquette, De munten van
Nederlandsch-Indi, Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 51 (1909): 33-56,
37; For an initial glimpse into the complexity of the trade networks in the region with a
special focus on coinage, see Li Tana, Cochinchinese Coin Casting and Circulating in
Eighteenth-Century Southeast Asia, in Eric Tagliacozzo and Wen-chin Chang, eds., Chi-
nese Circulations. Capital, commodities, and networks in Southeast Asia (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2011), 130-148.
43 Van der Kemp, Episodes uit de geschiedenis, p.396 (see note 25).

218 Weber
At the time when Goldbergs silver arrived in Surabaya in mid-1816, the citys
mint was poorly set up for producing government coinage.44 According to a
survey done during the British interregnum in 1811 or 1812, the facility consisted
of a smelting house (290 56 feet), three sheds with screw presses and other
machines imported from Europe, flattening mills and a chemical workplace
for the material analysis of raw materials and coins.45 In those years, coinage
equipment circulated regularly between Europe, Asia and the Americas.
Matthew Boultons workshop in Birmingham, for instance, supplied a wide
range of coinage facilities in Europe, India, South America and Russia with
tools and equipment.46 Like the mint in Utrecht, the Surabaya mint was
equipped with small iron assay furnaces, glassware, pans for distillation, touch-
stones, and several sets of balances and weights (Fig. 8.3).47
By 1816 production at the Surabaya mint heavily depended on private mint-
ing requests from the colonys elite. Orders were as likely to come from military
men and Javanese aristocrats as local government officials.48 In fact, the pro-
duction volume for privately minted coins often surpassed production for the
government. Whereas the Surabaya mint master and assayer Johan Anthonie
Zwekkert manufactured 36,762 coins for the government in 1814, the following
year the mint produced around 50,000 silver rupees for private individuals.49
For Zwekkert, the introduction of Goldbergs currency was thus a double-
edged sword. On the one hand, processing a relatively large amount of silver
would be a lucrative endeavor; he was allowed to keep 5 percent of the total
amount of fine silver as his salary, next to expenses for the necessary labor
force and equipment.50 On the other hand, the introduction of a new currency
44 On the mints history, see Elisa Netscher and Jacobus A. van der Chijs, De munten van
Nederlandsch-Indi (Batavia: Lange & Co., 1863), appendix 2: Geschiedenis van de munt in
Soerabaja; L.M.J. Boegheim, Franois Loriaux, de stichter van de Duitenmunt te
Soerabaja, De Beeldenaar 3 (1996): 131-134. On Loriaux, see also Van der Kemp, Episodes
uit de geschiedenis, pp.250-59 (see note 25).
45 Bucknill, The Coins, pp.161-172 (see note 15) and J.P. Moquette, De munten, p.35 (see
note 42).
46 Denis R. Cooper, The Art and Craft of Coinmaking. A history of minting technology (Lon-
don: Spink & Son 1988), 123-130.
47 Anonymous, Verhandelingen der munten, maten, en gewigten, van Neerlandsch Indi,
Verhandelingen van het Bataviaasch Genootschap, der kunsten en wetenschappen 6 (1824):
284-86.
48 For the most detailed overview of minting activity during the British interregnum, see
Moquette, De munten, pp.33-96, on 53, 62 and 81 (list of names) (see note 42).
49 Ibid., pp.33-96, appendix G.
50 See article seven of his instructions, which are reprinted in Van der Kemp De zilveren
Java-Ropijen, appendix B (see note 39).

Figure 8.3 Balance used for the weighing of coins, eighteenth century. Image used by the
kind permission of Museum Boerhaave, Leiden.
also formed, as already explained, a threat to the status and capital of the col-
onys elite, who were next to the colonial government Zwekkerts most
important customers. Zwekkert ingeniously managed to accommodate the
interests of both these local clients and the distant government demands of
Goldberg. He informed his superiors in Batavia that he was willing to produce
silver rupees with a lower value of silver (9.614 grams) for the colonial govern-
ment. But he actually used his chemical expertise to increase the silver content
to the British norm (10.896 gram of fine silver), appropriating Goldbergs proj-
ect for ends that protected the interests of his valued local customers.
After Zwekkert had confirmed the governments orders, he first used gov-
ernment funds to increase the mints personnel.51 While Goldberg, the
government minister, had struggled to secure experts in assaying and minting
in the Netherlands, Zwekkert was well-placed to find suitable skilled support,
since he was linked to various networks of artisans in the relevant trades.
Zwekkert assembled a group with a deep understanding of how subtle mate-
rial qualities in coins would effect their success as a currency. Owing to
Surabayas function as an important trading hub in the eastern part of the
Indonesian Archipelago, the city housed skilled artisans such as cupel makers
51 On Zwekkert see Frederik de Haan, Personalia der periode van het Engelsch bestuur over
Java 1811-1816, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde in Nederlandsch-Indi 92 (1935):
477-681, on 669.

220
Figure 8.4 Mineralogical map by Thomas Horsfield, ca. 1816. Batavia and Surabaya are marked with an arrow. Image published under CC0 1.0 Univer-
sal by Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.

Weber
from China and Javanese engravers.52 Cupels (the shallow containers in which
assays were carried out), together with assay balances, were crucial for the pro-
duction of silver coins.53 Before the raw materials were brought to the mints
forge, Zwekkert used them to determine the exact amount of fine silver which
was necessary for the production of the new rupees. Next to local cupel mak-
ers, Zwekkert also relied on the services of the Javanese engraver Inche Maimin
and four of his local helpers. Besides having a thorough material expertise,
engravers such as Inche Maimin also had to be knowledgeable experts on local
monetary culture. Coins such as the rupee had to display a convincing combi-
nation of linguistic and visual features in order to be accepted as a medium of
exchange for local and long-distance trade. Each coin carried Arabic charac-
ters on one side and Javanese characters on the other side. Maimin used rupees
produced by the British in India as a visual guide.54 Zwekkert went to great
efforts to enlist these highly skilled cupel makers and engravers, offering them
permanent and well-paid positions.55 In order to emphasize Maimins role in
relation to local money users, his initial (M) was struck on every Java rupee.
Zwekkert thus went to some lengths to enact a version of Goldbergs policy
that reshaped it to serve his own ends and the interests of his private clients. It
afforded him improvements to his premises and personnel, but also the oppor-
tunity to alter policy. This only became apparent to the government in mid-1817,
after he had handed in detailed balance sheets. When government officials in
Batavia and The Hague started to compare the amount of produced coins with
the amount of silver which was sent to Surabaya, they gradually realized that
Zwekkert had minted a currency that contained much more fine silver than
52 Ulbe Bosma, The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia. Industrial production, 1770-2010
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 107. For a fascinating insight into the Java-
nese metal industry, Gerret P. Rouffaer, De voornaamste industrien der inlandsche bevolk-
ing van Java en Madoera (s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1904), 91-122. For the growing
role of Chinese traders in the region, Kwee H. Kian, The Expansion of Chinese Inter-
Insular and Hinterland Trade in Southeast Asia, c. 1400-1850, in David Henley and Henk
Schulte Nordholt, eds., Environment, Trade and Society in Southeast Asia (Brill: Leiden,
2015), 149-165.
53 For an in-depth description of the process, see Cooper, The Art and Craft, pp.85-87 (see
note 46).
54 Scholten, De munten, p.84 (see note 15).
55 Van der Kemp, De zilveren Java-Ropijen, pp.299-301 (see note 39) and Moquette, De
munten, appendix U (see note 42). From December 1816 to June 1817, Maimin received
384 rupees. High-quality dyes were the best protection against forgery. See also
G.P. Dyer and P.P. Gaspar, Reform, the New Technology and Tower Hill, 1700-1966,
in C.E. Challis, ed., A New History of the Royal Mint (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992), 398-606, on 409.

222 Weber
Table 8.1 Comparing the fine metal content of silver coins involved in Goldbergs reform program. Of
course, the real content of fine metal varied greatly. One ace (aas) is the equivalent of 0.048
gram. For details, see J.H. van Swinden, Bedenkingen over het muntwezen
(Utrecht: Het Geldmuseum, 1997), iv.
Silver money in Silver money in Silver money Silver money as

the Netherlands the colonies as produced by produced by
(1815) projected by the British Zwekkert in
(guilder) Goldberg in 1816 (rupee) Surabaya in
(colonial guilder) 1816/1817.
Amount of fine 200 aces 166 aces 227 aces 227 aces
silver in aces
(rounded)
Amount of fine 9.6 gram 7.968 gram 10.896 gram 10.896 gram
silver in gram
(rounded)
Estimation of ~ 104 coins ~125 coins ~ 91 coins ~ 91 coins
coins minted from
1kg of fine silver
(excluding loss
caused by melting,
etc.)
Owing to Zwekkerts reluctance, roughly 27 percent fewer silver coins were produced than Goldberg and
the Dutch crown had projected in 1816.
either Goldberg or the government in Batavia had planned.56 Since Zwekkert

was using more silver in each coin, the total he produced with the silver sent
from abroad turned out to amount to only some 75 percent of the desired
quantity (Table 8.1). Producing 260,000 silver rupees in Surabaya thus increased
the costs for the new money tremendously. Instead of helping to mitigate pub-
lic debt at home, the production of the currency actually increased the public
debt.
The reactions to these developments were harsh. The colonial government
in Batavia immediately stopped the production of silver coins in Surabaya. It
then intervened directly with the mints organization. According to regulations
of 1819, the mint master had to report on his activity on a weekly basis in order
56 Van der Kemp, De zilveren Java-Ropijen, pp.303-4 (see note 39).

to compensate for the high costs the minting of the silver rupees had created.57
The mint master responded by claiming that the silver which Goldberg had
sent to Batavia must have had a much lower silver content than metal traders
in Europe had promised. But this did not alter the governments distrust of the
mint.58 Until its dissolution in 1843, the mint in Surabaya was never again
asked to mint silver or gold coins for the colonial government.59
Material accommodations to diverse local interests over coinage in Java
thus led to radical consequences for Goldbergs policy at home. Back in the
Netherlands, Zwekkerts behavior and the colonial governments inability to
discipline the mints activities had fatal consequences for Goldbergs career
and the treasury. Instead of maintaining his position in the kings inner circle
of advisors, Goldberg was shifted to a less influential position as the king
decided to dissolve the Department of Trade and Colonies. While the Dutch
crown had first followed Goldbergs plan to introduce the new currency in the
form of paper bills and coins with silver content far below the local norm, the
king eventually opted for a less costly form of managing the colonys agricul-
tural wealth. In order to realign the interests of proto-bankers in Batavia and
at home, the Crown invited them to become shareholders in a new trading
company, the so-called Netherlands Trading Society (Nederlandsche Handel-
Maatschappij, or NHM).60 In order to attract private capital, the NHM was
awarded exclusive rights to ship cash crops and other products from and to the
Indonesian Archipelago. Moreover, the king guaranteed a dividend of 4.5 per-
cent for each share. On the day the shares were issued, wealthy individuals
invested almost 70 million guilders.61 Unlike Goldbergs attempt to reduce
colonial debt by introducing a new paper currency, the NHM was an instant
success because it allowed the Dutch crown to capitalize on the colonys agri-
cultural riches. In 1840, a caricaturist had to remind the Dutch public of the
opportunities merchants in Batavia once had. In order to symbolize the domi-
nant role of the NHM, the anonymous cartoonist depicted the trading company
as a sea monster controlling all ships going to and from Batavia. Seen from the
57 See the instructions of the mint master and other personnel: ANRI Jakarta, K 20 Surabaya,
1254: Ingekomen brieven bij de muntmeester te Surabaya 1818: Reglement op het beheer
en de administratie van de munt in Surabaya.
58 ANRI Jakarta, Muntwezen, no. 7: Mint master to Resident of Surabaya: 15 June 1821.
59 Bucknill, The Coins, chapter 6 (see note 15).
60 Ton de Graaf, Voor handel en Maatschappij. Geschiedenis van de Nederlandsche Handel-
Maatschappij, 1824-1964 (Amsterdam: Boom, 2012), 39-45.
61 J. Jonker and K.E. Sluyterman, At Home on the World Markets: Dutch international trading
companies from the 16th century until the present (The Hague: SDU Uitgevers, 2000), 160.

224 Weber
cartoonists perspective, the NHM had made the accumulation of private

wealth in Batavia impossible.62
By following Goldbergs currency to Java, the second part of this essay has
shown that the colonys mint master and the chemistry of coins played an
active role in the formation and execution of monetary policy. Instead of pas-
sively serving his metropolitan masters, Zwekkert appropriated Goldbergs
project for his own goals, which were shaped by the local networks of which
he was a part. The consequences were not only felt in the colony but also
at home. In order to counter the growing cost of colonial management, the
king resorted to an alternative form of monetary policy. Instead of aiming to
devalue private assets in Batavia, he invited wealthy individuals to invest capi-
tal in a new trading company which received extensive trading rights to and
from the Indonesian Archipelago. By reformulating the governments orders,
the colonys mint master thus prevented locally accumulated private capital
from being used for the tremendous public debt which had accumulated in
the Netherlands.
Conclusion
In the process of governing the Dutch colonies, metropolitan ministers may

have been the first to enunciate policies, but their final shape and conse-
quences depended on the practical contributions of a variety of people and
contexts. In the case of Dutch coinage in Java, the embodied formation and
enactment of policy hinged on chemical practices that the Dutch minister
Goldberg was ill-equipped to manage. Making the new coinage work to relieve
government debt hinged on material considerations of the quantity of silver to
be incorporated into coins, which demanded the skilled assessments and labor
of expert assayers, mint masters, and engravers. So too did they depend on
familiarity with more locally situated social and cultural trends, manifested
in coin design and designation, that afforded local acceptance of what was
62 A digital copy of the caricature, which was titled De Groothandelaar (The Wholesaler)
may be found here: <http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.521867> [accessed
February 22, 2015]. Of course, this is a very simplistic picture. Research by Roger Knight
and Alex Claver has shown that the Indonesian Archipelago continued to offer a fertile
climate for private entrepreneurs. See Roger Knight, Rescued from the Myths of Time:
Toward a reappraisal of European merchant houses in mid-nineteenth century Java, ca.
1830-1870, Bijdragen tot de Taal,- Land- en Volkenkunde 170 (2014): 313-341; Alex Claver,
Dutch Commerce and Chinese Merchants in Java. Colonial relationships in trade and
finance, 1800-1942 (Brill: Leiden, 2014).

otherwise seen as foreign and therefore untrustworthy currency. Unable

to secure such skills at home, Goldberg delegated the production of new coins
to colonial masters, but in so doing had to defer control to persons and institu-
tions that were even farther from his immediate reach. These did not serve him
well. Attuned to a local economy whose moral and material evaluations of cur-
rency were quite at odds with those of the Dutch government, the Surabaya
mint masters reworked the new currency to suit their own ends. The result was
a devastating reversal of the intended policy, costing more money than might
be saved, that ultimately prompted the fall of Goldberg himself.
Approached through the lens of chemical governance, the material dimen-
sions of colonial government become apparent. In Goldbergs case, monetary
policy depended on locally situated chemical expertise. Zwekkert used his
expertise to increase the silver content of the newly produced coins. Since the
exact composition of the coins initially remained invisible to the colonial gov-
ernment, he was able for a time to secure the mints existence and counter the
threat to the wealthy colonial elites private capital and authority, which was
embodied in the introduction of a new currency.
In conclusion, this chapter has shown how modes of government and scien-
tific practice cannot be treated separately in understanding the relations of
metropole and colony in this period. Rather, an understanding of chemical
governance exposes a polycentric world in which power was dispersed amongst
people, skills and practices. Far from simply enabling or constraining policy
enforcement, local initiatives and acts of appropriation which were informed
by chemical expertise shaped the realization of policies. These chemical acts
have subsequently become obscure to historians interested in colonial gover-
nance, at least in part because it was ultimately Goldberg himself who was
formally recognized as responsible for the policys failure. Nonetheless, chemi-
cal practices that were pursued at various distances from the official center of
metropolitan policymaking proved critical to the formative realization of both
colonial and metropolitan governance.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Lissa Roberts, Simon Werrett, Joppe van Driel and Esther
van Gelder for their comments on earlier versions of this essay. I would also
like to thank Erik van der Kam, curator of the National Numismatic Collection
in Amsterdam, for providing with me with some of the visual material used in
this essay, and Johan de Zoete from Museum Enschede in Haarlem for infor-
mation and bibliographical references about the production of paper money
by Joh. Ensched en Zonen.

226 Tomic
Chapter 9
How to Govern Chemical Courses. The Case of the

Paris cole de pharmacie During Vauquelins
Direction, 1803-1829
Sacha Tomic
The Paris School of Pharmacy (cole de pharmacie, hereafter the cole) was
established by the law of 21 Germinal year 11 (April 11, 1803).1 The new establish-
ment succeeded the Free School (cole gratuite) established on 3 Floreal year 4
(April 22, 1796), itself heir of the former Collge de pharmacie established by
the reform of 1777 which separated apothecaries from grocers. This creation
joined in an overall plan of education system renovation following the
Revolution. Under the Consulate, pharmacists educational fate was sealed by
two chemists who held important governmental positions: the Minister of the
Interior Jean Antoine Chaptal and the Council of State and General Director of
Public Instruction Antoine Franois Fourcroy. They considered the training of
the time to be too corporatist and reorganized pharmaceutical education
accordingly. Henceforth, the state regulated pharmacists training on a national
scale.
The coles laboratory exemplifies a two-tiered space of chemistry and
pharmacy education. Its study tackles several questions concerning gover-
nance and laboratory studies. How was the teaching of chemistry and
pharmacy organized? What was the role of the laboratorys staff, including its
invisible personnel?2 What was the moral economy at stake in this educa-
tional context?3 What was the budget and how was it managed? To what extent
did the State intervene in the governance of the institution and its pedagogical
guidance?
1 Two other schools were created, in Montpellier and Strasbourg. See Adolphe Trbuchet,
Jurisprudence de la mdecine, de la chirurgie et de la pharmacie (Paris: J.-B. Baillire, 1834). The
candidates accepted into these schools became first-class pharmacists and could practice
throughout France.
2 Steven Shapin, The Invisible Technician, American Scientist 77 (1989): 554-63.
3 Lorraine Daston, The Moral Economy of Science, Osiris 10 (1995): 2-24; French edition trans-
lated by Samuel Lz with a presentation by Stphane Van Damme, Lconomie morale des
sciences modernes (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2014).
Sacha Tomic, 2018|doi 10.1163/9789004325562_011


How to Govern Chemical Courses 227
In order to tackle these questions, this essay is divided into four sections. It
first examines the coles administrative and pedagogical structure and dis-
cusses the specificity of the chemistry courses organized for pharmacists. The
second part insists especially on the crucial role of the lab assistant (prpara-
teur) in the implementation of experimental courses. The last two sections
examine in detail the coles spending management. Section three presents
the coles good governance through the evolution of its accounts and gives an
estimation of the staffs salaries. The final section proposes an assessment of
global annual average costs for chemistry and pharmacy courses.
Through this case study, this essay provides an example of exploiting finan-
cial sources often neglected in the historiography of science. A detailed
examination of annual budgets and their correlation with bills opens new
perspectives in the study of the relationships between chemistry and gover
nance.
Teaching the New Chemistry to Pharmacists
Continuity largely characterized the coles administrative and educational

structure (Table 9.1). With regard to the Free School, and with the exception of
Simon Morelot, a former treasurer definitively removed from the cole, there
was some persistence of the staff. Half of the direction (director, assistant, sec-
retary and treasurer) was renewed, as was most of the teaching staff (full
professor and his assistant) in the four chairs (chemistry, pharmacy, botany,
natural and medical history or materia medica). The cole also inherited the
Free Schools premises and facilities. This structural continuity explained the
rapid implementation of reform. Soon after the publication of the Ministerial
Order of 25 Thermidor year 11 (August 13, 1803) concerning pharmacy schools
organisation, the administration and professors were appointed by the govern-
mental decree of 15 Vendmiaire year 12 (October 8, 1803). The administration
had to meet at least once a month. Different assemblies could take place at
professors request and once a year the coles personnel met in a general
assembly during the first days of Vendmiaire (September).4 The first assembly
took place on 2 Brumaire year 12 (October 25, 1803) and the cole was officially
settled by a decree of 3 Frimaire year 12 (November 25, 1803) that is, eight
months after laws promulgation.
4 Archives of the Bibliothque InterUniversitaire de Sant (BIUS), register n 25, records of the
assemblies from October 1803 until May 1811.

228 Tomic
Table 9.1 The coles directors and the professors of chemistry and pharmacy.
Direction Chair of Chemistry Chair of Pharmacy
Director: Vauquelin Full professor: Full professor:

Assistant director: Bouillon-Lagrange [1803-1829] Brongniart [1803-1804]
Trusson [1803-1811] Nachet [1804-1832]
Laugier [1811-1829]
Treasurer: Assistant professor: Assistant professor:

Chradame [1803-1824] Henry pre [1803-1826] Bouriat [1803-1832]
Robiquet [1824-1840] Bussy [1826-1830]
Secretary: Bouillon-
Lagrange [1803-1830]
The law of 1803 did not impose a specific program but recommended chem-
istry teaching which was more specially applicable to pharmaceutical science
(Title II, art. 11). How was this institutional call for a pharmaceutical chemistry
put into practice? This question raises the further question of the place of
pharmaceutical practice and chemical theory in the curriculum. Lavoisierian
chemistry and its training model (theory before practice), which official chem-
ists largely adopted, were not accepted by all pharmacists. Some of them
claimed that pharmaceutical practice must precede theory.5 Although the new
team subscribed to this doctrine and favored chemical philosophy (theory),
these courses were still taught after practical coursework was completed.
During the deanship of Nicolas Louis Vauquelin, pupils were admitted to
attend courses only after a practical internship in a dispensary (officine).6 This
educational sequence, based on the weight of tradition, distinguished the
cole from other establishments. At the Polytechnic School (cole polytech
nique) and, to a lesser extent, at the Mining School (cole des mines) and at the
5 The pharmacist Jacques-Philibert Delunel criticized the young chemist Thenard, then exam-
iner at Polytechnic School, for praising the teaching of theory before practice, Jonathan Simon,
Chemistry, Pharmacy and Revolution in France, 1777-1809 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 140-45;
For the acceptance of Lavoisierian chemistry by official chemists, see Bernadette Bensaude-
Vincents essay in this volume.
6 Courses lasted from one to three years according to the duration of internships. Candidates
with an eight year internship were allowed to take the final examination without attending
courses. Assembly of Germinal 8 year 12 (March 29, 1804). Archive BIUS, register n 25, 14b.

Faculty of Medicine (Facult de mdecine), pupils experimented after the lec-

ture.7 The cole would eventually follow the same path by creating its own
Practical School (cole pratique) in 1831 but, though gradually shortened,
internships remained mandatory during the nineteenth-century.
The teaching of chemical philosophy was not new in pharmacists curricu-
lum. The novelty is rather to be found in the teaching of the new chemistry so
as to explain everyday pharmaceutical operations. Discussion of courses
experimental character and its material consequences appeared in the assem-
bly of May 12, 1808. Both Jean-Nicolas Trusson and Jean-Pierre-Ren Chradame
noted that the professors of chemistry and pharmacy [thought] that the
numerous experiments and operations performed during the courses resulted in
a rather considerable quantity of products and results [] but they had no
suitable premises to deposit and preserve them.8
The premises built in 1808 reflected the coles first collection of chemicals.
It is important to notice that even if the chemistry and pharmacy courses were
distinct, the administration considered these disciplines inseparable in their
common material dimension. The coles lab was a typical chemico-pharma-
ceutical lab and its basic instruments and reagents were the same as those
found in numerous pharmacy and chemical laboratories.
Students notebooks give an idea of the chemistry taught at the cole. The
first chemistry course was given by Edm-Jean-Baptiste Bouillon-Lagrange on
21 Germinal year 12 (April 21, 1804).9 Bouillon-Lagrange acquired his knowl-
edge in chemistry at the Polytechnic School where he occupied the post of lab
assistant and head of chemical works (chef des travaux chimiques). He also
taught chemistry at the cole centrale du Panthon and at the Collge Henri IV.
From these experiences he wrote a successful Manuel dun cours de chimie.10
Bouillon-Lagrange was sometimes replaced by Nol-tienne Henry pre who
was also appointed at the head of the Central Pharmacy of civilian hospitals
(Pharmacie centrale des hpitaux civils) in 1803.11 Henry pre gave similar
7 The sequence theory-practice finally became widespread and would stand out as a natu-
ral law by the end of the nineteenth century. Sacha Tomic, Le cadre matriel des cours
de chimie dans lenseignement suprieur Paris au XIXe sicle, Histoire de lducation 130
(2011): 57-83.
8 BIUS, register n 25, 30a, my emphasis.
9 BIUS, Ms 26. Notes taken by Nicolas Denis Moutillard, BIUS, register n 25, 28b. The manu-
script contains a series of about forty lessons of approximately five pages dispensed
between April and August, 1804.
10 Manuel dun cours de chimie (Paris: Bernard, 1799, 1801, 1802 1809; Klostermann, 1812).
11 Antoine-Franois Boutron-Charlard, Ncrologie [dHenry pre], Journal de chimie mdi-
cale de pharmacie et de toxicologie 8 (October 1832): 703-4.

230 Tomic
courses to the full professors.12 According to his colleague Louis-Antoine

Planche, Henry pre was not a brilliant professor, but his lessons were fully
attended because the example was always given next to the rule. The pupils
already provided with some elementary knowledge were rewarded.13
What was the content of these lessons? If, as Jonathan Simon noticed,
Bouillon-Lagrange asserted the dominant position of chemical philosophy
by resuming the classification given by his master Fourcroy in the Systme des
connaissances chimiques, the professor immediately indicated to his audience
that these divisions bring nothing useful for a pharmacist, I would not give
more ample details.14 Bouillon-Lagrange adopted a mixed plan alternating
general considerations and particular cases proceeding from simple to com-
plex, following Lavoisiers pedagogical progression.15 His lessons may be
divided into three parts. In the first part he defined the main notions of chemi-
cal philosophy (analysis, attraction, aggregation, caloric, elastic fluids) and
reviewed the elements (oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, phosphor, sulfur, metals).
Then he considered oxides and the physical properties of liquids and water.
The second and longest part was dedicated to inorganic chemistry (acids,
earths, alkalis, salts, metals and mineral waters). The last and shortest part
dealt with vegetable chemistry (acids, immediate materials: sugar, oil, and
ether) and animal chemistry (prussic acid, bile, urine).
Bouillon-Lagranges courses did not differ fundamentally from the structure
of his book, from which he borrowed some passages. However, his courses con-
trasted with those clearly more exhaustive ones given by Thenard at the Collge
de France.16 The difference lies in the selection made by Bouillon-Lagrange to
give to future pharmacists an overview of chemistrys potential to explain and
improve pharmaceutical operations. The professor focused on useful com-
pounds for pharmacy, such as arsenic, and antimony for metals, as well as
camphoric acid and phosphoric ether for plant chemistry. He also addressed
12 BIUS, Ms 27 and Ms 33; BIUS, register n 25, 23b; BIUS, Ms 26, 113-15.
13 Louis-Antoine Planche, Ncrologie sur Nol-tienne Henry, Journal de Pharmacie 18
(1832): 522.
14 Systme des connaissances chimiques (Paris: Baudoin, 1800-1801); Simon, Chemistry, Phar-
macy, pp.140-45, 159-60 (see note 5).
15 This point marks the differences in the teaching of Bouillon-Lagrange from Berthollet at
the cole normale, see Bernadette Bensaude-Vincents essay in this volume.
16 BIUS, Ms 22 et Ms 23, notes taken in 1809 by the pharmacist and future professor of mate-
ria medica Nicolas-Jean-Baptiste-Gaston Guibourt. Jos Ramn Bertomeu-Snchez,
Antonio Garca Belmar, Les cahiers dlves sources pour une histoire des contenus et
des pratiques de lenseignement de la chimie, 2004, <http://rhe.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/cours_
magistral/expose_thenard/expose_thenard_complet.php> (accessed 29 September 2017).

practical subjects such as lutes (to assure the joint and waterproofing of
devices) and capillaries. The lessons did not contain pharmaceutical recipes,
but the professor handled themes of interest to pharmacists, such as vegetable
and animal physiology. Directly inspired by his master Fourcroy, he taught a
chemistry which did not totally break with natural history. The experimental
nature of chemistry courses and the choice of subjects close to pharmacists
interests seem to have answered the governments desire for a chemistry
applicable to pharmacy, a renewed pharmaceutical chemistry.17
Pharmacy teaching was entrusted to Antoine Brongniart, but he died on
February 24, 1804. Louis-Isidore Nachet succeeded him.18 Nachet had more the
profile of a pharmacist than his colleague because he operated a pharmacy for
fifteen years, compared to the two years of Bouillon-Lagrange. According to his
biographer, Nachet was barely assisted by his assistant Bouriat during twenty-
eight years of what should have been their collaboration, Nachet carried the
entire weight of teaching alone.19 According to his former apprentice, the doc-
tor botanist Franois-Victor Mrat, Nachet was a deserving professor.20 Mrat
informs us of the practical nature of his courses:
[Nachet was] a quite practical man, rather than a scholar, a man of the
laboratory, as we say in professional terms: so the pupils looked with
greediness for the details which he gave them on the particular processes
in the preparation of certain medicines which were not described in
books, and which pass, in a way by tradition, from laboratory to labora-
tory [] He thus trained good pharmacists and good chemist-manipulators
(chimistes-manipulateurs), who are the most useful, if not the most
brilliant.21
Chemistry teaching and the art of chemical manipulation through pharmacys

lessons aimed more at inculcating the new chemistry from a practical stand-
17 This specialization of chemistry teaching was strongly supported by Bussy in 1850 to

defend the coles chair of chemistry, archives BIUS, box n 312, folder 312-8.
18 Patrick Bourrinet, Nachet (Louis-Isidore) 1757-1832, Revue dHistoire de la Pharmacie 93
(2005): 301.
19 Georges Dillemann, Louis Isidore Nachet, 2e titulaire de la chaire de Pharmacie, Produits
et problmes pharmaceutiques 25 (1970): 1125-26.
20 Franois-Victor Mrat, Notice ncrologique sur M. Nachet, professeur lcole de phar-
macie, Journal de pharmacie 18 (1832): 588.
21 Franois-Victor Mrat, Nachet (Louis-Isidore), Louis-Gabriel Michaud, dir., Biographie
universelle, ancienne et moderne. Supplment (Paris, 1844), 75, 61-2.

232 Tomic
point to an audience already well versed in practice.22 The cole also trained
pharmacists who were more attracted by an effective practice of their future
work, along with pupils seeking to become useful chemist-manipulators. This
last group would enlarge the contingent of future experts in chemical analysis
and technicians needed by the growing chemical and pharmaceutical indus-
try. Amongst the nearly 800 students trained under Vauquelins deanship, an
elite of first-class pharmacists adopted the self-proclaimed title of pharma-
cist-chemist so as to underline the professions learned character.23 This
generation became famous for numerous discoveries in chemistry and for its
members expertise as requested by the emergent regulation of industrial
society.24
As this description shows, assistants were not crucial in the teaching of
chemistry and pharmacy. By contrast, lab assistants were strongly implicated
in the implementation of courses.
The Central Position of the Lab Assistant
Prior to the revolution, chemistry courses in France were taught by a professor

(a trained physician), with the assistance of a demonstrator (an apothecary)
who carried out the experimental demonstrations.25 This division of labor
22 Another example illustrates this practical orientation of the coles courses. At the gov-
ernments request during the assembly of April 8, 1811, Nicolas Appert was authorized to
open a course for the distribution of its process concerning the preservation of plant and
animal foodstuffs. BIUS, register n 77, document n 39-40; register n 25, 37b.
23 The average annual number of pupils (about forty) was stable until 1817, after which it
rose to a peak of 180 pupils in 1826. By 1830, we can estimate the population of pharma-
cists at approximately 10,000 for France. Their number in Paris increased from c. 100 in
1800 to c. 300 in 1830.
24 Sacha Tomic, Status and Role of French Pharmacist-Chemists in the History of Chemis-
try in the Early Nineteenth Century, paper presented at Leuven (Irish College) on June 1,
2013, workshop Situating Material and Knowledge Production in the History of Chemistry:
Sites and Networks of Discipline Formation and Industrial Practice, 1760-1840. The results
accumulated in a few decades by these analysts contributed to the emergence of a new
speciality: organic chemistry. Sacha Tomic, Aux origines de la chimie organique. Mthodes
et pratiques des pharmaciens et des chimistes (1785-1835) (Rennes: PUR, 2010). For the con-
nection of the first industrial regulation law (decree of October 15, 1810) with environ-
mental history, industrial chemistry, and pharmacists experts, see Thomas Le Roux, Le
laboratoire des pollutions industrielles. Paris, 1770-1830 (Paris: Albin Michel, 2011).
25 Christine Lehman, Les multiples facettes des cours de chimie en France au milieu du
XVIIIe sicle, Histoire de lducation 130 (2011): 31-56; John Perkins, Chemistry Courses, the

continued following the establishment of the cole out of educational neces-

sity rather than as a statutory requirement. According to the director of the
cole, Gustave Planchon, it was on the wishes of Nicolas Deyeux, professor of
chemistry at the Free School, that the first official lab assistant attached to
chemistry courses was appointed in April-May, 1793.26 The importance of lab
assistants as demonstrators were now called was thus underlined for teach-
ing experimental chemistry effectively. A pharmacists diploma was not
required for the post. The lab assistant was chosen from among the rather
intelligent pupils and he was awarded fees. Four successive lab assistants
served at the cole under Vauquelins deanship: Henri-Auguste Vogel, mile
Sureau, Alexandre Bussy and Louis-Dominique Guiart fils. Vogel and Bussy
were particularly active.
After apprenticeships in different pharmacies in Hanover and Brme, Vogel
came to Paris in 1802 and was appointed lab assistant on 8 Germinal year 12
(March 29, 1804). Far from being limited by a position that institutionalized the
division between mind and hand, he also taught chemistry at the Lyce
Napolon before he left Paris in 1816 for the chair of chemistry at the University
of Munich. During his stay at the cole, Vogel published some ten articles,
alone or in association with Bouillon-Lagrange or Joseph Pelletier, mainly on
the chemical analysis of different substances taken from materia medica (saf-
fron, scammony, juice of buckthorn, red coral, and bitter almonds, and so on).
In 1804, he received a 400 francs fee and additional 100 francs with the condi-
tion that he correctly carries out the duty of his place. Vogel did not disappoint
the administrators who hired him. He entered the first graduation class of the
cole and received the gold medal at the coles first annual student competi-
tion in chemistry. The session was chaired by Fourcroy and took place on a
symbolic day, the first year of Napoleons reign (4th complementary day year 12
September 21, 1804). Vogel became a pharmacist in 1808 and was soon pro-
moted in 1809 with more duties and a pay raise. His position thus covered
courses for chemistry, pharmacy, materia medica and, occasionally, botany.27
Bussys career embodied the ascent of a pharmacist who rose through all
the pedagogical ranks of the cole. Appointed lab assistant in 1821, he became
assistant professor in 1826, full professor in 1830 and finally managed the cole
for thirty years from 1844. After publishing on discoloration by animal charcoal
Parisian Chemical World and the Chemical Revolution, 1770-1790, Ambix 57 (2010): 27-47.
26 Gustave Planchon, Lenseignement des sciences physico-chimiques au Jardin des apothi
caires et lcole de pharmacie de Paris (Paris: Ernst Flammarion, 1897), 36.
27 BIUS, register n 25, 34b. The professor of the botanical chair was also assisted by the
gardener named Puyhatier dit Prigord, BIUS, register n 25, 15a.

234 Tomic
and the first elementary analysis of morphine in 1822, he was quickly noticed
by his colleagues. In 1823, he was granted an exceptional 600 francs compensa-
tion, identical to those of professors assistants, for purchase of utensils and
ingredients necessary for the preparation of chemistry and pharmacy courses.28
The deliberation of August 23, 1823 signed by the secretary Bouillon-Lagrange
specified the reasons for this bonus: Bussy, having been in charge of an
extraordinary work, both for the various cabinets arrangement and chemical
research, as well as the various operations, deserved to be helped.29
Bussys last two years as lab assistant were productive. He supported
Bouillon-Lagrange in 1825 instead of Henry pre, a responsibility for which
he received another 600 francs compensation. The following year he replaced
Henry pre who decided to dedicate all his energy to his function as chief-phar-
macist of the Central Pharmacy of civilian hospitals. Also in 1825, Bussy began
research with Louis-Ren Lecanu on the distillation of fats and acids which
Michel-Eugne Chevreul had discovered the wet way, establishing the base for
a renewed proximate analysis. Together with Dumas at the Athene in the same
year, Bussy introduced Flix-Polydore Boullay fils during chemistry courses
where, according to Chevallier, he performed practiced chemical manipula-
tions in the coles laboratory.30 A skilfull and recognizable manipulator,
Bussy adapted the technical part of Michael Faradays Chemical Manipulations
(1827).31 He justified the necessity of such a work intended for beginners, argu-
ing that France possessed very few skilful workers, whereas it counts scholars
in large numbers.32
Moving down the administrative hierarchy, we notice that other people
were involved in the activities of the laboratory. In a letter of 1823, Bouillon-
Lagrange specified that Bussy was helped, which supposes that there was a
kind of second lab assistant. Besides Boullay fils, who assisted Bussy, Planchon
reported that Joseph-Bienam Caventou was lab assistant, for free, to the
assistant of chemistry courses.33 The lab assistant also had his own assistant.
28 AN, F/17/2326, Acounts for 1823, first article for courses expenses.
29 BIUS, box BLII, folder 205, extract from the cole register of deliberation from August 23,
1823.
30 Alphonse Chevallier, Ncrologie de Flix Polydore Boullay (1806-1835), Journal de chimie
mdicale 1 (1835): 390.
31 Alfred Velpeau, review of Manipulations chimiques, Archives gnrales de mdecine 6
(1828): 155-6; William B. Jensen, Michael Faraday and the Art and Science of Chemical
Manipulation, Bulletin for the History of Chemistry 11 (1991): 65-75.
32 Michael Faraday, Manipulations chimiques, trans. Raymond-Balthazar Maiseau, foreword
by Alexandre Bussy (Paris: A. Sautelet, 1827), vol. 1, VIII.
33 Gustave Planchon, Lenseignement des sciences, p.45 (see note 26).

The coles office boy (garon de bureau), Louis Bour, participated in several
courses, his task defined in the session of 20 Floreal year 12 (May 10, 1804).
Besides the duties of office and sweeping the premises, he was also in charge
of cleaning the laboratory, its vessels and utensils, becoming then a lab boy.34
The accounts indicated that he made diverse purchases such as eggs and glue
(used for lutes), washed the laboratory cloths (used for filtrations), and sup-
plied coal for furnaces and heating.
Through these different activities, it appears that the laboratory was also a
place of research where the coles entire staff participated in its educational
activities. The courses took place only during the summer semester (1st
Germinal to 1st Fructidor March 22 to August 19), which left the winter semes-
ter (from September to March) for examinations and for the staffs own use.
Bouillon-Lagrange, who had been without his own pharmacy since 1789, per-
formed at least some of his experiments at the cole, as did Vogel and Bussy.
A privileged number of students also performed practical works.
To sum up, the lab assistants, assisted or not by a lab boy, did not content
themselves with preparing experiments or chemicals for courses. They also
performed original research and published in scientific journals and often
advanced the money for and took care of the supply of equipment and chemi-
cals.35 They drafted spending for the course reports that were approved by
the professor or the director.
In her seminal paper on moral economy, Loraine Daston quoted Claude
Bernard and John Ponds opinions about the division of labor in science.36 For
Daston, both men considered that repetitive work (observation, data collec-
tion, calculations) must be performed by uneducated men and drudges.
This example of mechanical objectivity in which uneducated lab assistants
were considered as devices contrasts with the coles pedagogical organiza-
tion. The valuation of scientific work highlighted by Daston as characteristic of
this period, that is to say, did not necessarily hold in an educational context,
especially in pharmacy where morality was one of the qualities officially
34 BIUS, register n 25, 15b.

35 Those technicians who became pharmacist-chemists can be considered as hybrid-experts
in the sense of Ursula Klein, Apothecarys Shops, Laboratories and Chemical Manufac-
ture in Eighteenth-Century Germany, Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, Peter Dear, eds., The
Mindful Hand. Inquiry and invention from the late Renaissance to early industrialisation
(Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2007), 247-276; Ursula
Klein, ed., special issue on Artisanal-scientific Experts in Eighteenth-century France and
Germany, Ambix 69 (2012).
36 Daston, The Moral Economy, p.20 (see note 3).

236 Tomic
required by the profession.37 Often characterized by historians as uneducated

invisible hands, lab assistants at the cole were both visible and educated
laboratory managers, who actively contributed to the success of experimental
chemistry teaching.38 In brief, the lab assistant was the main administrator
and technician of chemical and pharmaceutical courses, who, in close col
laboration with professors, contributed to the coles prestige and good
governance.
The coles Good Governance
The coles accounts provide information about the moral economy and
material frame of its courses.39 Two treasurers served during Vauquelins dean-
ship: the former Free Schools assistant director Chradame and Pierre-Jean
Robiquet.40 The Ministerial Order of 25 Thermidor year 11 (August 13, 1803)
concerning the coles regulation specified that the treasurer was appointed
for three years, whereas the director had a five-year term; both were eligible for
reelection.41 Article 10 specified that every year, in the first days of Vendmiaire
[September-October], the treasurer will report the previous years revenues and
expenditures, at the coles general assembly. This account will be checked by
the prefects of the department, and in Paris by the Prefect of police. It will then
be submitted for the approval of the Minister of the Interior. This administra-
tive procedure explains why certain accounts were officially validated only one
37 Pharmacists had to take an oath in front of the Prefect to validate their diploma. The
coles administrators did not hesitate to dismiss pupils for deviant behavior as hap-
pened to a certain Gauthier in 1806, BIUS, register n 25, 25-a-26b.
38 Another example of the visibility of laboratory workers is given by Jos Ramn Bertomeu-
Snchez, Antonio Garca Belmar, Louis Jacques Thenards Chemistry Courses at the Col-
lge de France, 1804-1835, Ambix 57 (2010): 48-63. These processes of visibility/invisibility
are still at stake in the evolution of contemporary science. Florence Millerand, Les ges-
tionnaires dinformation invisibles dans la production dune base de donnes scienti-
fiques, Revue danthropologie des sciences 6 (2012): 163-190.
39 It has been possible to reconstitute the various budgets thanks to the whole collection of
annual accounts preserved at the Archives Nationales (series F/17/2325 and F/17/2326).
Some of them have been correlated, for certain years and for certain spending, to the
diverse itemized bills kept by the BIUS (box BLI, folders 1-100; box BLII, folders 101-230).
Pierre Julien, Plaidoyer pour les notes et factures anciennes de pharmacie, Revue
dhistoire de la pharmacie 37 (1990): 81-92.
40 The assistant director Andr Laugier was temporary treasurer during two months and
drafted the account for September and October, 1824.
41 BIUS, register n 25, 28a, 32a.

or even two years after their writing. Chradame presented his first account
in the session of 6 Nivse year 13 (December 27, 1804), signed by the profes-
sors and approved by the Prefect on 18 Brumaire year 14 (November 9, 1805).
In a letter read at the assembly on 7 Frimaire year 14 (November 27, 1805), the
Minister of the Interior Chaptal expressed through the Prefect his satisfaction
of the good order which reigns in the accounts [of 1804].42 With these words,
the Government paid tribute to the treasurer, emphasizing his central role in
the good governance of the establishment.
A typical account is divided into revenues and expenditures, themselves
divided into chapters concerning a more or less precise subject. Revenues dis-
tinguished between the previous years surplus and three items which fed the
budget: pharmacists graduation fees (fixed at 900 francs by law), by far the
most important income amounting to nearly three-quarters of the revenues;
visitation rights for pharmacists (six francs), druggists and herbalists (two
francs); and registration fees (thirty-six francs/year). The expenditure records
consisted generally of ten chapters, the most important expense items con-
cerning renovation work.43 Settled on the same location as the Jardin des
apothicaires, founded in 1626 (13 rue de lArbalte), the cole inherited build-
ings of the Free School and a laboratory built in 1702 and enlarged in 1760. The
primitive building (c. 250 m2) contained a big laboratory for demonstrations
and public courses (c. 90 m2).44 Even if the overall building configuration did
not change much during Vauquelins deanship, the cole underwent perpetual
remodelling during this period, both inside and outside. The garden was con-
tinually in development and different spaces were created: a laboratory for
receptions (1804), an amphitheater of botany and natural history (1805),
a locale for chemicals (1808), a space for mineralogy (1824) and materia medica
and mineral collections (1826).
The budgetary evolution of the coles governance reveals three phases
(Graph 9.1). The average expenditures were about 36,000 francs for the period
1804-1815; they increased by 30 percent during 1816-1823 (47,000 francs) and
again by 46 percent to reach about 68,000 francs at the end of Vauquelins
42 BIUS, register n 25, 24a.

43 Expenditure headings: 1. Examiners rights of presence, 2. Staff fees, 3. Course expendi-
tures, 4. Extraordinary expenditures, 5. Work expenditures, 6. Visitation fees, 7. Office
fees, 8. Administrators expenditures, 9. Gardener and lab boy expenditures, 10. Treasurer
allowances.
44 BIUS, Ms 87, N.-J.-B.-G. Guibourt, Expos historique sur lorigine et les augmentations
successives de limmeuble affect lcole de Pharmacie, reproduced (without the first
nine pages) in Adrien Philippe, Histoire des apothicaires (Paris: Direction de la Publicit
Mdicale, 1853), 253.

238 Tomic
139000
129000 Revenues
119000 Expenditures
Remainder
109000
99000
89000
79000
Francs
69000
59000
49000
39000
29000
19000
9000
-1000
Graph 9.1 Evolution of the coles accounts.
deanship (1824-1829). The average revenues, following the increasing number

of graduating pharmacists, became established at 37,000 francs for the first
period, increased by 40 percent for the second period (53,000 francs) and
jumped to 88 percent (about 100,000 francs) for the last period. For the whole
period, the total average amounts were about 1.28 million francs for expendi-
tures, and about 1.46 million francs for the revenues with a profit of about
180,000 francs. With the governments agreement, a part of the exceptional rev-
enues accumulated in 1826 (more than 50,000 francs) was deposited in an
interest-paying account.
How did this good governance apply to staff salaries? Several sources of
income, divided into fixed and mobile parts, covered the staffs expenses. The
fixed part did not concern the management. Professors indemnities were fixed
by the government at 1,500 francs whereas lab assistants indemnities were
decided by the coles administration and fixed at 600 francs (750 francs from
1823).45 Lab assistants fixed indemnity rapidly increased, going from 500 francs
in 1804 to 1,200 francs from 1812. Salaries more than doubled (by 140 percent) in
eight years, competing with those of a professor. The wages of the office-lab
boy, who also received housing, increased more slowly. His income (without
bonuses as New Years gifts), passed from 500 francs in 1803 to 800 francs from
45 BIUS, box BLII, folder 205, extract from the coles register of deliberation from August 30,
1821. As a comparison, fixed indemnities were twice as high for professors at the Faculty
of Medicine (3,000 francs), more than three times at the Polytechnic School and National
Museum of Natural History (5,000 francs), and four times at the Collge de France (6,000
francs).

1819, with a global increase of 80 percent. As we have seen in the previous sec-
tion, this appreciation of salaries underlines the fundamental role of lab
assistants in the laboratory management and contributed to their visibility.
The mobile part of the coles income, which represented the directors only
revenue stream, was divided into several parts which substantially increased
the total income. These sums grew with the number of candidates. The institu-
tions life was punctuated by assemblies, examinations and other public
meetings for which the staff received remuneration. The rights of presence
(droits de prsence) for the examinations fixed by the law represented an
important part of income. For each successfully passed examination, a sixty-
six franc sum was assigned to the examiners. This income was about 1,000
1,500 francs for a professor and the director, and about 500 1,500 francs for
the assistant professors and the treasurer. The administrative tasks with atten-
dance fees to the assemblies were fixed at four francs both for the office
assemblies held by the administrators, and by the committees and the assem-
blies of coles members, which represented about 150 francs per professor,
assistant and administrator.46 The rights of presencefor the competitions
were fixed at eight francs per session, that is twenty-four francs for three days.47
The directors received compensation for examination expenses (thirty francs /
reception) which notably increased their salary. For example, in 1826, the
director, his assistant and the treasurer received about 2,000 francs. From 1826
onward (revenue peak), a secondary account appeared. It concerns the budget
for the last practical examination (300 francs / candidates) initiated by Bussy.48
The bulk of the income was used for compensation (twenty francs / sessions)
and stood at about 1,500-2,000 francs for administrators, and 1,000-1,500 francs
for professors and assistants.
Finally, we can estimate a 4,000 francs average salary for a full professor,
2,500 francs for an assistant professor, 1,000 francs for a lab assistant, and about
700 francs for the office/lab boys. As for the directors, whose members could
also be appointed professor, the average income estimation is as follows: 3,500-
4,000 francs for the treasurer, 2,500-3,500 francs for the director, and 2,000-3,000
francs for his assistant. The salaries from the lab assistant to the professor were
46 These fees were justified during the assembly of October 4, 1806 for the reason that the
cole members cannot give up their own pharmacy without receiving a compensation,
BIUS, register n 25, 27b.
47 At least for 1823, BIUS, box BLI, folder 69.
48 Alfred Riche, Notice biographique sur Bussy, Journal de pharmacie et de chimie 5 (1882):
303.

240 Tomic
in a 1:4 ratio with attractive gaps so as to develop staff loyalty and encourage
the personnel to climb the ladder to professorship as exemplified by Bussy.
Controlling Course Expenditures
With few exceptions (1804 and 1819), teaching expenses were grouped in
annual accounts under chapter III concerning the various purchases required
for the courses of chemistry, pharmacy, natural history and other expenses
relative to courses.49 Botany expenses (gardener, maintenance of the garden,
plants collections) were often scattered in other account sections. To have a
closer look at the specific budget concerning chemistry and pharmacy courses
(materially and financially inseparable), it is necessary to estimate the amount
devoted to the cabinet of natural history and materia medica. Several elements
enabled the minimization of this cost. First of all, the majority of reports
(mmoires and mmoires quittancs), those detailing the price of every article
often simple invoices stipulated explicitly the supply of objects appropri-
ate to chemistry and pharmacy.50 The comparison of itemized bills (chemicals,
vessels and utensils, instruments) with the total of courses expenses confirms
the dominating place of a budget peculiar to chemistry and pharmacy teach-
ing.51 At the same time, most of the expenses corresponding to materia medica
courses offered during different periods were included under the chapter
exceptional expenses. From 1824 onward, at the instigation of Pelletier who
replaced Robiquet as chair of materia medica in 1825, the expenses remained
stable and regular (approximately 2,000 francs for minerals bought between
1824 and 1829, that is an average of 333 francs/year). Materia medica expenses
can be estimated to approximately 5,000 francs, or nearly 200 francs/year for
1803-1829. With regard to the average course expenses (2,180 francs), this
amount represents approximately 10 percent. It was then possible to deduct an
annual average cost specific to chemistry and pharmacy courses of about 2,000
francs, or 4.5 percent of total expenses (Graph 9.2). One can notice that this
proportion, higher at the coles beginnings (5.5 percent from 1804 till 1817),
decreased from 1812 and became stable from 1818 (3.5 percent for 1818-1829).
This order of magnitude corresponds to the amount mentioned by Fourcroy in
49 Archives Nationales series F/17/2325.

51 The BIUS archives provides bills for thirteen years (1806-1814, 1819, 1821, 1823 and 1824) i.e.
50% of the twenty-six years of Vauquelins deanship.

3500 9.0
courses expenditures (left axis) 8.0

3000
% courses expenditures (right axis)
7.0
2500
6.0
2000 5.0
Francs
1500 4.0
3.0
1000
2.0
500
1.0
0 0.0
Graph 9.2 Evolution of the coles chemical & pharmacy courses expenditures.
the Methodical Encyclopedia as necessary to maintain a daily laboratory

service.52
From the midpoint of Vauquelins deanship, the number of enrolled stu-
dents converged toward the number of receipts, which means that practically
all students followed a normal education of three years. By this time, the
cole achieved its cruising speed and administrators succeeded in mastering
chemistry and pharmacy expenses, in spite of the staffs salary increases, with
income from the growing number of received pharmacists. These consider-
ations are consistent with the administrations desire to control the coles
expenses. During the session of 7 Frimaire year 14 (November 27, 1805), the
directors decided that the maximum of course expenses for 1806 [will be fixed]
at 2400 francs.53 With few exceptions, this maximum was never exceeded.
The control over course-related spending was also the consequence of a
faithful network of various suppliers which included some of the coles mem-
bers. Pharmacist-chemists, whose name was a warranty of their products
quality, had a monopoly on the production of high value-added products. Next
to a high-grade chemical industry, a market existed for teaching equipment
whose development was strongly tied to pharmacists business.54 Not sur-
52 A.F. Fourcroy, Oprations, Encyclopdie mthodique Chimie (Paris: Panckoucke, 1808),

vol. 5, 272.
54 Anna Simmons discussion in this volume of the formation of a marketplace (in relation
to the sale of drugs in London, in her case) can be extended to the emerging education
market. This market was not specific to France as the case of Friedrich Accum suggests,
but further comparative studies are needed.

242 Tomic
prisingly, we find among the main chemicals suppliers, the director Vauquelin
and the professors of materia medica Jacques-Paul Valle and Robiquet. This
new revenue stream (from a few thousand to 100,000 francs a year) was appar-
ently accepted as natural and no conflict of interests was highlighted.
After a more or less chaotic financial association with various partners
(Gilbert Deserres, Henry Lemercier and Herv), Fourcroy and Vauquelin
established their own business, the Manufacture de produits et de ractifs chi-
miques, in July 1804, which was housed at rue du Colombier, 23 (6th district)
on land bought in November 1800.55 In a letter of May 18, 1807 addressed to the
Italian physicist and agronomist Giovanni Fabbroni, Vauquelin indicated that
he was henceforth the only owner of the factory. The director specified that
Professors, Chemists, Pharmacists, Traders and Students, can be sure from
now on to find in [his] stores all the reagents in a state of perfect purity, or the
preparations necessary for their demonstrations, for their trade, for their stud-
ies or for their research.56 In 1804, the factory delivered vessels and utensils
valued at more than 1000 francs under the name of Deserres and Lemercier.57
The factory also provided instruments (such as barometers, thermometers,
hydrometers, instruments for mineralogy, apparatus for physics, and so on)
and glassware. Vauquelin also proposed the shipping of books to clients.
In spite of its financial setbacks, the factory operated continuously thanks to
the massive financial contribution of Fourcroy (150,000 francs) and Vauquelin
(100,000 francs) to cope with the debts of their partner. Their associate Lemer
cier was mostly responsible for the bad financial situation of the factory. This
commercial failure was also the consequence of the implementation of the
first industrial regulation law of October 15, 1810. The factory had settled in
the very heart of Paris and was the subject of periodic complaints from neigh-
bours.58 In 1818, Lemercier chose to move the large-scale production of acids
and phosphorous substances to the suburbs and the factory was sold for 88,000
francs in August, 1822 to Jean-Baptiste Quesneville who, with his son Gustave
Augustin, would make it a prosperous establishment.
This episode shows that Fourcroy and Vauquelin were, at first sight, quite
bad managers. This bad governance was not only due to some risky financial
55 Maurice Bouvet, Nicolas Vauquelin, droguiste, Revue dhistoire de la pharmacie 46 (1958):

246-52.
56 American Philosophical Society, Mss. B F113.
57 Vauquelin sold copper, crystal, glass, porcelain and stoneware chemical and pharmaceu-
tical vessels; flasks filled with emery, melting pots and capsules made of platinum, silver
and china.
58 Thomas Le Roux, Le laboratoire des pollutions, pp.242, 305-12, 466, 484-86 (see note 24).

choices. It was also the result of a proactive education policy. Fourcroy and
Vauquelins factory was a non-profit creation.59 The creation of the establish-
ment, the first one of this kind in France, was more a political act to promote a
new kind of chemical education than to build a lucrative business. Moreover,
different courses took place in the amphitheater located inside the plant.
Rather than seek an immediate profit, the moral economy at stake behind the
factorys owners was to promote a model for experimental chemical education
and to support the coles good governance.
Unlike Vauquelin, two other cole suppliers, Valle and Robiquet, sold
chemicals exclusively for profit. Valle was appointed assistant professor
of materia medica in 1803 and full professor in 1811. He was the owner of a
pharmacy on rue Saint-Victor, n98 (12th district) from 1802 to which he
annexed a small factory of chemicals and supplied the cole, even with liv-
ing vipers.60 In his obituary, Nachet insisted on the considerable increase
of this business which began with the moderate sum of 1,200 francs.61 After
his departure, Robiquet settled on the rue de la Monnaie, n9 (1st district)
and took over and supplied the majority of products from 1818. In 1826 he
joined Aristide Boyveau, who possessed a factory on the rue des Fosss-Saint-
Germain-lAuxerrois, n5 (1st district). Together with Pelletier they created
a factory in 1834 on the rue des Francs-Bourgeois-Saint-Michel, n8 (6th
district).
Other suppliers of chemicals (Table 9.2) included the pharmacist Charles
Baget for phosphorus and iodine, Paul Blondeau for spring waters, the apothe-
cary-druggist Charles Bouvier for mineral acids, the director of the Faculty of
Medicines chemical laboratory Jean-Pierre Barruel for potassium, the grocer
Sureau fils for alcohol and vinegar, and the druggist Bonnes who provided mer-
cury in 1804 (doubtless for pneumatic tanks). Different distillers regularly
supplied the cole with large quantities of spirits (eau-de-vie) and alcohol, one
of the favorite solvents used in proximate analysis. Beside Vauquelin, the cole
possessed another almost official supplier of vessels and utensils, the potter
and master glassmaker Jean-Baptiste Acloque, who occasionally also took care
of the equipment. Different potters, oven makers, boilermakers and paper-
59 Georges Kersaint, Lusine de Fourcroy et Vauquelin, Revue dhistoire de la pharmacie 47

(1959): 25-30; Alain Queruel, Vauquelin et son temps (1763-1829) (Paris: LHarmattan, 1994),
116-23.
60 Georges Dillemann, Jacques Paul Valle, 1772-1814, Produits et problmes pharmaceu-
tiques 26 (1971): 426.
61 Louis-Isidore Nachet, Ncrologie de Valle, Journal de pharmacie 6 (1814): 380-83.

244 Tomic
Table 9.2 The coles various suppliers of chemicals (main suppliers in bold).
Suppliers Profession Address Chemicals
Vauquelin Professor of chemistry, Director of Rue du Colombier, n23 Various

the cole
Valle Pharmacist, Professor of materia Rue Saint-Victor, n98 Various
medica at the cole
Robiquet Pharmacist-chemist, Professor of Rue de la Monnaie, n9 Various
materia medica and treasurer at the
cole
Robiquet- Ibid Rue des Fosss-St-Ger- Various
Boyveau Industrialist main-LAuxerrois, n5
Baget Pharmacist Rue vieille du Temple, phosphorus,
n79 iodine
Blondeau Pharmacist Rue de Cond, n22 & Spring waters
Rue de Tournon, n17
Bouvier Apothecary-druggist Rue des Vieilles-Tuilleries, Mineral acids
n19
Barruel Director of the chemical laboratory Rue de lcole de Potassium
at the Faculty of Medicine Mdecine
Sureau fils Grocer Rue du Bourg-lAbb, n 4 Alcohol,
vinegar
Bonnes Druggist Mercury
Various Distillers Spirits
makers supplied furnaces and other accessories, as well as providing reams of

Josephs paper and other papers used in filtrations (Table 9.3).
Instruments were supplied by patented instruments engineers, especially
Dumotiez and his successor and nephew Nicolas Constant Pixii (Table 9.4).62
They supplied generally expensive devices such as a pneumatic machine (220
francs in 1808), a device for water decomposition (120 francs in 1813), and a
Volta eudiometer (40 francs in 1819). Jean-Gabriel-Augustin Chevallier said the
62 Dumotiez was one of the first to receive an engineers certificate in instruments of optics,
physics, and mathematics with privilege delivered in April, 1788 by the Committee of the
artists of the Royal Academy of Sciences, created at the instigation of the astronomer
Dominique Cassini, Mmoires pour servir lhistoire des sciences et celle de lObservatoire
Royal de Paris 1810 (Paris: Bleuet), 86-94.

Table 9.3 The coles various suppliers of utensils (main suppliers in bold).
Suppliers Profession Address Utensils
Vauquelin Professor of chemistry, Director of Rue du Colombier, n23 Various

the cole
Acloque Glassmaker Rue de la Barillerie, n22 Various
Blanc Potter and oven maker (fournaliste) Rue de Larbraltre, n12 Furnaces
Gaillard Boilermaker Furnaces
Petit an Trader (ngociant) Rue Saint-Jacques-la- Test tubes
Boucherie, n23 & 25
Paillard Paper-maker Joseph paper
Table 9.4 The coles suppliers of instruments (main suppliers in bold)
Suppliers Profession Address Instruments
Dumotiez Patended instrument Rue du Jardinet, n2 Pneumatic machine, air

engineer thermometer, pyrometer
Pixii Patended instrument Rue du Jardinet, n2 Pneumatic machine, Voltas
engineer eudiometer, galvanic devices
Chevallier (Le Patended instrument Quai & Tour de lHorloge Hydrometers, Descroizilles
Chevalier) engineer du Palais, n1 stills
Chemin fils and Mechanics (balan Balances
Chevill fils ciers-mcaniciens)
Dourches Instrument maker Precision balance
engineer Chevallier (Le Chevalier), sold hydrometers and Descroizilles stills

for wine assays (54 francs in 1823). The mechanics (balancier-mcanicien)
Chemin fils and Chevill fils sold and repaired balances, and Dourches pro-
vided an expensive precision balance (330 francs) in 1828.63 Some of these
instrument-makers, such as Pixii, built an international reputation and provis
ioned universities including Leuven, Turin, Moscow, Warsaw, and Combra in
Europe, as well as across the Atlantic.
63 Louis Marquet describes a Fourch-Chemin balance, Balances et botes de poids de la

collection de la Socit dHistoire de la pharmacie, Revue dhistoire de la pharmacie 34
(1987): 41-46, see 43-4.

246 Tomic
In the end, and in order to promote an updated, high-quality chemical edu-

cation, the good management of the cole ensured a reconciliation between
educational requirements and equipment. Quality reagents and instruments
placed at the staffs disposal were provided by the best traders according to
market prices and a policy of loyalty. Alongside this liberal management of
material resources, the coles direction also promoted an attractive internal
promotion policy based on a moral economy that provided its reputation and
identity.
Conclusion
This essay ends as the cole, supervised by the new director Andr Laugier, was
about to enter a new phase. Thanks to the surplus of the previous years, the
cole added two new wings. Under the impulse of Bussy, a Practical School
was created in 1831. This paid training addressed pupils duly selected by com-
petition and constituted, after the Polytechnic School in its early stages, the
first regular training of practical chemistry within higher education. The
administration was to confirm and endow this training with a specific budget
during the coles affiliation with the University by the ordinance of September
27, 1840.64
Despite State control, the cole kept a large degree of autonomy. This was
especially true for the training program but also for the coles management.
Its good governance rested on financial management but also on the sharing of
common values. Administrators and professors established a moral economy
founded on a compensation policy for the staff, on promotion of moral and
scientific excellence amongst students and lab assistants, and on the adapta-
tion of chemistry courses intended for the profession. The promotion from lab
assistant to professor as embodied by Bussy in this essay, was not specific to
pharmacy teaching. During the nineteenth-century this was the standard pro-
motion at the Faculty of Science, at the Faculty of Medicine and at the Collge
de France. Yet, the cole was not integrated into the University system in 1808
64 This integration was led by the physician-chemist and dean of the Faculty of Medicine,
Mateu Josep Bonaventura (fr. Mathieu) Orfila. Meanwhile, the establishment underwent
a sort of metamorphosis with the creation in 1834 of two additional chairs (toxicology
and elementary physics) which would redefine the use of the premises and introduce a
second semester (1st November 1st April), Louis-Ren Lecanu, Rapport sur ltat actuel
de lenseignement dans lcole de pharmacie de Paris, Journal de Pharmacie 22 (1836):
703-14.

as was the Faculty of Medicine. The coles scientific character was however
recognized by the government in the 1840s when the administration adopted,
without making it official, the name of cole suprieure de pharmacie.65 This
recognition was tied to the weight of chemistry in the scientific rise of the
establishment. With the exception of Laugiers brief deanship (1829-1832), the
three other directors who followed until 1873 were professors of chemistry
(Vauquelin, Bouillon-Lagrange, and Bussy).
For these men, chemistry was considered as an accessory science (science
accessoire) to pharmacy, with a utilitarian value for society and a route to
employment opportunities. Some of the brightest students established schools
of research specializing in industrial analytical chemistry. These sites culti-
vated an almost exclusively industrial chemistry, developed side-by-side with
the academic chemistry developed in research schools led by eminent
chemists such as Thenard, Dumas and Pelouze in France, and Thomas
Thomson and Justus Liebig abroad.66 A pharmacist-chemist like Jean-Baptiste
Alphonse Chevallier, who was trained at the cole before becoming a professor
of pharmacy, was at the head of a laboratory where he trained numerous ana-
lysts.67 The generalization of such spaces of practical teaching or schools of
analytical chemistry significantly contributed to the emergence of the future
generations of technicians, expert chemists, and chemical engineers who
found numerous career opportunities in the industrial society of the nine-
teenth and early twentieth-century. These men embodied links between
practitioners and scholars and contributed to chemical and sanitary risk man-
agement by the development of food science and occupational toxicology
where chemistry, politics, justice, and economy were intimately intertwined.68
65 The cole received the title of Faculty in 1920. Georges Dillemann, Les tablissements
denseignement pharmaceutique de 1803 1994, Annales pharmaceutiques franaises 53
(1995): 1-7.
66 Gerald L. Geison, Frederic L. Holmes, eds., Research Schools: Historical Reappraisals,
Osiris 8 (1993).
67 Alex Berman, J.B.A.Chevallier, Pharmacist-Chemist: A major figure in nineteenth-cen-
tury French public health, Bulletin for the History of Medicine 52 (1978): 200-13.
68 Soraya Boudia and Nathalie Jas, eds., special issue, Risk and Risk Society in Historical
Perspective, History and Technology 23 (2007).

248 Tomic

Part 3

250 Tomic

Teaching Chemistry in the French Revolution 251
Chapter 10
Teaching Chemistry in the French Revolution:

Pedagogy, Materials and Politics
By the end of 1794 Year III of the revolutionary calendar, the young one and
indivisible French republic established a Normal School (cole normale) to
provide the French people with a system of instruction worthy of its novel
destiny.1 More concretely the purpose was to train a number of citizens
quickly so that they could train the future primary and secondary teachers in
all the districts of the French territory. Chemistry was an integral part of the
curriculum, which included both science and humanities. The term cole
normale clearly conveys a project of normalization or standardization of edu-
cation providing a uniform approach to all the sectors of knowledge previously
covered by the Encyclopdie. This teaching institution was dedicated to shap-
ing the man and the citizen. It was meant to coproduce knowledge and
citizenship according to the republican ideals of liberty, equality, and frater-
nity. Well-trained teachers (instituteurs) would be capable of being the
executives of a plan aimed at regenerating the human understanding in a
republic of 25 million people, all of whom democracy rendered equal.2
Claude-Louis Berthollet participated in this state initiative to assume his
social and political role as a teacher. As one of the supporters of Lavoisiers
chemistry and a member of the group of academicians who reformed the
1 Anon., Arrt des reprsentants du peuple prs les coles normales du 24 nivse an III de la
Rpublique franaise une et indivisible, Sances des coles normales (Paris: Imprimerie du
Cercle social, 1800-1801). All lessons are now available in print: Jean Dhombres, ed., Lcole
normale de lAn III. Leons de mathmatiques. Laplace, Lagrange, Monge (Paris: Dunod, 1992);
Daniel Nordman, ed., Lcole normale de lAn III. Leons dhistoire, de gographie, dconomie
politique. Volney, Buache de la Neuville, Mentelle, Vandermonde (Paris: Dunod, 1994); Etienne
Guyon, ed., Lcole normale de lAn III. Leons de physique, de chimie, et dhistoire naturelle.
Hay, Berthollet, Daubenton (Paris: ditions ENS Rue dUlm, 2006); Batrice Didier, Jean
Dhombres, eds., Lcole normale de lAn III. Leons littraires, art de la parole, morale, analyse
de lentendement (Paris: ditions ENS Rue dUlm, 2009). On the ambitions of the educational
projects of the French Revolution, see Mona Ozouf, Lhomme rgnr. Essais sur la Rvolution
franaise (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).
2 Debate at the Convention nationale in September 1794 quoted in Jean Dhombres, Introduction
gnrale, Dhombre, ed., Cours de lcole normale de lAn III, p.1 (see note 1).
Bernadette Bensaude Vincent, 2018|doi 10.1163/9789004325562_012


252 Bensaude Vincent
chemical language in the 1780s, he could be expected to contribute to the

national effort of normalization by teaching the new chemistry, known as the
theory of French chemists. Given the synchronism of the chemical and politi-
cal revolutions, chemistry featured as an ideal discipline to prompt the
transformation of the socio-political order by making up citizens capable of
transforming natural substances into national resources for the nations war-
fare and public welfare.
However Berthollets chemistry lectures suggest a quite different endeavor.
He did not take on the role of spokesman for a chemical community engaged
in a deep transformation of this discipline. Far from aiming at stabilizing the
new language of chemistry and promoting the theory outlined in Lavoisiers
Trait lmentaire de chimie (1789), Berthollet developed personal views about
chemical theories and utilitarian applications. He did nothing to spread the
gospel of two synchronic revolutions.
This essay stresses the gap between the national aspiration to shape the
future citizens of a new sociopolitical order and the pedagogical practice of
the chemistry lecturer. While the cole normale was meant to instill in children
and their teachers the normative frame according to which they should live
and work in a republican society, Berthollets lessons rather aimed at shaping
competent citizens by sharing his experience of the world as an expert in
chemical theory and arts. While revolutionary education was institutionally
projected as possessing a disciplinary power with which to govern both social
and material constituents, in Berthollets design it consisted in transmitting
ones own knowledge and expertise in the art of governing the multitude of
chemical substances.
The first section of this essay presents the goals and ambitions of the cre-
ation of the Normal School in the dual context of the political and chemical
revolutions. The second section focuses on the course of chemistry and
describes the site, the audience, and what we know about the teachers perfor-
mance. In the third section I argue that Berthollets pedagogical choice
expressed his personal vision of chemistry, which deeply differed from
Lavoisiers chemistry. It reveals a tension between Berthollets aspiration to a
world ruled by general laws and his concern with exceptions. While he stressed
the deductive power of chemical theory for enlightening chemical arts,
Berthollet nevertheless focused on anomalies and peculiar circumstances.
Berthollets lessons reflected his own experience of the world as a chemist
oscillating between the power of disciplining material substances conferred by
chemical theory and the art of paying attention to circumstances.

Normalizing Science and Education: A Revolutionary Ambition
The National Convention was a site for legislation intended to discipline soci-
ety and the economy through the organization of centralized structures and
practices of administration and education. It established the Normal School
a few months after the end of the Terror, which had generated strong cam-
paigns of slander against scientists.3 It was crucial for the young republic to
create trust between the elites and the new regime following the dissolution
of the Paris Royal Academy of Sciences together with all other academies in
1793 and the execution of Lavoisier together with twenty-one tax collectors of
the ancien rgime. The republic has no need of savants (la rpublique na pas
besoin de savants): although this alleged response of the revolutionary tribunal
to Lavoisiers request of a delay of capital punishment proved to be a legend, it
certainly expressed the general opinion and fear of the elite who had initially
supported the revolutionary movement. In fact the revolutionary government
badly needed the knowledge and skills of scientists for warfare. Chemists were
mobilized to produce large quantities of hydrogen for balloons, to transform
the church bells into canons and to manufacture saltpeter. So pressing was
the lack of explosive powder that in February 1794, the French government
mobilized leading chemists such as Gaspard Monge, Jean-Henri Hassenfratz,
Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, Antoine de Fourcroy and Berthollet to
teach French citizens how to collect and process saltpeter in their basements.4
In addition to warfare, the young republic needed scientists for the institu-
tion of public service in general, and education in particular. The decree
creating the Normal School aimed at replacing the educational system, which
had been in the hands of the Church during the ancien rgime. For this pur-
pose it was crucial to train primary and secondary teachers. The Church
educational system had already inaugurated this kind of institution in 1685
with Jean Baptiste de la Salles Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools.
The National Convention decreed: An cole normale will be established in
Paris where citizens from all parts of the republic already instructed in useful
3 Charles Coulston Gillispie, Science in the French Revolution, Proceedings of the National
Academy 45 (1959): 677-84. Charles Coulston Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity: An essay in the
history of scientific ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).
4 Programmes des cours rvolutionnaires sur la fabrication des salptres, des poudres et des
canons; faits Paris dans lamphithtre du Musum dhistoire naturelle et dans la salle des
Electeurs les 1, 11, 21 ventse et 5 germinal, 2me anne de la Rpublique franaise par les
citoyens Guyton, Fourcroy, Dufourny, Berthollet, Carny, Pluvinet, Monge, Hassenfratz et Perrier,
2nd edition (Paris: Comit de Salut public, 1794).

sciences will be called in order to learn the art of teaching under the most
skilled teachers in all genres.5
In 1791-92, Nicolas de Condorcet submitted a plan of education to the Legis
lative Assembly.6 It was inspired by the Enlightenment ideal of education
for citizenship and Condorcets conviction that education is the key for the
progress of civilization. Although Condorcets Plan was formally rejected, his
ambition to build up a complete national, free and compulsory system of secu-
lar schools to provide equal opportunity for all children, served as a guideline
for establishing the normal school in 1794. The purpose was to set the stan-
dards or norms for a universal plan and methods of education.
The unanimous concourse of wills and the convergence of efforts toward

the same goal being the safest guarantee of social order, schools, which
are the nurseries of the people bounded to serve the state, must equally
provide a uniform instruction, based on fixed and common rules for all
teaching houses.7
The Normal School founded in 1794 was short-lived but it initiated a process of
standardization that would be implemented on its re-opening in 1808 under
the First Empire. This process was to be achieved by the students themselves.
Those who came to the first training course at the Normal School in Paris had
been recruited in each of the eighty seven geographic districts (dpartements)
created in December 1789. On their return to their districts they would create
local normal schools to train dozens of primary and secondary teachers.
The Convention wanted to train primary and secondary teachers for the
entire territory of the Republic.
5 Article 1 of the Decree of the National Convention, 9 Brumaire An III (October 30, 1794).
6 Nicolas Caritat de Condorcet, Cinq mmoires sur linstruction publique (1791), new edition
Charles Coutel and Catherine Kinzler eds., (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1994). See also Keith
M. Baker and William A. Smeaton, The Origins and Authorship of the Educational Proposals
Published in 1793 by the Bureau de Consultation des Arts et mtiers and Generally Ascribed to
Lavoisier, Annals of Science 21 (1965): 33-46. Catherine Kinzler, Condorcet. Linstruction pub-
lique et la naissance du citoyen (Paris: Folio/Essais, 1984).
7 This statement about the driving forces behind the creation of the Normal School was formu-
lated on the occasion of its re-opening in 1808. See the introduction to the edition of the
lectures in 1808 quoted by Guyon, ed., Lcole normale de lAn III, p.3 (see note 1): Le concours
unanime et uniforme des volonts, la runion des efforts vers un mme but tant le plus sr
garant de lordre social, les coles, qui sont les ppinires des hommes destins servir lEtat,
doivent galement offrir une instruction uniforme, base sur des rgles invariables et com-
munes toutes les maisons denseignement.

Such is the goal of the institution of the coles normales. In other schools,
only the various branches of human knowledge are taught; in the coles
normales, one will teach the most useful knowledge of each kind and
insist on the method of exposition. This will essentially distinguish the
coles normales; this will fulfill their denomination.8
In keeping with the previous systematizations of natural history and chemical

languages and the simultaneous on-going project of standardization of weights
and measures, the normal schools standardized both the contents and the
methods of teaching. The contents were encyclopedic. According to Condor
cets grand views, all citizens had to be taught how to use reason in order to
overcome prejudices due to ignorance and superstition, to know their rights
and how to exercise them, as well as how to manage their household and to
advance the arts for national welfare.9 Similarly in his lectures on physics,
Ren-Just Hay insisted that primary teachers needed a broad instruction in
order to eradicate the prejudices spread by ordinary people, the vulgar. They
had to acquire a birds-eye view of the contents in order to distinguish the
most direct and easiest route from among all those leading to the targeted
goal.10
The Normal School recruited the leading figures of the former academies to
deliver an up-to-date survey of all the knowledge embedded in Diderot and
DAlemberts Encyclopdie. It also clearly recommended a linkage between sci-
ence and arts in education and the concern for public utility. However, the
revolutionary Normal School departed from Diderots Encyclopdie in adopt-
ing a disciplinary division of knowledge like the Encyclopdie mthodique.11
The introductory lessons carefully delineated the contemporary albeit prac-
tically contested boundaries between physics, chemistry, and natural history,
and tried to inculcate them in the future teachers minds.12 Natural sciences
8 Arrt du 24 nivse an II, quoted in Guyon, ed., Lcole normale de lAn III, p.33 (see note 1).
9 Nicolas Caritat de Condorcet, Esquisse dun tableau des progrs de lesprit humain (Paris:
Au bureau de la bibliothque choisie, 1795) Engl. Transl. J. Barraclough, Sketch for a his-
torical picture of the progress of the human mind (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1955),
182-184.
10 Ren Just Hay, 3rd lecture, in Guyon, ed., Lcole normale de lAn III, p.61 (see note 1).
11 Charles-Joseph Panckoucke ed., Encyclopdie mthodique par ordre de matires par une
Socit de gens de Lettres, de Savans et dArtistes (Lille: Librairie Panckoucke, 1782-1832);
Claude Blanckaert, Michel Porret, eds., LEncyclopdie mthodique, 1782-1832. Des Lumires
au positivisme (Genve: Librairie Droz, 2006).
12 See Ren-Just Hay and Berthollets first lectures, in Guyon, ed., Lcole normale de lAn III,
pp.44 and 256 (see note 1).

were essentially promoted for the enlightenment of workshop practices from a

utilitarian perspective.
The project further entailed standardizing the method of learning. This was
first to be achieved by teaching all subjects according to the method of analy-
sis, the method derived from algebra recommended by Etienne Bonnot de
Condillac.13 In relation to empirical data, the standard method was inspired by
a kind of vulgate of Newtons method. Hypotheses were not banned but strictly
confined to predictions; theories, clearly distinguished from systems, could
play a key role because they subsume a large number of particular phenomena
under one single general law.
To sum up this section, the educational program of the Normal School of
Year III was part of the political agenda of the French Revolution. It was one
aspect of a huge and multifaceted effort of standardization aimed at making a
homogeneous republican society. This effort encompassed the constitution of
a national territory divided into 89 administrative units (dpartements) and
the standardization of weights and measures thanks to the institution of
republican units of measurement (the metric system). The disciplinary power
of these political and institutional measures had to be reinforced by education.
Pedagogy and epistemology would shape the future citizens of the French
Republic. The academic elites mobilized in the Normal School were expected
to contribute to this national effort with their own sense of disciplinarity.
Actual Practices: Site and Courses
In January 1795, 1400 citizens selected to become primary and secondary teach-
ers came to Paris from all over the country for an intensive four-month course.
The training included mathematics, physics, natural history, history, geogra-
phy, political economy, literature, and what is today known as rhetoric (art du
discours), ethics (morale) and philosophy (analyse de lentendement). The con-
trast is striking between the ambition of the program and the time allocated:
13 William Albury, The Order of Ideas: Condillacs method of analysis as a political instru-
ment in the French revolution, J.A. Schuster, R. Yeo, eds., The Politics and the Rhetoric of
Scientific Method. Historical studies (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1986), 203-226. Lissa L. Roberts,
Condillac, Lavoisier, and the instrumentalization of science, Eighteenth-Century, Essays
and Interpretation 33 (1992): 252-271. Marco Beretta, The Enlightenment of Matter (Saga-
more Beach: Science History Publications, 1993). Bernadette Bensaude Vincent, Lavoisier,
lecteur de Condillac, Dix-Huitime Sicle 42 (2010): 49-65.

less than a semester from January 20 to May 15, 1795. The winter season being
extremely cold, the circumstances were not ideal.
The course included twelve to sixteen sessions per subject, with an average
of two to three lectures on each subject per dcade (the ten day week of the
revolutionary calendar) every day except on the fifth and tenth day between
11am and 2pm.14 The sessions took place in a large auditorium of the former
Jardin du Roy, renamed Jardin des plantes.15 The auditorium, being too small to
accommodate 1400 people, was uncomfortable and on some occasions the
attendance became irregular and sparse.16
Well-trained stenographers took the minutes of each lecture in shorthand
and transcribed them. The transcriptions were revised by the professors, then
printed and circulated among the audience. For a number of subjects, in par-
ticular chemistry, the published version of the oral lectures delivered in 1795
included an additional lecture delivered in 1801 for updating the contents. More
than half of the pages of the printed course were devoted to scientific sub-
jects, although rhetoric got the most number of pages of any single discipline
(eighteen percent of the whole). Among the scientific disciplines mathematics
received many more than chemistry (sixteen percent versus ten percent).
The students of the first Normal School had been selected on the basis of
unclear criteria. They had to be well educated in all subjects, but it seems that
their political inclinations also mattered a lot. They were preferably young but
half of them had teaching experience, including a good proportion of clergy-
men. Eighty percent of them became teachers in the coles centrales (high
schools) created by a decree in October 1795. For instance, Antoine Libes (1752-
1832), who had taught physics at the collge (high school) of Toulouse, would
later get the chair of experimental physics and chemistry at the cole centrale
of the Saint-Antoine suburb in Paris. So too did he go on to author a three-
volume Trait lementaire de physique (1801) and a Histoire philosophique des
progrs de la physique (1810).
The lecturers were selected from among the leading figures of science and
humanities, the members of the former academies that had been abolished by
a revolutionary decree in 1793. Most of them Monge, Hay, Bernardin de St
14 cole normale suprieure, Le Livre du Centenaire. Edition du bicentenaire (Paris: Presses de

lcole normale suprieure, 1994); Paul Viallaneix and R. Elmoznino eds., Lapprentissage
du savoir savant (Paris: PUF, 1995).
15 Yves Laissus, Le Musum national dhistoire naturelle (Paris: Gallimard, 1995). Stphane
Deligeorges, Alexandre Gady et Franoise Labalette, Le jardin des plantes et le Musum
national dhistoire naturelle (Paris: Monum, 2004).
16 Dominique Julia, Lcole normale de lan III: bilan dune exprience rvolutionnaire,
Revue du Nord 78 (1996):853-886.

Pierre had already taught in higher education institutions. In this respect,

Berthollet was an exception. Trained in medicine in Torino he became the pri-
vate physician of the lover of the Duc dOrlans on his arrival in Paris in 1772
and for fifteen years he conducted chemical research in the dukes private labo-
ratory.17 Like many chemists of the time, he collected airs and investigated
their chemical properties.18 In 1779, he became docteur-rgent of the Paris fac-
ulty of medicine. He entered the Acadmie des sciences as adjunct chemist in
1780 where he regularly interacted and collaborated with Lavoisier. Typical of
chemists and chemistrys fluid movement between material and knowledge
production at that time, he became Director of Dyes at the Gobelins Royal
Manufacture in 1784. This position implied that he had to visit the workshops
to explore dyeing practices and to write a treatise on this art. It was in this con-
text that he invented a bleaching process (involving what later came to be
known as chlorine) and published the Elments de lart de la teinture in 1791.19
Berthollet was thus not only a leading figure in academic chemistry but also an
expert in chemical arts. However, unlike his colleagues at the Normal School,
he had no teaching experience prior to the revolutionary course on saltpeter
he co-taught and his course at the Ecole des travaux publics.
According to the testimonies of some students of the Normal School,
Berthollet was not a brilliant teacher. Joseph Fourier, who later became a
famous physicist, wrote in 1785:
Berthollet is the greatest chemist of today, whether in France, or abroad;

he is not aged (forty-seven years) and with an ordinary look. He speaks
with the most extreme difficulty, hesitates and repeats ten times the
same words in a sentence and he seems embarrassed in the least details
of experiments.20
This view is confirmed by another testimony from Jean-Michel Raymond-

Latour, who praised Berthollet as the Newton of transcendental chemistry,
but remembered his poor teaching performances. He remembered especially
17 Michelle Sadoun Goupil, Le chimiste C.L. Berthollet, 1748-1822, sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: Vrin,
1977).
18 Claude-Louis Berthollet, Observations sur lair (Paris: Firmon Didot, 1776).
19 Agusti Nieto Galn, Colouring Textiles. A history of natural dyestuffs in industrial Europe
(Boston: Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, 2001).
20 Joseph Fourier, letter dated from March 18, 1785, quoted by Sadoun Goupil, Le chimiste
Claude-Louis Berthollet, p.37 (see note 17).

that when Berthollet presented his own work on ammonia, he was so shy and
embarrassed that Monge had to replace him for the rest of the lecture.21
All lecturers at the Normal School had to follow three specific rules to con-
form to the novel republican pedagogy, which broke with the traditional
dogmatic style of teaching based on authority. First, lecturers should not read
their lectures. Second, they were asked to focus on the basics of their subject
matter, the idea being that knowledge for all would reduce social inequalities.
Most importantly, entire sessions were to be dedicated to debates with the
audience. The printed transcriptions of these special sessions show that the
debates were not just meant for clarifying basic concepts. Some of the students
who had teaching experience did not hesitate to discuss the professors theo-
retical and pedagogical choices and even criticized them.
The printed version of the oral lectures, however, also demonstrates that the
lecturers did not strictly follow the revolutionary guidelines. Indeed, in their
introductory lectures they claimed that scientific theories were keys for the
progress of human welfare and that a good instruction should proceed gradu-
ally from elementary notions to more complex ones. However these were
essentially rhetorical claims. The messages delivered in some of their lectures
could be summarized by the motto. Follow what I say. Do not follow what
I do.22 For instance, while Hay emphasized the importance of mathematics
for physics he nevertheless adopted a descriptive approach to natural phe-
nomena and insisted on the practice of experimental methods.23 Louis
Jean-Marie Daubenton who was both a professor and former director of the
Jardin du Roy was extremely concerned with didactics, but his lectures were
full of digressions and details, which in some cases obliterated their theoretical
consistency.24 More generally, the transcribed lectures suggest that the profes-
sors struggled to resolve the tension between two conflicting demands: to
promote a new didactics of science and to provide a review of the most recent
21 Jean-Michel Raymond-Latour, Souvenirs dun oisif (Lyon: Chez Ayne fils, Isidore Per-
son,1836), 51-52.
22 Guyon, ed., Lcole normale de lAn III, p.3 (see note 1).
23 For instance Hays second lecture on the general properties of bodies (impenetrability,
divisibility, mobility, gravity), presented the experiments conducted for determining the
republican kilogram. Guyon, ed., Lcole normale de lAn III, pp.50-55 (see note 1); The
fourteenth lecture on electricity consisted in a detailed description of Coulombs experi-
ments. Ibid., pp.174-184.
24 For instance in his first lecture meant to define the object and limits of natural history,
Daubenton interrupted the presentation of veterinary art with a lengthy description of
the efforts of acclimatization of useful animals. Guyon, ed., Lcole normale de lAn III,
pp.420-22 (see note 1).

developments in their field. In other words, the pedagogical practice of the

teachers responded to the requirements of their respective discipline more
than to the centralizing policy demands to discipline future citizens. The con-
straints of individual scientific disciplines and personal styles of individual
lecturers clashed with the overall disciplinary framework that was supposed to
create a new sociopolitical order.
Disciplinary Power or Art of Governance?
In January 1795 Lavoisier, who had been among the victims of the Terror in May
1794, could not deliver the chemistry lectures. This was unfortunate for the
Normal School because his view of chemistry matched its pedagogical style.
Lavoisier, as it is well known, promoted his own theory as a revolution in
chemistry.25 Also well known is that contemporary historians of chemistry
legitimately question whether the term revolution is warranted for various
reasons, including the Kuhnian view of scientific revolutions as involving para-
digm shifts.26 However neither this Kuhnian definition of the term revolution
nor the idea that it necessarily involved a radical break with the past prevailed
at the end of the eighteenth century.27 In a sense, as I have argued elsewhere,
Lavoisiers own revolutionary ambition and the subsequent controversy that
he sparked together with the reform of the chemical language contributed to
stabilizing the current meaning of the phrase scientific revolution.28 In any
event, the elements that he and his champions viewed as constituting the
chemical revolution served the project of normalization carried out by the
cole normale in three ways. First, Lavoisiers method of balancing the inputs
and outputs of chemical reactions could be perceived as a kind of disciplinary
25 In 1772, Lavoisier deposited a sealed note at the Paris Academy of Sciences describing the
experiments of calcination, which led him to question the phlogiston theory and men-
tioning that they might bring about a revolution in physics and chemistry. Henry Guer-
lac, Lavoisier- The Crucial Year: The background and origin of his first experiments on
combustion, in 1772 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1961).
26 See for instance Ursula Klein, A Revolution that Never Happened, Studies in History and
Philosophy of Science 49 (2015): 80-90.
27 I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).
Rolf Reichardt Rolf, H.J. Lsebrink, Rvolution la fin du 18e sicle. Pour une relecture
dun concept-cl du sicle des Lumires, Mots 16 (1988): 35-68. Alain Rey, Rvolution: His-
toire dun mot (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).
28 Bernadette Bensaude Vincent, Lavoisier. Mmoires dune rvolution (Paris: Flammarion,
1993).

power over both materials and the minds and bodies of those who were
charged with performing these balancing acts. Whether or not Lavoisier actu-
ally matched his claims of quantitative precision, he used them as a rhetorical
argument to convert his fellow chemists to his views as instantiated in his
spectacular experiment on water, which determined Berthollet to rally to him.29
Second, the reform of chemical nomenclature provided a revolutionary model
of standardization; the new language of chemistry submitted to the Paris
Academy in 1787 by Guyton de Morveau, Lavoisier, Fourcroy and Berthollet
was an artificial language, breaking with the language forged by those who had
worked with chemical substances over many centuries.30 The new language
was promoted as a way to prompt a radical break with the past and in particu-
lar with the phlogiston theory, although the appropriation of this nomenclature
by European chemists did not always match this ideal.31
Third and more importantly, the normalization of linguistic habits could be
used as a prelude to the normalization of the republican educational system.
Lavoisiers Trait lementaire de chimie promoted a new pedagogy of chemistry
based on Condillacs claim that words, facts and ideas were the three ingredi-
ents of the formation of ideas in childrens minds. Lavoisier presented his
Trait as an extension of the memoir on the reform of nomenclature:
The impossibility of separating the nomenclature of a science from the

science itself is owing to this, that every branch of physical science must
consist in three things: the series of facts which are the objects of the sci-
ence; the ideas which represented these facts; and the words by which
these ideas are expressed. Like three impressions of the same seal, the
word ought to produce the idea, and the idea to be a picture of the fact.
And as ideas are preserved and communicated by means of words, it
necessarily follows that we cannot improve the language of any science
without at the same time improving the science itself. [] When we
29 See Bernadette Bensaude Vincent, Between Chemistry and Politics: Lavoisier and the
balance, Eighteenth-century, Essays and Interpretation, 33 (1992): 217-237. On the chal-
lenges to Lavoisiers precision see Jan Golinski, Fit Instruments: Thermometers in eigh-
teenth-century chemistry, Frederic L. Holmes and Trevor H. Levere, eds., Instruments and
Experimentation in the History of Chemistry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 185-210.
30 Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, Antoine Lavoisier, Claude-Louis Berthollet, Antoine
de Fourcroy, Mthode de nomenclature chimique (Paris: Cuchet, 1787), new edition (Paris:
Seuil, 1994).
31 Bernadette Bensaude Vincent and Ferdinando Abbri, eds., Lavoisier in European Context.
Negotiating a new language for chemistry (Sagamore Beach: Science History Publications,
1995).

begin the study of any science, we are in a situation respecting that

science similar to childrens and the course by which we have to advance,
is precisely the same, which Nature follows in the formation of their
ideas.32
According to this formulation, learning the formation of complex ideas in

childrens minds results from the association of simple sensations just as
chemical compounds are formed through the association of simple substances
and compound words by the addition of simple words. In Lavoisiers view, the
material elements of chemistry (simple bodies) were one and the same as
chemistrys pedagogical elements. From the simple to the complex, the order
of learning mirrored the order of material composition in nature.33 Thus
chemistry could elegantly solve the dilemmathat lecturers at the Normal
School had to face: promoting a new didactics of science and at the same time
providing a review of the most recent advances in their field.
Yet Berthollet did not follow this elegant pattern. On the one hand, he delib-
erately refused to give an elementary course. He assumed that his mission was
to provide a survey of recent advances in chemistry. The future teachers in the
audience were supposed to rephrase them later into a more didactic form.
Indeed, Berthollet recommended proceeding from the simple to the complex
in elementary courses of chemistry, but he clearly stated that he was not in the
same situation as teachers addressing an audience of pupils. On the other
hand, he did not follow Lavoisiers metaphysical assumption that the forma-
tion of ideas from simple to more complex ones was the mirror image of the
composition of words in human language or of the formation of compound
substances in nature. He firmly rejected the parallel between the order of
learning and the order of nature, which was the basic pre-assumption of
Lavoisiers revolutionary pedagogy. Berthollet claimed instead that natural
phenomena should be approached from various standpoints in order both to
facilitate the organization of ideas in the pupils minds and to develop further
investigations. To the linear analytical order (from the simple-to-the-complex),
he preferred displaying a broad spectrum of perspectives on each subject.
Lavoisier, for example, had refused to discuss affinities in his Trait lmen-
taire, arguing that the subject was too difficult and required too many pre-
32 Antoine Lavoisier, Trait lmentaire de chimie (Paris: Cuchet, 1789); Elements of Chemis-
try, translated by R. Kerr (Edinburgh: W. Creech, 1790), xiii.
33 Bernadette Bensaude Vincent, A View of the Chemical Revolution Through Contempo-
rary Textbooks: Chaptal, Lavoisier, Fourcroy, British Journal for the History of Science 23
(1990): 435-60.

conceptions to be included in an elementary course of chemistry.34 Berthollet,

contrariwise, dedicated his first lecture to the theory of affinity, based on his
own claim that affinities constituted the core concept of chemistry. His justifi-
cation was that their attractive action balanced by the repulsive force of caloric
provided the basic principle of all chemical phenomena. The description of
the properties of simple substances and their compounds thereby entailed the
application of this general principle.35
The structure of Berthollets course (table 10.1) reveals both an interest in
the theoretically arcane and a concern for practical aspects of the social prac-
tice of chemistry. In his first programmatic lecture Berthollet advocated the
view of technological applications and improvements deduced from theoreti-
cal understanding. He intended to provide the broad deductive framework on
which basis future teachers would have to develop more particular aspects
according to their audience. But in none of the following lectures did he
deduce practical applications from theory.
Strikingly, far from dogmatically imposing the revolutionary norms on
chemistry, Berthollet demanded that his audience be able to interpret knowl-
edge by themselves. In particular, he did not devote a single lecture to the new
language of chemistry. His silence is all the more striking since he was a mem-
ber of the group of chemists who had reformed the language of chemistry in
1787.36 The Normal School was an ideal place to spread the new nomenclature
and the underlying theory of French chemists. Judging from the transcription
of the first session of debates, such was the expectation of a number of the
students in the audience. While Berthollet announced that the session would
be devoted to a discussion of chemical attractions, Etienne-Bernard Guillemet
from the district of Besanon opened the debate with this critical remark:
Would it not have been more appropriate, or would it not be more appro-
priate, before proceeding further in your lectures, to talk about the words
and rules on which the new chemical nomenclature is based? When one
has to talk about a new theory, it is necessary to render the adopted
34 Lavoisier, Trait lmentaire de chimie (see note 32).

35 Berthollet, in Guyon, ed., Lcole normale de lAn III. Leons de physique, de chimie,
dhistoire naturelle, p.109 (see note 1).
36 Berthollet was in fact the first chemist who adopted Lavoisiers oxygen theory. In 1785 he
used it to account for the formation of dephogisticated marine acid (future chlorine) in
reacting manganese dioxide on marine acid (future chlorhydric acid). In 1787 he joined
Guyton de Morveau, Lavoisier and Fourcroy to compose the Mthode de nomenclature
chimique. In 1789, he was part of the editorial committee of the Annales de chimie, a new
journal promoting the antiphlogiston theory.

Table 10.1 Berthollets Chemistry Course at the cole normale de lAn III
First Lecture: 6 Pluvise an III (January 26, 1795)

Order to be followed in an elementary course
Indispensable preliminary: chemical attraction or affinity
Second Lecture: 7 Pluvise an III (January 27, 1795)
Anomalies in the affinities
Third Lecture: 22 Pluvise an III (February 10, 1795)
Nature and properties of heat: caloric and its action presented through their
analogy with dissolutions
First Debate: 27 Pluvise an III (February 15, 1795)
On nomenclature, on the laws of affinities, and on phlogiston as well as caloric
Fourth Lecture: 2 Ventse an III ( February 20, 1795)
The chemical action of light
Second Debate: 7 Ventse an III (February 25, 1795)
On heat and light
Fifth Lecture: 12 Ventse an III (March 2, 1795)
Analysis and synthesis of water
Sixth Lecture: 22 Ventse an III (March mars, 1795)
Carbonic gas
Seventh Lecture: 2 germinal an III (March 22,1795)
Composition and properties of combustible bodies; their domestic applications
Eighth Lecture: 12 Germinal an III (April 1, 1795)
Niters and saltpeters
Ninth Lecture: 22 Germinal an III (April 11, 1795)
Oxygenated muriatic acid
Tenth Lecture: 2 Floral an III ( April 21, 1795)
Chemical properties of atmospheric air
Eleventh Lecture : 12 Floral an III (April 31,1795)
Hydrogen combinations: ammonia, action of electricity on various substances
Twelfth Lecture: 22 Floral an III ( May 11, 1795)
Acidity: influence of oxygen and its limits
Additional Lecture: 21 Prairial an IX ( June 10, 1801)
Further thoughts about chemical action in gas, plants and animals

phrases perfectly intelligible, in establishing, prior to using them, the

rules of the recent convention, which alone had imagined them. I know
that you suppose elementary notions of chemistry in the discussion; but
one can have these notions and ignore the meaning of carbonic acid,
bombiate carbonate, etc. I will therefore ask you whether it would not be
more appropriate to say a few words about the rules of this convention.
Your lecture would be more successful, and fruitful.37
Guillemet rightly expected rules in order to extend the process of normaliza-

tion of chemistry in his own teaching. The emphasis on the term convention,
which had a clear political connotation at the time of the National Convention,
suggests a close association of the chemical revolution and the political revolu-
tion. After the end of the Terror fighting external and internal enemies no
longer was a priority. The time had come to explain clearly the foundations of
the new sociopolitical order. Such was Guillemets expectation: a revolutionary
teacher had to explain clearly the meaning and foundations of the new linguis-
tic order. Berthollet ignored the criticism and answered that the new language
was already embedded in the exposition of the recent advances in chemistry.
It would suffice, he replied, to juxtapose the old and the novel denominations
in the rest of his lectures.
Berthollet did not care to normalize chemistry. Quite the contrary, he was
interested in anomalies. Following the first lecture on the theory of elective
affinities and the construction of affinity tables, he devoted an entire lecture to
the cases that opposed the order of affinities in the tables. He thus detailed a
number of reactions where the products reacted with reagents and offered two
possible explanations for such anomalies: either a variation in temperature or
the proportion of substances.38 His take-home message to the future instruc-
tors was that they should pay attention to the circumstances of reaction. He
repeatedly emphasized their peculiarity more than their conformity with the
general rule. This attention to the local and particular circumstances would
lead him to revise the standard theory of affinity in his Essai de statique chi-
mique (1803) and to oppose Joseph Proust regarding the general law of fixed
proportions.39
37 Berthollet, First debate, 27 pluvise/February 15 in Guyon, ed., Lcole normale de lAn III.
Leons de physique, de chimie, dhistoire naturelle, p.275 (see note 1).
38 See Pere Grapi and Merce Izquierdo, Berthollets Conception of Chemical Change in
Context, Ambix 44 (1997): 113-30.
39 Kiyohisa Fujii, The Berthollet-Proust Controversy and Daltons Atomic Theory, 1800-
1820, British Journal for the History of Science 19 (1986): 177-200.

More broadly Berthollet did not use the opportunity of this course to spread
the theory of French chemists. He surveyed state of the art European chemis-
try and downplayed the divide between so-called phlogistonist and
antiphlogistonist chemists. Strikingly his lectures portrayed chemistry as an
international and communal science, a position that opponents to the new
chemistry had sought to use as a foil to what they saw as its imperialistically
French character. While he hardly mentioned his own work and contributions
(on ammonia, for instance), he nevertheless ventured personal theoretical
views in the twelfth lecture on acidity. Here he began with two examples that
instantiated Lavoisiers theory of acids, followed by the presentation of oxy-
genated compounds without acidic properties and one acid that did not
contain oxygen. Berthollet clearly expressed his own view: This is a question
on which I disagree with most chemists.40
Conclusion
This essay presented Berthollets lectures at the cole normale de lAn III as one
face of chemistry in the public sphere, which has been eclipsed by the stan-
dard narratives of the chemical revolution shaped by Lavoisier. Berthollets
lectures clearly indicate that there was no uniform paradigm of chemistry even
among the French antiphlogistonist school. He disagreed with Lavoisier not
only about theoretical aspects (such as the nature of acids) but also about the
moral economy of chemistry.41 The values underlying Lavoisiers chemistry
were simplicity, standardization, abstraction from local contexts and circum-
stances. By contrast, Berthollet put the emphasis on non-standard cases and
local circumstances. Through his engagement in both the chemical and the
French revolutions, Berthollet was trying to promote an alternative model of
order one that would take into account the complexities of the real world
rather than promoting an ideal of normality.
Although Lavoisiers chemistry provided a form of disciplinary power over
materials and language, which was in full agreement with the project of nor-
malizing science and education, Berthollet promoted chemistry as an art of
circumstances requiring attention and personal experience. To the discipli-
40 Berthollet, Premier dbat, 27 pluvise/February 15 in Guyon, ed., Lcole normale de lAn

III. Leons de physique, de chimie, dhistoire naturelle, p.350 (see note 1).
41 The moral economy of science in Lorraine Dastons sense is a balanced system of emo-
tional forces, with equilibrium points and constraints. Lorraine Daston, The Moral
Economy of Science, Osiris 10 (1995): 2-24, 2.

nary power of chemistry balancing chemical equations and ruling all chemical
arts, he preferred a governance of materials and reactions based on negotia-
tions with their peculiar behaviors in specific circumstances. It is not that
Berthollet was against all systematic order. Rather for him disciplining materi-
als by submitting them to the rule of general laws did not make sense as long
as it introduced an arbitrary decision of minimizing the significance of excep-
tions. In his view anomalies were interesting and informative as much as the
standard cases. In more general terms, Berthollet was against the revolutionary
plea for normalization because it entailed a process of abstraction and ideal-
ization of the actual behavior of materials in the real world. He sought a more
inclusive order that would take the particularities of ambient circumstances
into account. In recognizing the mundane complexities of the material world,
he invited future citizens to negotiate between the goal of disciplining knowl-
edge, on one hand, and both nature and society on the other.
Lavoisiers analytic-synthetic ideal of standardized chemical substances
prevailed for most of the nineteenth century, whereas Berthollets ideal was
eclipsed. The Normal School was globally regarded as a failure because the
professors lessons were academic courses rather than lectures appropriated
for instruction.42 Under Napolons empire, teachers were trained at the
university: they had to attend courses at the Collge de France, the cole poly
technique and the Musum dhistoire naturelle. When the Normal School was
fully re-established in 1830 by King Louis-Philippe the program of the chemis-
try course mainly dealt with stoichiometric compounds although it maintained
a first lesson dedicated to molecular attraction and affinity.43 It included one
laboratory class per week but virtually no practical recipes for preparing useful
compounds. For many decades, only daltonide compounds were investi-
gated, whereas berthollide non-stoichiometric compounds and equilibrium
reactions were ignored until the 1870s. Only under the Third Republic did
chemists face the challenge of normalizing the berthollides, of ruling chemical
equilibrium with the mass action law and Henry Le Chateliers law. However,
in advocating the application of Taylorism to laboratory research, Le Chatelier
extended the ideal of normalization to all practices of chemistry.44 Definitely,
Berthollets lessons of chemistry failed to shape the future generations of
French chemists!
42 Victor Cousin, in cole normale. Rglements, programmes et rapports (Paris: Hachette,

1837), p.4.
43 Programme du cours de chimie, 1st et 2nd semester in ibid., p.50-56.
44 Henry Le Chatelier, Science et industrie (Paris: Flammarion, 1925).

Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Patrice Bret and Pere Grapi who collaborated with me for the
edition of Berthollets lecture in Etienne Guyon ed. Lcole normale de lAn III.
Leons de physique, de chimie, et dhistoire naturelle. Hay, Berthollet, Daubenton.
(Paris, ditions ENS Rue dUlm, 2006). I also wish to thank Lissa Roberts for her
critical comments on earlier versions of this essay.

The Subversive Humphry Davy 269
Chapter 11
The Subversive Humphry Davy: Aristocracy and

Establishing Chemical Research Laboratories in
Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century
England
Frank A.J.L. James
As other essays in this volume testify, chemistry, in all its multifarious guises
throughout Europe, could be undertaken within a wide range of institutional,
organisational and physical settings. This essay discusses the beginnings in
England at the end of the eighteenth century of one type of setting, namely
institutional laboratories funded by subscription that were either envisioned
or came to be devoted to chemical research. Such laboratories required a num-
ber of material things before they could start to produce scientific knowledge:
a building, building services (heating, lighting, water, and so on) and appara-
tus. Furthermore, appropriately trained staff including researchers, laboratory
assistants and servants, also needed to be found. Less tangibly, it was impor-
tant to have available retrievable recording methods and some access to
disseminating the knowledge produced. These components did not appear of
their own volition, but required substantial financial support, to be organized
and governed, all through human agency. Even today none of this is straight-
forward, but when no appropriate models were available that could be followed
to achieve the desired aims, the difficulties became manifold. Inevitably under
such circumstances, a strong tendency existed to underdefine and underspec-
ify what a laboratory required, particularly in terms of management, and to
start with the familiar. That left ample scope for unintended consequences, the
idiosyncrasies of individual agency and the subversion of original aims.
This essay explores these themes through examining the founding and
development of the first two subscription funded research laboratories in
England, located in the Medical Pneumatic Institution (MPI) in Bristol and the
Royal Institution of Great Britain (RIGB) in London, both established in the
late 1790s. This is not to suggest that research laboratories did not previously
exist in Great Britain. Two of the most significant were funded privately by
individual wealthy aristocrats, one in Clapham, Surrey, built by and for Henry
Cavendish (1731-1810) and the other by the Second Earl of Shelburne (1737
Frank A.J.L. James, 2018|doi 10.1163/9789004325562_013


270 James
1805) at his Bowood seat in Wiltshire where Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) and
Jan Ingen-Housz (1730-1799) worked.1 Both laboratories were entirely depen-
dent on aristocratic interest and whim, with no mechanism for them to be
sustained beyond their patrons lives. It is perhaps no coincidence that much
of Cavendishs apparatus later wound up at the RIGB, where he was a leading
figure during its early years.2
It might be assumed a priori that subscription-funded laboratories would be
organized differently from those supported aristocratically and command lon-
ger term support, since their funding base was broader and seemingly not
dependent on any specific individual. In practice, it had to be learned how
such novel organisations should be managed. That meant, to some extent
at least, beginning with familiar organisational methods, thus potentially
subjecting the new institutions to the same issues surrounding individual
domination, continuity and legacy that arose with aristocratic patronage.
Aristocratic laboratories provided one of the few models available in Great
Britain about how a research laboratory might be managed; furthermore, a
large proportion of subscriptions for both the MPI and RIGB came from aristo-
crats. These new laboratories were not ex nihilo creations, linked distinctively,
according to some accounts, to notions of increasing industrialization or a ris-
ing middle class, but were also closely connected to the traditional British
ruling class whose power was still enormous.
The MPI and the RIGB were also linked together closely by a single individ-
ual, Humphry Davy (1778-1829). He was the formers superintendent for nearly
two and a half years from October 1798 until March 1801, when he moved to the
latter. While the considerable literatures on Davy, the MPI and the RIGB do, of
course, note the connection, its significance for the development of research
1 Christa Jungnickel and Russell McCormmach, Cavendish: The experimental life ([Lewisburg]:
Bucknell, 1998), 329-30. Robert E. Schofield, The Enlightened Joseph Priestley: A study of his life
and work from 1773 to 1804 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 3-143;
Norman Beale and Elaine Beale, Echoes of Ingen Housz: The long lost story of the genius who
rescued the Habsburgs from smallpox and became the father of photosynthesis (East Knoyle:
Hobnob Press, 2011).
2 The minutes of the meetings of the Royal Institutions Managers are in RI MS AD/2/B/2/A
followed by volume number. This will be cited here as RI MM followed by date of meeting,
volume and page numbers. The minutes of nineteenth-century meetings were published in
facsimile as Archives of the Royal Institution, Minutes of the Managers Meetings, 1799-1903, 15
volumes in 7 (London: Scholar Press, 1971-1976). Cavendishs apparatus is referred to in RI MM,
9 July 1810, 5: 126.

laboratories in Great Britain has not really been appreciated.3 This essay argues
that Davys unique career trajectory from provincial obscurity in Penzance, in
the far west of England, to the MPI, provided him with the skills, experience
and commitment to negotiate and persuade the RIGB to add research to its
activities, something that had never been intended or even envisaged by its
founders. Davy brought about this significant transformation in a manner rem-
iniscent of the way aristocratic laboratories were organized. As a consequence
he established at the RIGB what became for much of the nineteenth century
the best-equipped chemical and natural philosophical research laboratory in
England. Many fundamental discoveries would be made there by Davy and his
successors, such as Michael Faraday (1791-1867), John Tyndall (c.1822-1893) and
James Dewar (1842-1923).4 Their successes contributed to ensuring that the
RIGB came to serve as a model, or at least a starting point, for the organisation
of science in other places, most notably the Smithsonian Institution in
Washington in 1846.5
The Medical Pneumatic Institution
The MPI stemmed from the work of Thomas Beddoes (1760-1808), the son of a
reasonably wealthy tanner with significant land holdings in Shifnal, Shrop-
3 June Fullmer, Young Humphry Davy: The making of an experimental chemist (Philadelphia:
American Philosophical Society, 2000); David Knight, Humphry Davy: Science and power
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1992; Second Edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
Sophie Forgan, ed., Science and the Sons of Genius: Studies on Humphry Davy (London: Science
Reviews, 1980); Trevor H. Levere, Dr. Thomas Beddoes and the Establishment of His Pneumatic
Institution: A tale of three presidents, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 32
(1977): 41-9; Mike Jay, The Atmosphere of Heaven: The unnatural experiments of Dr. Beddoes and
his sons of genius (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Henry Bence Jones, The Royal
Institution: Its founders, and its first professors (London: Longman, 1871); Morris Berman, Social
Change and Scientific Organization: The Royal Institution, 1799-1844 (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1978); Frank A.J.L. James, ed., The Common Purposes of Life: Science and society at the
Royal Institution of Great Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).
4 Frank A.J.L. James, Michael Faraday: A very short introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010); Roland Jackson, John Tyndall and the Early History of Diamagnetism, Annals of Science
72 (2015): 435-89; John Rowlinson, Sir James Dewar, 1842-1923: A ruthless chemist (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2012).
5 Heather Ewing, The Lost World of James Smithson: Science, revolution, and the birth of the
Smithsonian (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007).

272 James
shire.6 He attended Pembroke College, Oxford, before studying chemistry with

Bryan Higgins (c.1741-1818) in London and then with Joseph Black (1728-1799) at
Edinburgh University. Returning to Oxford in 1786, he took his MD, followed by
a visit to France. There he became acquainted with many leading chemists,
including Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794), following which he adopted the new
chemical nomenclature. From 1787 until his final lecture series delivered in the
spring of 1792, he held the non-stipendiary Readership in Chemistry at Oxford
University. He then resigned following disagreements in Oxford centering on
his support for the French Revolution and his general position as a democrat,
which led him to be subjected to government harassment.7
Needing an income, Beddoes decided to practice medicine and by early
April 1793 had acquired the lease on 11 Hope Square, Hotwells.8 Located near
Bristol, the fifth largest city in England, Hotwells, a small spa village on the
banks of the river Avon across from Somerset, had a long tradition of wealthy
and aristocratic visitors coming to take the waters to benefit their health
since the seventeenth century.9 The Midlands engineer and industrialist
James Watt sr. (1736-1819) had no doubt that Beddoes chose Bristol for the
greater [medical] practice, suggesting he believed that the choice of loca-
tion was entirely deliberate, enabling Beddoes to be near wealth and potential
patronage.10
Furthermore, Bristol was also geographically convenient for Bowood, and
evidence suggests that Beddoes had links there, especially with Ingen-Housz.11
The main influence, however, for Beddoess choosing Hotwells was probably
the presence of the Irish landowner and educational writer Richard Edgeworth
6 John Stock, Memoirs of T. Beddoes, M.D., with an analytical account of his writings (London:
John Murray, 1811); Dorothy Stansfield, Thomas Beddoes M.D., 1760-1808: Chemist, physi-
cian, democrat (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1984).
7 Kenneth Johnston, Unusual Suspects: Pitts reign of alarm and the lost generation of the
1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) devoted an entire chapter (96-110) to Bed-
does. See also Trevor H. Levere, Dr. Thomas Beddoes at Oxford: Radical politics in 1788-
1793 and the fate of the Regius Chair in Chemistry, Ambix 28 (1981): 61-9.
8 Thomas Beddoes to Davies Giddy, 7 April 1793, CRO MS DG/41/2, told him to send his next
letter to Hope Square.
9 Phyllis Hembry, The English Spa 1560-1815: A social history (London: Athlone, 1990), 245-50.
10 James Watt sr. to Joseph Black, 17 July 1793, in R.G.W. Anderson and Jean Jones, eds., The
Correspondence of Joseph Black, 2 vols. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), vol. 2, 703.
11 See Jan Ingen-Housz to Thomas Beddoes, 4 August 1794, quoted in Thomas Beddoes and
James Watt, Considerations on the Medicinal Use of Factitious Airs, and on the manner of
obtaining them in large quantities (parts 1 and 2, London: Johnson, [1794]), part 1, 31. Beale
and Beale, Ingen Housz, pp.452-4, 481-3 (see note 1).

(1744-1817), whom he knew via his links with the Midlands industrialists.
Edgeworth had been living in Clifton (north of Hotwells) with his third wife
and large family since late 1791 for the sake of of his sons health. Beddoes
regarded Edgeworth as being in the highest rank of the untitled Aristocracy
(again suggesting Beddoess concern with status and position).12 Furthermore,
Beddoes had fallen in love with Edgeworths daughter, Anna Edgeworth (1773-
1824); they married in Ireland on 17 April 1794.13 Approving the match,
Edgeworth described his future son-in-law as a little fat Democrat of consider-
able abilities and thought that if he concentrated on medicine he would make
his fortune.14 Beddoes did indeed build up a considerable and lucrative medi-
cal practice in the ensuing years.15
But Beddoes also spent much time developing his ideas about the possible
therapeutic value of pneumatic chemistry, first mooted while still at Oxford.16
In the preceding decades Priestley, Cavendish and others had discovered vari-
ous new airs, elastic fluids or gases, and Beddoes wanted to determine whether
they could be used to cure diseases (particularly consumption) or at least miti-
gate them. Knowledge about Beddoess work, especially its significance if
successful, circulated fairly widely and attracted considerable attention includ-
ing from no less a figure than the Whig grandee Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess
of Devonshire (1757-1806), wife of the fifth Duke of Devonshire (1748-1811). She
twice visited Beddoes in Hotwells, once just before Christmas 1793 and again in
mid-January, evincing a strong interest in his ideas.17 On both occasions
Beddoes demonstrated to her that if animals such as dogs or rabbits breathed
oxygen beforehand they could survive freezing or emersion in nitrogen.18
12 Thomas Beddoes to Davies Giddy, 25 or 26 May 1793, CRO MS DG/41/21. A misreading of

this passage may be the source of the mistake in Jay, Atmosphere, pp.80, 289 (see note 3),
in incorrectly awarding a knighthood to Edgeworth.
13 Thomas Beddoes to Davies Giddy, 25 or 26 May 1793, CRO MS DG/41/27, referred to becom-
ing intimately acquainted with her during the previous three months.
14 Postscript by Edgeworth in Maria Edgeworth to Margaret Ruxton, 21 July 1793, National
Library of Ireland MS 10166/7/105. Jay, Atmosphere, p.91 (see note 3), suggested that Bed-
does was not a gentleman, being a tanners son, and therefore there were class issues
that required resolution before the marriage could take place. It is not clear on what basis
Jay thought that Edgeworth would not have viewed an Oxford educated physician as any-
thing other than a gentleman.
15 Thomas Beddoes to James Watt sr., 30 May 1797, LoB MS 3219/4/29/14.
16 Thomas Beddoes to Davies Giddy, 2 March 1795, CRO DG/42/35.
17 Duchess of Devonshire to Dowager Countess Spencer, 1 January 1794 and 16 January 1794,
Chatsworth MS CS5/1201 and 1204 respectively.
18 Duchess of Devonshire to Charles Blagden, 13 and 14 January 1794, Royal Society of Lon-
don MS CB/1/3/278; Duchess of Devonshire to Joseph Banks, 1 December 1794, in Neil

274 James
It was not a coincidence that, following these aristocratic visits, Beddoes

began to develop plans for a pneumatic hospital. This idea appeared first in a
letter to the chemist Joseph Black, written on Christmas Eve 1793.19 In another
letter written to an unidentified correspondent immediately after Devon
shires second visit, Beddoes wrote: it would be more practical to determine
the medical effects of elastic fluids in one year, if we had six to twelve patients
in a house with apparatus, than in twelve years of private practice. He esti-
mated that such a hospital dedicated solely to this area of research could be
established with six or seven hundred pounds, though he soon revised this to
not less than 3000 & not more than 5000.20 In a folded broadsheet entitled
A proposal towards the improvement of Medicine, printed at the end of July 1794,
Beddoes argued that he had abundantly proved, that the application of elastic
fluids to the cure of diseases, is both practical and promising. He continued
that a funded Medical Pneumatic Institution would much more effectively
establish the benefits or otherwise of pneumatic medicine than twenty years
of private practice. A successful MPI, Beddoes argued, ought to render itself
useless, by so far simplifying methods and ascertaining facts, that every practi-
tioner of medicine, at least, may both know how to procure and how to apply
the different elastic fluids. If unsuccessful, then at least it had been tried. He
thought such an institution should be able to settle the matter after operating
for two or three years. Money would be required to rent a building accommo-
dating a dozen patients, apparatus, furniture, a medical superintendent to run
the institution, three servants, contingent expenses and medicines.21 Beddoes
clearly understood a laboratorys material and staffing requirements, although
not necessarily how they fitted together.
For nearly four years, from the autumn of 1794 until the summer of 1798,
Beddoes worked with his major supporters, including Devonshire, James Watt
jr. (1769-1848), Tom Wedgwood (1771-1805) and Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802),
undertaking a public fundraising campaign. In the end around 200 donors sub-
scribed just over 2000, significantly below the minimum sum that Beddoes
Chambers, ed., The Scientific Correspondence of Joseph Banks, 6 vols. (London: Pickering,
2007), vol. 4, 1290.
19 Thomas Beddoes to Joseph Black, 24 December 1793, Black Correspondence, vol. 2, p.724
(see note 10).
20 Thomas Beddoes to unidentified correspondent, mid-January 1794, in Stock, Beddoes,
pp.100-1 (see note 6). Thomas Beddoes to Thomas Wedgwood, mid-March 1794, WM MS
MC 35. This letter is dated on the basis that Beddoes mentioned that he was about to go to
Ireland.
21 Thomas Beddoes, A proposal towards the improvement of Medicine (Bristol: np, 1794).

believed necessary.22 Nearly a third of this money came from just nineteen
donations greater than 20 (mostly from members of the Devonshire circle
including seven aristocrats). Additionally, Wedgwood gifted 500 and Beddoess
deceased patient William Lambton (1764-1797) bequeathed 300. The reason
why the general public appeal failed to raise the required amount, thus forcing
Beddoes to rely heavily on his wealthy and aristocratic supporters, was due to
his radical political views, which told against him. For example, despite her
best efforts, the Dutchess of Devonshire (who disliked Beddoess politics)
could not obtain the support of the President of the Royal Society of London,
Joseph Banks (1743-1820).23 He regarded Beddoess opposition to the present
arrangement of the order of Society in this Country as disqualifying him from
support.24 Even Beddoess strong supporters became frustrated with him;
James Watt sr. told him that his political activities will do more hurt to
Pneumatics than you can possibly do good to the nation amend your ways.25
During 1797 Beddoes and some subscribers became convinced that suf
ficient funds had been raised to ensure the practicality of imminently estab-
lishing the MPI. Discussions began about its possible location (some were not
convinced of Bristols appropriateness) and to search for a suitable superinten-
dent.26 So far as the latter was concerned, Beddoes noted in October, that
despite many applications none were suitable, which disappointed him.27
However, whilst staying in Penzance during the winter of 1797/8 for the sake of
their health, Wedgwood and Watts son from his second marriage, Gregory
Watt (1777-1804), had formed a friendship with an apprentice apothecary, the
nineteen-year-old Humphry Davy.
22 This is detailed in Frank A.J.L. James, The first example of an extensive scheme of pure
scientific medical investigation: Thomas Beddoes and the Medical Pneumatic Institution in
Bristol, 1794 to 1799 (London: Royal Society of Chemistry Historical Group Occasional Pub-
lication, 2016).
23 Duchess of Devonshire to Earl Spencer, 30 May 1796, British Library MS add 75923 (no
foliation).
24 Joseph Banks to Duchess of Devonshire, 30 November 1794, Natural History Museum
Dawson Turner Collection, 9, f. 125.
25 James Watt sr. to Thomas Beddoes, 28 November 1795, LoB MS 3219/4/124/414.
26 Thomas Beddoes to James Watt sr., 26 May 1797, LoB MS 3219/4/29/13.
27 Thomas Beddoes to Thomas Girdlestone, 25 July 1797, private possession; Thomas Bed-
does to James Watt sr., 24 October 1797, LoB MS 3219/4/29/23.

276 James
Humphry Davy
Davy was born in Penzance in 1778, the eldest of five children. Many anecdotes
testify to his being a bright child and after attending local schools he studied at
Truro Grammar School in 1793.28 Leaving serious debts due to unwise mining
investments, his father died in December 1794, a week before Davys sixteenth
birthday. To help overcome the familys financial problems, his mother, Grace
Davy (1752-1826), apprenticed him to the Penzance surgeon and apothecary
John Borlase (1753-1813).29 She also opened a milliners shop and took in lodg-
ers, including at the end of 1797 Gregory Watt to whom Davy became close.
Wedgwood, also in Penzance, and Watt were both interested in chemistry and
it is from this time that Davy began his chemical studies hitherto he had been
more interested in poetry.30 Despite the existence of a 1790 English translation
he read, amongst other texts, Lavoisiers Trait elementaire de chimie (1789; sec-
ond edition, 1793) in French, which he had learned from an migr, and
undertook some chemical experiments.31 All this brought him to the attention
of Beddoess former student and minor member of the Cornish gentry, Davies
Giddy (1767-1839). His support secured Davy access to the well-equipped labo-
ratory in Riviere House, Hayle, owned by John Edwards (1731-1807), manager of
the Cornish Copper Company.32 Either there or possibly through an instru-
ment maker in Penzance, Davy conducted experiments with an air pump
demonstrating that a flintlock fired in a vacuum did not, contra Lavoisier, pro-
duce light. Furthermore, he also experimented on rubbing ice pieces together,
from which he concluded that heat was a mode of motion rather than a fluid,
a result he appears to have reached before hearing about the similar theory
proposed around the same time by Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford
(1753-1814).33
28 John Paris, The Life of Sir Humphry Davy, 2 vols. (London: Colburn and Bentley, 1831); John
Davy, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Humphry Davy, Bart, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1836).
29 Davys indenture of apprenticeship in RI MS HD/5/3.
30 Wahida Amin, The Poetry and Science of Humphry Davy, PhD thesis, University of Sal-
ford, 2013; Sharon Ruston, From The Life of the Spinosist to Life: Humphry Davy,
Chemist and Poet, Margaret Hagen and Margery Skagen, eds., Literature and Chemistry:
Elective affinities (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2013), 77-97.
31 Davy, Davy, vol. 1, p.21 (see note 28).
32 Paris, Davy, vol. 1, p.47 (see note 28). W.H. Pascoe, CCC: The history of the Cornish Copper
Company (Hayle: Haylebooks, 1981), 158.
33 Rumford, An Inquiry concerning the Source of the Heat which is Excited by Friction,
Philosophical Transactions 88 (1798): 80-102.

Giddy suggested to Davy that he should send an account of his experiments

to Beddoes which he did in April 1798, and which Beddoes later published.34 In
July Beddoes wrote to Watt sr. asking for his opinion about appointing Davy
(concerning whom apply to Gregory) to be superintendent, to which he
presumably consented.35 On 1 October, after extended negotiations, Borlase
canceled the final sixteen and a half months of Davys apprenticeship. Leaving
Penzance the following day, Davy arrived in Bristol five days later. Beddoes had
just moved into a large house in Rodney Place, commenting that the houses in
it are the best at Clifton & I have bought the best.36 But, above all, Davy told his
mother soon after arriving, Rodney Place possessed an excellent laboratory.37
Davy did not disappoint and Beddoes reacted to him as did everyone else who
met him at this time. In The Monthly Magazine, Beddoes described Davy as A
young man, endowed with talents for experimental researches at least equal
to any person I have ever known. His patient, the poet Robert Southey (1774-
1843), wrote, We have an extraordinary young man lately settled here.38
Beddoes entrusted Davy with the task of spending the money that he had
taken so long to raise and arranged for him to meet some of the MPIs major
subscribers. For instance, Davy quickly visited the Midlands to see Watt sr. and
his fellow industrialist James Keir (1735-1820). During this period Davy also
began negotiations to acquire a building for the MPI in Dowry Square.39 In
March 1799 The Bristol Gazette carried an advertisement announcing the open-
ing there of the New Medical Institution which would be attended, pre-
sumably daily, by Beddoes and Davy between 11am and 1pm.40 Shortly
afterwards, Davy drafted a Prospectus for the MPI (though it is not clear if this
was ever printed) in which he wrote that upwards of forty are become outpa-
tients [at the MPI] within this fortnight & we could immediately fill the house
with in-patients.41 The following month the number of out-patients had
34 Thomas Beddoes to Davies Giddy, 14 April 1798, CRO DG/42/2. Humphry Davy, An Essay
on Heat, Light, and the Combinations of Light, Thomas Beddoes, ed., Contributions to
physical and medical knowledge, principally from the West of England (London: Long-
man,1799), 5-147.
35 Thomas Beddoes to James Watt sr., 15 July 1798, LoB MS 3219/4/29/32.
36 Thomas Beddoes to James Watt jr., October 1798, LoB MS 3219/6/2/B/72.
37 Humphry Davy to Grace Davy, 11 October 1798, RI MS HD/26/A/1.
38 The Monthly Magazine 6 (1798): 238. Robert Southey to William Taylor, 24 February 1799.
39 Humphry Davy to Grace Davy, 11 October 1798, RI MS HD/26/A/1.
40 The Bristol Gazette (21 March 1799): 3c.
41 Humphry Davy, Prospectus of the design of the Institution, [late March / early April
1799], RI MS HD/20/B, 11-16, quotation on 14.

278 James
increased to eighty.42 By November, there were five lady in-patients being sub-
jected to Beddoess novel treatment of inhaling the breath of an Alderney
cow.43
Following the MPIs opening, Davy began experimentation on dephlogisti-
cated nitrous air as Priestley, its discoverer, had named it, or nitrous phosoxyd
as Davy initially termed it before finally calling it, following the new nomencla-
ture developed by Lavoisier and his associates, nitrous oxide. He discovered
the gass pleasurable physiological action and self-experimented by frequently
inhaling it in large quantities on one occasion sixteen quarts (just over eigh-
teen liters).44 This sustained exposure to the gas so damaged his health that he
spent most of November 1799 in Cornwall, where he suffered withdrawal symp-
toms. After thirty-three days without the gas, he inhaled nine quarts on his
return.45 In his first book, Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; Chiefly
Concerning Nitrous Oxide, or Dephlogisticated Nitrous Air, and its Respiration,
Davy described the results of his own experimentation and the accounts of
many of those in Beddoess Bristol circle whom he persuaded to inhale.46
Published mid-1800, Researches cost half a guinea and ran to nearly six hun-
dred pages. He divided the text roughly equally between providing a detailed
chemical analysis of the gas and describing its physiological properties.
Towards the end, and then only very briefly, did Davy make reference to any
possible therapeutic use, though Beddoes thought there might be.47 As count-
less writers have pointed out, Davy did not observe the anaesthetic property of
nitrous oxide.48
Despite Beddoess avowed aims for the MPI, for which subscriptions had
been so painfully obtained, Davy, somewhat subversively, developed and pur-
sued a rather different research agenda. In this Davy exhibited a pattern of
behavior similar to those of aristocratic laboratories where the researchers fol-
lowed their own interests. (What direct knowledge he might have had of them
42 Humphry Davy to Davies Giddy, 18? April 1799, Paris, Davy, 1: pp.79-82 (see note 28). Paris
dated this letter 10 April 1799, but such a date contradicts other evidence. Davys numbers
can, on occasion, be confused.
43 Thomas Frankland to James Smith, 18 November 1799, Linnean Society MS JES/COR/15/6.
44 Humphry Davy to Davies Giddy, 18? April 1799, Paris, Davy, vol.1, pp.79-82 (see note 28).
45 Humphry Davy, Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; Chiefly concerning nitrous oxide,
or dephlogisticated nitrous air, and its respiration (London: Johnson, 1800), 478.
46 Ibid.
47 Thomas Beddoes, Notice of Some Observations Made at the Medical Pneumatic Institution
(London: Longman, 1799).
48 Jan Golinski, Humphry Davy: The experimental self, Eighteenth-Century Studies 45
(2011): 15-28, especially 18-19.

is not known, but he later developed a taste for staying in large aristocratic
country houses.) Despite Beddoess clear aims for the MPI, he had not found a
way of ensuring that they would be fulfilled, suggesting that he had not consid-
ered how research in a laboratory should be managed or guided towards a
defined aim. Alternatively Beddoes may have recognized that he had too many
other commitments and interests and so gave Davy a free hand, which also
illustrates similarities to aristocratic laboratories.
A similar pattern occurred when news reached Davy, just as he was com-
pleting his Researches, of an invention made by Alessandro Volta (1745-1827),
which he called a pile producing galvanic electricity, but which Davy would
shortly rename the battery.49 Davy included a very brief reference to Volta right
at the end of his Researches and Beddoes arranged for a pile to be built.50 For
the remainder of the year Davy experimented on galvanism, recording this
research in two notebooks, beginning in August, and in a series of papers
published monthly (apart from January) in A Journal of Natural Philosophy,
Chemistry and the Arts from September 1800 through to February 1801.51 In
these papers Davy announced, amongst other discoveries, that electricity
would pass through organic tissue, that charcoal could be used as an electric
pole and came to the overall conclusion, contra Volta, that Galvanism [was]
a process purely chemical.52 Such conclusions confirmed Davys view, proba-
bly written in his notebook during mid-1799, that Chemistry must no longer
[be] considered as a science important because it is connected with our artifi-
cial wants; but because it promises to unfold to us the laws of our own
existence.53 Right from the start, Davy believed studying galvanism would
acquaint us with some of the laws of life!, a view stemming ultimately from
the origin of galvanism in animal electricity.54 Once again Davy displayed little
concern for whether his work had any therapeutic value or relevance to the
MPI.
49 Humphry Davy, An Account of some Galvanic Combinations, formed by the Arrange-

ments of single metallic Plates and Fluids, analogous to the new Galvanic Apparatus of
Mr. Volta, Philosophical Transactions 91 (1801): 397-402, 400.
50 Davy, Researches, p.568 (see note 45). A Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and the
Arts 4 (1800): 275.
51 RI MS HD/20/C and /22/B. Papers listed in June Fullmer, Sir Humphry Davys Published
Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969).
52 Humphry Davy to Davies Giddy, 20 October 1800, private possession, but also Paris, Davy,
vol. 1, pp.108-11 (see note 28).
53 RI MS HD/20/A, p.266.
54 Humphry Davy to Davies Giddy, 3 July 1800, Paris, Davy, vol. 1, pp.85-8 (see note 28).

280 James
Beddoes, who also thought they were close to understanding living systems,
sought to take advantage of Davys straying, by arguing that to exploit his work
(and thus continue pursuing the MPIs stated aims) would require the most
extensive application of chemistry to physiology.55 To achieve this he would
need to appoint an expert anatomist as well as an instrument maker and estab-
lish a manufactory on the scale of Boulton and Watts recently completed
foundry for constructing steam engines at Soho, then one of the largest indus-
trial facilities in the world.56 Beddoes pointed out, somewhat unnecessarily,
that additional funding would be required.57 One does have to wonder how far
Beddoes, or indeed anyone else, believed his unrealistic rhetoric bordering on
fantasy. He essentially used the success of Davys discovery to make a case for
significant extra financial support for the MPI. In this he saw Davy as a valuable
resource, writing that he considered that the effect of his presence as more
than virtually doubling the fund.58
Despite his value to Beddoes, Davy realized that he had major problems
with his career due to the political odium attached to its [the MPIs] founder.59
Owing to the non-survival of papers detailing the MPIs operation, we have no
knowledge of its expenditure pattern, only that Davy earned 200 annually.60
With only finite resources, it would have been apparent to him that the MPIs
duration would be limited as Beddoes had originally intended in his 1794
Proposal. Davys continuing connection with a known political radical would
be an increasing liability in finding a new job, so perhaps it is not too surprizing
that about two years after his arrival in Bristol, he began considering his future
prospects. In two letters written in September and November 1800, he hinted
to his mother that he was looking for alternative employment.61 In the latter
month writing from Lisbon, Southey opined that Davy will not always remain
at the Pneumatic Institution.62 Though it is not clear what options might then
have been open to him, by early January he had started negotiations to move to
the RIGB in London.63
55 Beddoes, Notice, p.34 (see note 47).

56 Peter Jones, Industrial Enlightenment: Science, technology and culture in Birmingham and
the West Midlands, 1760-1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 55.
57 Beddoes, Notice, pp.35-6 (see note 47).
58 Ibid., p.6.
59 Humphry Davy to John Tonkin, 12 January 1801, Davy, Davy, vol. 1, pp.107-9 (see note 28).
60 Humphry Davy to Grace Davy, 19 January 1799, RI MS HD/26/A/2.
61 Humphry Davy to Grace Davy, 27 September 1800, SM MS 333/2 and 19 November 1800,
Davy, Davy, vol. 1, pp.105-7 (see note 28).
62 Robert Southey to William Taylor, 26 November 1800.
63 Humphry Davy to Grace Davy, 31 January 1801, SM MS 333/4.

The Royal Institution of Great Britain
At a meeting held on 7 March 1799 in Joseph Bankss Soho Square house, fifty-
eight men (around a quarter of whom were aristocrats), each pledged fifty
guineas, a substantial sum, to become Proprietors of a new Institution for
Diffusing the Knowledge and Facilitating the General Introduction of Useful
Mechanical Inventions and Improvements, and for Teaching, By Courses of
Philosophical Lectures and Experiments, the Application of Science to the
Common Purposes of Life.64 They also elected a committee of Managers
charged with establishing and then running the new institution.65 In addition
to Banks and Rumford, a third of this committee were aristocrats and in May
George Finch, ninth Earl of Winchilsea (1752-1826) became President. The
RIGB founders original intention was to communicate scientific knowledge to
its Proprietors, all of whom came from the wealthy echelons of society, as well
as Life and Annual Subscribers who contributed ten and two guineas respec-
tively. To deliver its program the RIGB needed a building and mid-1799 it moved
into 21 Albemarle Street, off Piccadilly. This had been a gentlemans town-
house, built during the eighteenth century, and thus needed conversion to
house a scientific institution that included a well-equipped laboratory in
which to prepare lecture demonstrations.66 Rumford was charged with over-
seeing the necessary work and, just a year after its foundation, a temporary
lecture room had been constructed. The first lecture in a course on various
natural philosophical and chemical topics was delivered on 11 March 1800 by
Thomas Garnett (1766-1802).67 He had enjoyed a reasonably successful career
as an itinerant lecturer during the latter part of the eighteenth century, but
immediately before moving to the RIGB had been employed to lecture at the
Andersonian Institution in Glasgow.
In April 1800 the Managers authorized the construction of a large lecture
theater at the buildings northern end, aiming for its completion by the start of
64 Proposals for forming by subscription, in the Metropolis of the British Empire, a Public Insti-
tution for Diffusing the Knowledge and Facilitating the General Introduction of Useful
Mechanical Inventions and Improvements, and for Teaching, By Courses of Philosophical
Lectures and Experiments, the Application of Science to the Common Purposes of Life ([Lon-
don: np, 1799]), 43.
65 RI MM, 9 March 1799, 1: 1.
66 Frank A.J.L. James and Anthony Peers, Constructing Space for Science at the Royal Insti-
tution of Great Britain, Physics in Perspective 9 (2007): 130-85.
67 Gentlemans Magazine, 70(1) (1800): 382. For the content see Journals of the Royal Institu-
tion of Great Britain 1 (5 April 1800): 15-16. Note this text was omitted from volume 1 of the
bound edition of the Journals.

282 James
1801.68 They contracted with the Pimlico builder Thomas Hancock to under-
take the extensive work involved which meant that the building became
unusable until the theater was completed.69 This prompted the Managers
(based on Bankss proposal) to dismiss five servants, including the lecture
assistant, a decision that did not commend itself to Garnett who thought that
the RIGB should have a permanent assistant.70 The project overran and, at
their meeting in early February 1801, the Managers decided that the second
season of lectures would commence when the lecture theater was completed.
Furthermore, they agreed that Banks, Rumford and Cavendish (now a Manager)
would form a committee to supervise the preparation of the syllabi and that
none should be published without their authorisation.71 The reason for this
latter decision was Garnetts imminent publication of the Outlines of his
courses both on chemistry and on natural and experimental philosophy.72
Indeed the prefaces (where he stated the times that he would be delivering the
lectures) were both dated 2 February, though the chemistry volume did not
appear until mid-March.73 Garnett, behaving as one might expect of a former
itinerant lecturer, published these without the Managers permission, suggest-
ing a lack of skill on their part about how to manage an experienced lecturer.
Two weeks later they ordered that copies of the minutes recording their deci-
sions made on 2 February should be sent to him.74 He thus began his second
season under something of a cloud so far as his employers were concerned.
Furthermore, Garnett had written to Rumford requesting an increase in salary
in accordance with what he believed were the terms of his original appoint-
ment.75 The Managers deferred making a decision until the annual accounts
68 RI MM, 14 April 1800, 2: 56. Rumford to Marc-Auguste Pictet, 5 July 1800, David Bickerton
and Ren Sigrist, eds., Marc-Auguste Pictet 1752-1825 Correspondance sciences et techniques
tome III: Les correspondants britanniques (Geneva: Slatkine, 2000), 558-9.
69 RI MS RI/1/G/G/1.
70 RI MM, 12 June 1800, 2: 104. Rumford had proposed earlier in the day that Banks did this.
Rumford to Joseph Banks, 12 June 1800, Banks Scientific Correspondence, vol. 5, p.1560 (see
note 18). Thomas Garnett to Thomas Webster, 27 September 1800, Bence Jones, Royal Insti-
tution, pp.172-4 (see note 3).
71 RI MM, 2 February 1801, 2: 126-7.
72 Thomas Garnett, Outlines of a Course of Lectures on Chemistry (London: Cadell and
Davies, 1801) and Outlines of a Course of Lectures on Natural and Experimental Philosophy:
Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (London: Cadell and Davies, 1801).
73 Morning Chronicle (18 March 1801): 2a.
74 RI MM, 16 February 1801, 2: 134.
75 Thomas Garnett to Rumford, 22 February 1801, copied in RI MM, 23 February 1801, 2: 136-8.

had been prepared and the RIGBs financial position ascertained.76 When
Garnett again pressed his case in mid-May, a specially convened Managers
meeting, held on the 25th refused the increase; Garnetts subsequent resigna-
tion offer was accepted.77
It is possible that as early as their meeting held on 5 January 1801, the dete-
riorating relations between Garnett and the RIGB may have prompted the
Managers to ask Rumford to seek a replacement.78 Rumford had spent much of
the previous September and October in Edinburgh with Blacks successor at
the University, Thomas Hope (1766-1844). He had known Beddoes when they
were students there and, having visited the MPI at some point during 1800,
sung Davys praises to Rumford.79 Around 10 January, Rumford must have
approached Davy, offering him by the end of the month, that should he move
to the RIGB he would shortly become the sole Professor of Chemistry.80 Davy
visited London during mid-February where he met Rumford, Banks and
Cavendish.81 These meetings resulted in the Managers appointing Davy
Assistant Lecturer in Chemistry, Director of the Chemical Laboratory, and
Assistant Editor of the Journals of the Institution on 16 February at an annual
salary of 100 guineas plus accommodation.82 This seems to represent a diminu-
tion in income, suggesting some keenness on Davys part to leave Bristol. The
same day Rumford wrote Davys appointment letter in which he copied the
Managers minutes, adding, what was not noted there, their additional agree-
ment that, provided he proved his fitness, he would be appointed Professor of
Chemistry in the next two or three years with an annual salary of 300.83 That
promise would make up for any immediate financial loss and Davy returned to
Bristol, probably for a couple of weeks, to settle his affairs. Beddoes, despite his
76 RI MM, 23 February 1801, 2: 138.

77 RI MM, 25 May 1801, 2: 180. RI MM, 15 June 1801, 2: 189-90.
78 Paris, Davy, vol. 1, p.115 (see note 28), based on an account written thirty years later; there
is no reference to such authorisation in RI MM, 5 January 1801, 2: 118-21.
79 Humphry Davy to Thomas Hope, 28 June 1801, transcript in RI MS HD/28/D/38. Humphry
Davy to John Tokin, 12 January 1801, Davy, Davy, vol. 1, pp.107-9 (see note 28). Thomas
Traill, Memoir of Dr Thomas Charles Hope, late Professor of Chemistry in the University
of Edinburgh, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 16 (1848): 419-34, 432.
80 Humphry Davy to Grace Davy, 31 January 1801, SM MS 333/4, noted that he had been in
discussions with the RIGB for three weeks.
81 Humphry Davy to Davies Giddy, 8 March 1801, Paris, Davy, 1: pp.116-9 (see note 28).
82 RI MM, 16 February 1801, 2: 134.
83 Rumford to Davy, 16 February 1801, Bence Jones, Royal Institution, pp.317-9 (see note 3).
Davy was appointed Professor the following year, RI MM, 31 May 1802, 3: 43.

284 James
view of Davys key role in the MPI, approved his move to London with great
liberality.84 On Wednesday 11 March 1801 Davy returned to the RIGB to com-
mence the next stage of his career.85
At the RIGB Davy, despite no previous experience, very quickly established
himself as an immensely attractive and engaging lecturer. Possibly his not hav-
ing any previous experience as an itinerant lecturer meant that he could,
unlike Garnett, conform more easily to the Managers expectations. His initial
two courses illustrated his immediate impact. The first starting on 25 April 1801
were evening lectures, while the second was an afternoon series attended not
only by men of science but by numbers of people of rank and fashion.86 The
pharmaceutical chemist William Allen (1770-1843) recorded in his diary the
success of Davys first lecture, describing it as A most capital one. He bids fair
to rise high in the philosophical world, a view shared by the writer in the
Philosophical Magazine, who noted Bankss presence in the audience.87 Davys
course on pneumatic chemistry concluded on 20 June with a lecture attended
by nearly 500 people, which included a practical demonstration of nitrous
oxides physiological effects.88 Davy was as nearly carried away with his own
success as a lecturer, as anyone who had come under the influence of nitrous
oxide: I have been nobly treated by the managers, God bless us I am about
1.000.000 times as much a being of my own volition as at Bristol. My time is too
much at my own disposal So much for egotism for weak glorious, pitiful,
sublime, conceited egotism.89 He would retain the RIGBs fashionable audi-
ence until his retirement in 1812 (at the age of thirty-three) on marriage to a
widow a wealthy heiress who had attended his 1811 lectures.90
During June 1801, the Managers, presumably led by Rumford, and possibly
mindful that Davy was being left too much to his own volition, proposed, in
line with the RIGBs utilitarian strand, that Davy should examine the state of
the arts and to begin with the process of tanning during the autumn.91 By the
end of the month Davy had agreed to deliver a course on tanning during
84 Humphry Davy to Davies Giddy, 8 March 1801, Paris, Davy, vol. 1, pp.116-9 (see note 28).
85 RI MM, 16 March 1801, 2: 150-1.
86 Royal Institution of Great Britain, Philosophical Magazine 10 (1801): 86-7, 86.
87 Life of William Allen, with selections from his Correspondence, 3 vols. (London: Gilpin, 1846-
7), vol. 1, 54 (entry for 25 April 1801). Royal Institute [sic] of Great Britain, Philosophical
Magazine 9 (1801): 281-2.
88 Humphry Davy to John King, 22 June 1801, Bristol Record Office, 32688/31. Royal Institu-
tion of Great Britain, Philosophical Magazine 10 (1801): 86-7, 86.
89 Humphry Davy to John King, 22 June 1801, Bristol Record Office, 32688/31.
90 RI MM, 28 January 1811, 5: 178.
91 Thomas Poole to Josiah Wedgwood jr., 25 and 26 June 1801, WM MS MC 55.

November, but in exchange received three months leave, starting in July, for
the purpose of making himself more intimately acquainted with the practical
part of the business of tanning. Furthermore, Davy was also instructed to
prepare lectures for delivery in December on dying, staining and printing vari-
ous cloths.92 None of these lectures were ever delivered. This suggests that
because of his success attracting audiences to the RIGB Davy could subvert the
Managers intentions without, unlike Garnett, suffering any penalty. Neverthe
less, in his famous 1802 lecture Discourse Introductory to a Course of Lectures
on Chemistry Davy went out of his way to emphasise the utilitarian value of
chemistry.
At this time Davys most significant contribution to utilitarian chemistry
was his appointment, at Bankss instigation, as Professor of Chemistry to the
Board of Agriculture. Until retirement he delivered annually a successful series
of six lectures on agricultural chemistry to the Board.93 Furthermore, despite
the proposal in May 1805 that the Board should possess its own laboratory in its
Sackville Street building, it was eventually agreed that the RIGBs laboratory
would undertake this function. This had been facilitated earlier in the year by
the Managers appointing Davy Director of the Laboratory and specifying its
public remit.94 This gave Davy the authority to undertake analysis of such
Substances as the Professor of Chemistry shall deem of Scientific or Public
Importance.95 This new function took material form when Davy began a for-
mal laboratory notebook in October. Following his death the Royal Institution
had to apply to Davys executors for the return of the first two of these note-
books which had several years ago been taken away by Sir H Davy, illustrating
his almost aristocratic sense of ownership of the laboratory.96
Davy did fulfill the RIGBs stated purposes to provide scientific lectures and
practical scientific advice. But during his period there Davy de facto added sci-
entific research to them, which had never been intended by the founders. It
was the RIGBs well-equipped laboratory that allowed him also to continue the
experimental work that he had started in Penzance and continued at the MPI.
In particular he concentrated at the RIGB on electrical research, which formed
the topic of his first paper read to the Royal Society of London in June 1801.97 In
the ensuing years he developed the first coherent theory of electro-chemical
92 RI MM, 29 June 1801, 2: 198.

93 Frank A.J.L. James, Agricultural Chymistry is at present in its infancy: The Board of
Agriculture, The Royal Institution and Humphry Davy, Ambix 62 (2015): 363-85.
94 RI MM, 28 January 1805, 4: 17. The Managers seemed to have forgotten that this was part of
Davys original job title.
95 RI MM, 11 March 1805, 4: 40.
96 RI MS HD/6 and 7. RI MM, 2 October 1829, 7: 276; 7 December 1829, 7: 285.
97 Humphry Davy, Galvanic Combinations. (see note 49).

286 James
action, a term he coined.98 During his research Davy isolated for the first time
a number of chemical elements such as sodium and potassium (which he so
named).99 By turning the RIGB into a site of independent chemical research
Davy fundamentally subverted the institutions founding intentions. The lec-
ture program and providing scientific advice to the state continued, which
financially supported the RIGB and thus Davys research. And when that money
became insufficient Davy also copied Beddoess fund-raising practices in per-
suading the RIGB to organise a subscription to pay for a mineralogical collection
and, towards the end of the decade, one to pay for a giant electric battery with
which he could continue his electro-chemical researches.100
Conclusion
Beddoes asserted that the MPI was perhaps, the first example, since the origin
of civil society, of an extensive scheme of pure scientific medical investigation.101
One interpretation of this view is that Beddoes believed that the MPI broke
with earlier models of laboratory organisation and in terms of funding this was
probably so. However, initially both the MPI and also the RIGB were organisa-
tions, which possessed underdefined or unspecified features, as one might
expect at the commencement of such novel projects. This allowed a great deal
of space for unintended consequences and individual human agency, espe-
cially, as in Davys case, where he had a clear idea that he wanted to pursue
independent research. Davys work in Bristol essentially continued his chemi-
cal career begun in Penzance. There using locally available resources Davy,
under the influence and guidance of Giddy, Wedgwood and Gregory Watt, had
developed his ability and enthusiasm for chemical theorizing and practical
experimentation. Such skills were just what Beddoes needed, signified by his
immediately praising Davys experimental prowess. With his already existing
experience Davy took full advantage of the resources that Beddoes provided in
Bristol. Davy, single-handedly, thus made the MPI a success in areas other than
98 Humphry Davy, The Bakerian Lecture, on some new Phenomena of chemical Changes
produced by Electricity, particularly the Decomposition of the fixed Alkalies, and the
Exhibition of the new substances which constitute their bases; and on the general Nature
of alkaline Bodies, Philosophical Transactions 98 (1808): 1-44, 2.
99 Ibid., p.32.
100 June Fullmer, Humphry Davy: Fundraiser, Frank A.J.L. James, ed., The Development of the
Laboratory: Essays on the place of experiment in industrial civilisation (London: Macmil-
lan, 1989), 11-21.
101 Thomas Beddoes, Notice, p.4 (see note 47).

the intended one of determining the therapeutic value of gases. Left largely to
his own devices, Davy made a significant medico-chemical discovery, pub-
lished his first book and commenced electrical experimentation, which he
clearly believed had further potential, especially in understanding life. But this
was not what Beddoes had worked, or hoped, to establish, though he willingly
sought to take advantage of Davys discoveries. Beddoes seems not to have con-
sidered how laboratory research should be managed, but had let Davy behave
in ways reminiscent of Priestley and Ingen-Housz at the aristocratic laboratory
set up by the second Earl of Shelburne. That this lacuna can be attributed to
Beddoes rather than Davy is apparent, since, following his departure for
London, research at the MPI ceased and it soon turned instead into a more
conventional hospital.102 The MPI did not develop into a sustainable institu-
tion and could not fully survive Davys departure.
Davys commitment to his own research and his experience in Penzance
and Bristol allowed him to add research to the RIGBs original activities, a move
that would have far reaching consequences. That Davy exerted such a pro-
found impact in developing research at both the MPI and the RIGB, suggests
that his existing skills and experience were crucial in shaping both those insti-
tutions. The RIGB, much better funded (though it had more than its fair share
of financial crises) than the MPI, had significant and continuing support from
many wealthy, aristocratic and influential individuals. But, as with the MPI, its
roles and management had not been fully defined, which again provided Davy
with the institutional opportunity and space to maneuver into place his own
ideas about what the RIGB should do.
In some ways his influence at both the MPI and the RIGB was similar to
those aristocrats who had built their own laboratories which came to an end
with their deaths (or suspension of interest), in that he constructed for himself
similar freedom to pursue his own interests at both institutions. But the RIGBs
institutional stability was strong enough to survive his departure and it contin-
ued to attract and foster talented men for the remainder of the nineteenth and
into the twentieth century. It was in such a manner that Davys subversion
illustrates how a successful research laboratory could be created and run in a
society still dominated by aristocrats.
102 Mary E. Fissell, Patients, Power, and the Poor in Eighteenth Century Bristol (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1991), 118-19.

288 James
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the participants of the Situating Chemistry workshops held

in Leuven, Berlin, Florence and Haarlem for discussions on papers that I pre-
sented and particularly to Lissa Roberts for comments on this paper. I thank
the following institutions for access to their manuscript collections: The Royal
Institution (RI), The Library of Birmingham (LoB), the Cornwall Record Office
(CRO), The Wedgwood Museum (WM), The Science Museum (SM), the British
Library, the Royal Society of London, the National Library of Ireland, the
Linnean Society, The Natural History Museum and Chatsworth. Letters written
by Humphry Davy are freely available on-line at <www.davy-letters.org.uk> as
part of the project to publish them by the end of the decade. In the meantime
this paper cites their archival or printed locations. Letters from Robert Southey
are available at <https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/southey_letters> and are
here cited by author, recipient and date.

Wholesale Pharmaceutical Manufacturing in London 289
Chapter 12
Wholesale Pharmaceutical Manufacturing in

London, c.1760 c.1840: Sites, Production and
Networks
Anna Simmons
The relationship between chemistry and production was central to the devel-
opment of wholesale pharmaceutical manufacturing in London in the late-
eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Drug manufacturing took place in
a diverse marketplace united by a loose, but coherent, chemical-pharmaceuti-
cal culture. Its development benefitted from the close linkage of scientific and
artisanal knowledge and practice, creating businesses from which the modern
pharmaceutical industry originated. Building on the themes of this volume,
this chapter will contribute to a broader history of industrialization that privi-
leges chemistry as much as mechanics, and looks beyond innovation to provide
a deeper examination of the history of productivity. Simply, pharmaceutical
production can be added to the list of absentees that a focus on Newtonian
mechanics has overlooked.1 Meanwhile Mokyrs un-ashamed portrayal of an
economic success story does not fit with the complex picture of development
in pharmaceutical manufacturing that encompassed failure, secrecy, collabo-
ration and competition.2 As William J. Ashworth has commented, the key to
Britains long term economic growth was an array of factors that lie outside the
entrenched literature that has grown up around the defence of Western cul-
ture and political economy, with governmental, imperial and military factors
particularly applicable to this study.3
Arguably even more underappreciated than the history of chemistry, the
history of pharmaceutical manufacturing, centered as it is on the investigation
and use of an extensive range of materials, plants and animals, provides a rich
and relatively untouched source for studying production.4 Much of the writing
1 Margaret Jacob, The First Knowledge Economy: Human capital and the European economy,
1750-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
2 Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy (London: Penguin, 2009).
3 William J. Ashworth, The British Industrial Revolution and the Ideological Revolution:
Science, neoliberalism and history, History of Science 52 (2014): 178-99, on 199.
4 Lissa Roberts, Producing (in) Europe and Asia, 1750-1850, Isis, 106 (2015): 857-65, on 864.
Anna Simmons, 2018|doi 10.1163/9789004325562_014


290 Simmons
about drug manufacturers operating in the period c.1760 to c.1840 is found in

company histories of long-established firms. Some of these studies can down-
play the extent of production at this time.5 Furthermore, when viewed from
the perspective of large, multinational firms operating today, the origins of the
industry can appear humble.6 Analysis of the industrys development as
a whole, meanwhile, tends to emphasise its retail origins or to focus on the
late-nineteenth century onwards.7 However, during the late-eighteenth and
early-nineteenth centuries, manufacturers activities stretched beyond the
pharmacy and the scale and scope of production was far from humble. More
over, an important dynamic existed between wholesale drug manufacturing in
the UK and the worldwide market for drugs. It is within this much wider inter-
national trade and productivity network that the origins of the modern
pharmaceutical industry can also be located.
In the context of this volume, the neglect of the period c.1760 to c.1840 is
particularly significant as it means that little has been done to integrate the
early history of the pharmaceutical industry within a broader history of indus-
trial development.8 Moreover, a narrative of innovation shapes many of the
existing individual studies of firms, notably how the introduction of new drugs
into pharmaceutical and medical practice directed the history of a firm and its
manufacturing activities.9 As David Edgerton has highlighted in calling for a
use-centered history of technology, one should not focus unreflectively on
5 Geoffrey Tweedale, At the Sign of the Plough: Allen and Hanburys and the British pharmaceuti-
cal industry, 1715-1990 (London: John Murray, 1990), 56.
6 John P. Swann, The Pharmaceutical Industries, Peter J. Bowler and John V. Pickstone, eds.,
The Cambridge History of Science Volume 6: Modern Life and Earth Sciences (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), 126-40, on 127.
7 J. Burnby, The Early Years of the Pharmaceutical Industry, Lesley Richmond, Julie Stevenson
and Alison Turton, eds., The Pharmaceutical Industry: A guide to historical records (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2003), 1-13; Judy Slinn, Research and Development in the UK Pharmaceutical
Industry from the Nineteenth Century to the 1960s, Mikul Teich and Roy Porter, eds., Drugs
and Narcotics in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 168-86. For pharmacy
in general see Stuart Anderson, ed., Making Medicines: A brief history of pharmacy and phar-
maceuticals (London: Pharmaceutical Press, 2005).
8 There is one major exception. Roy and Dorothy Porter emphasise druggists role as manufac-
turers and distributors of medicines and suggest they could be the authentic progenitors of
the pharmaceutical industry, in that they are integral to that surge of large-scale manufactur-
ing and marketing which we call the Industrial Revolution. Roy Porter and Dorothy Porter,
The Rise of the English Drugs Industry: The role of Thomas Corbyn, Medical History 33 (1989):
277-95, on 282.
9 For example, A.F.P.Morson, Operative Chymist, Clio Medica no. 45 (Amsterdam: Rodophi,
1997).

innovation as the motor of historical development.10 In conjunction with a

stimulus from innovation, the demands of local and international markets and
existing networks of supply all shaped production. Meanwhile for the actors
involved, innovation was conceptualized in terms of adapting established
technological processes, utilizing existing knowledge and improving technical
efficiency.
Practitioners and Production
For much of the period under discussion, the boundaries surrounding manu-
facturing, wholesale and retail pharmacy were very fluid, whilst the substances
produced often had utility beyond pharmacy.11 Various terms were used to
describe the practitioners who made drugs, for example chymist, apothecary,
chemist, druggist, operative chemist, fine chemical manufacturer and so on.
What these roles meant also evolved over time as professional boundaries
shifted.12 Many of these individuals were not just retailers, they were manufac-
turers and distributers of medicines, often engaged in overseas trade, and
sometimes acting as government contractors. This chapters primary concern
is not with distinctions between the various actors categories that are used or
with changing professional and institutional regulation in this period.13
Furthermore, the differences in the contexts in which these categories were
used in Britain compared to other European countries also lie outside the
scope of this study.14 Instead this chapters objective is to provide an insight
into a world of production and commerce by focusing on the manufacture of
medical drugs for sale in bulk; that is not medical drugs sold to the individual
10 David Edgerton, Shock of the Old: Technology and global history since 1900 (London: Profile
Books, 2006).
11 For the retailing perspective, see Louise Hill Curth, ed., From Physick to Pharmacology:
Five hundred years of British drug retailing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
12 Colin A. Russell, Noel G. Coley and Gerrylynn K. Roberts, Chemists by Profession. The ori-
gins and rise of the Royal Institute of Chemistry (Milton Keynes: Open University Press,
1977), 14-54.
13 S.W.F.Holloway, Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, 1841-1991: A political and
social history (London: The Pharmaceutical Press, 1991).
14 Ursula Klein, Blending Technical Innovation and Learned Natural Knowledge: The mak-
ing of ethers, Ursula Klein and Emma Spary, eds., Materials and Expertise in Early Modern
Europe: Between market and laboratory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 125-
57, on 151-4.

292 Simmons
consumer, but those supplied wholesale to hospitals, institutions, merchants

and government departments, and also exported overseas.
Given the diverse range of practitioners who made drugs, the examples in
this chapter include firms that described themselves as fine chemical manu-
facturers; individuals or frequently changing partnerships who used the term
chemist or druggist or both; and also a livery company undertaking collective
manufacture on behalf of its members. As a result of participating in the
Situating Chemistry, 1760-1840 international network for collaborative
research, information on all of these sites of pharmaceutical manufacture and
the individuals linked to them is gradually being added to the projects data-
base, currently found at <http://situatingchemistry.org/>.15 What is common
to all these sites and individuals is that, through the medium of large-scale
manufacturing, they participated in and considered themselves part of the
pharmaceutical marketplace.16 Large-scale manufacturing is obviously a rela-
tive term, relative not only to the standards of the time but also to the specific
industry. Given that drugs could be prescribed to patients in quantities of
grains and minims, pharmaceutical production was necessarily on a smaller
scale than in other chemical industries, for example the manufacture of
bleaching powder, as discussed in John Christies chapter in this volume.
Multiple operations on one site could also be supervized by a relatively small
workforce, in contrast to the large numbers engaged in manufacturing for mili-
tary purposes in dockyards and munitions works.17 However, as subsequent
examples of the apparatus used; the quantity of raw materials consumed; and
the size of the market supplied show; for pharmacy this was production on the
largest possible scale for the standards of the time.
15 The Business Archives Councils survey of records of the British Pharmaceutical Industry
and Derek Oddy, John Perkins and John Stewarts assistance have been invaluable in this
aspect of my research.
16 The concept of a generalized medical marketplace can be seen as outdated, with a pref-
erence for considering markets for medical goods and services instead. Mark Jenner and
Patrick Wallis, The Medical Marketplace, Mark Jenner and Patrick Wallis, eds., Medicine
and the Market in England and its Colonies, c.1450-c.1850 (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2007), 1-17, on 16. However, given the complexities and fluid boundaries of the drug trade,
for this chapter pharmaceutical marketplace is a useful way of bringing together differ-
ent aspects of the markets for drugs.
17 Jan Lucassen, Working at the Ichapur Gunpowder Factory in the 1790s, Parts I and II,
Indian Historical Review 39 (2012): 19-56, 251-71. With thanks to Andreas Weber for this
reference.

From Dockside to Drug Auction
Patrick Wallis work on the massive growth in the use of commercial drugs in
the early modern period clearly shows the importance of the drug trade at this
time. Using Port Books listing ships cargoes and, from 1696, annual ledgers of
the InspectorGeneral of the Customs, he has presented new evidence on the
scale, origins and content of English imports of medical drugs between 1567
and 1774. Wallis shows that the volume of imported medical drugs exploded in
the seventeenth century and continued growing, but on a more gradual scale,
in the eighteenth century. Many of these drugs were re-exported, as Englands
position as a leading international entrept developed. However, given the
dosages in use in that period, Wallis demonstrates that common drugs such as
senna and Jesuits bark were available to the majority of the population in the
eighteenth century.18 This provides further evidence of the expansion of medi-
cal consumption at this time, with subsequent work by Wallis and Pirohakul
underlining the growing centrality of therapeutics in patients expectations of
medical treatment.19 However this poses the question: how did those involved
in the pharmaceutical marketplace meet this substantial increase in demand
for drugs? Whilst drug imports provide the first part of the answer, a focus on
production provides the second part. The route from dockside to consumer
was varied and could involve many sites, actors and networks. Plant-based
drugs had to be processed in different ways to make them suitable for admin-
istration in various formats, whilst chemical medicines had to be either made
from raw materials or refined to medicinal grade quality.
London provides the focus for this study as it was a major center for the
international trade in crude drugs and the key location for large-scale drug
production in the UK in the period c.1760 to c.1840.20 By the late seventeenth
century, over ninety-five percent of drug imports into the UK came through
London, and the city possessed significant commercial advantages in terms of
shipping, banking and insurance, as well as a reputation for reliability in terms
18 Patrick Wallis, Exotic Drugs and English Medicine: Englands drug trade, c.1550 c.1800,
Social History of Medicine 25 (2012): 20-46.
19 Patrick Wallis and Teerapa Pirohakul, Medical Revolutions? The growth of medicine in
England, 1660-1800, Journal of Social History, 49 (2016): 510-31, on 523.
20 It was not until the 1830s that T. & H. Smith, Duncan Flockhart & Co. and J.F.Macfarlan &
Co. commenced alkaloid manufacture in Edinburgh. Morson, Operative Chymist, pp.104-
21 (see note 9).

294 Simmons
of financing and the quality of goods.21 As its sphere of influence expanded in

the eighteenth century, Britain gained control over the sources of many drugs
and other raw materials, such as camphor, niter, quicksilver and tincal, whilst
trade restrictions forced these goods to be exported through London. These
factors not only promoted the trade in raw drugs, but also the activities of the
manufacturers who processed them. The broader history of the import and
export of drugs into London lies outside the scope of this chapter, but this
examination of sites, production and networks is part of a much wider history
of globally situated interconnections, exchanges and translations in the drug
trade.22
The exact route from ship to saleroom depended on who had imported
the goods. Many of the commodities discussed in this chapter were imported
by the East India Company. Until the East India Docks were opened in 1806,
their ships were unloaded at Blackwall. Goods were then carried by lighters
to the legal quays or sufferance wharves of the Pool of London.23 From there,
drugs such as aloes, cassia and nux vomica were sent to its Crutched Friars
Warehouse. Here they were classified and sorted, with samples prepared for
sale at East India House in Leadenhall Street.24 Private trading networks, oper-
ating in tandem with monopoly companies, were particularly significant in the
context of drug imports, as Timothy Davies has highlighted for the London drug
merchants, Gammon and Chaloner.25 Mincing Lane was known as the heart of
Londons drug trade in the nineteenth century, being subsequently described in
21 Anon., Londons Drug Market and the Romance of Mincing Lane, Chemist and Druggist,
30 June 1928, 850-67; Terry M. Parssinen, Secret Passions, Secret Remedies: Narcotic drugs
in British society, 1820-1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), 15-16;
R.S.Roberts, The Early History of the Import of Drugs into Britain, F.N.L.Poynter, ed.,
The Evolution of Pharmacy in Britain (London: Pitman, 1965), 165-85.
22 Harold J. Cook and Timothy D. Walker, Circulation of Medicine in the Early Modern
Atlantic World, Social History of Medicine 26 (2013): 337-51.
23 The East India Docks: Historical development, Hermione Hobhouse, ed., Survey of Lon-
don: Volumes 43 and 44, Poplar, Blackwall and Isle of Dogs (London: London County Coun-
cil, 1994), 575-82, accessed 24 September 2015, <http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-
london/vols43-4/pp575-582>. For changes to trading rights see John Keay, The Honorable
Company: A history of the English East India Company (London: HarperCollins, 1991).
24 Anon., A New Drug Showroom, Chemist and Druggist, 1 February 1913, 52-3; Anon., Lon-
dons Drug Market, p.858 (see note 21).
25 Timothy Davies, British Private Trade Networks and Metropolitan Connections in the
Eighteenth Century, Maxine Berg, ed., Goods from the East, 1600-1800: Trading Eurasia
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 154-67. For the broader context see Emily Erik-
son, Between Monopoly and Free Trade: The English East India Company, 1600-1757 (Prince
ton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

the weekly trade periodical, The Chemist and Druggist, as once the undoubted
centre of exchange for the worlds botanical drugs and essential oils.26 Drug
sales, meanwhile, were held at Garraways coffee house in Exchange Alley, near
Cornhill, until shortly before it was demolished in 1866.27 Here brokers auc-
tioned the lots in their catalog to an audience of wholesale druggists, export
merchants and dealers. Although individual firms buying arrangements dif-
fered, it was from this audience that significant quantities of raw materials
were purchased and then processed by wholesale manufacturers.28
Expanding Markets
Prior to exploring the development of sites of bulk drug manufacturing in

London, it is important to discuss what drove the early development of
the industry in the UK. British pharmaceutical manufacturers had specific
strengths in terms of their access to worldwide markets and the economic,
imperial and social networks they belonged to. In this context, the industrys
expansion was not only driven by increasing demand from customers for med-
ical drugs but also facilitated by improved access to resources from Britains
empire. The growth in demand for medical drugs to supply the Army, Navy,
and East India Company was particularly important, as this expenditure pro-
vided a significant stimulus for growth in production a point that provides
further evidence against explanations of British economic growth at this time
with reference to the free market.29 The Garnier Family, which secured a pat-
ent in 1715 to hold the post of Apothecary General to the Army in perpetuity,
was rumoured to have earned profits of 10,000 a year in the late-eighteenth
century.30 These profits derived from the lucrative terms of the post, an
26 Anon., A Century of Commerce in Drugs, Chemist and Druggist, 10 November 1959, 160-6,
on 160.
27 Anon., Londons Drug Market, pp.862-3 (see note 21); Anon., The Drug Sales, Chemist
and Druggist, 21 August 1886, 230-2.
28 Corbyns bought direct from the auctions. The Society of Apothecaries posted a list of
drugs required at Apothecaries Hall and any merchant or druggist could offer samples to
be viewed by the Societys buying committee. Howards purchased through the wholesale
druggists David Taylor and Sons.
29 John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, money, and the English state, 1688-1783 (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1988); Ashworth, The British Industrial Revolution (see note
3).
30 Arthur Edmund Garnier, The Chronicles of the Garniers of Hampshire during Four Centu-
ries, 1530-1900 (Norwich and London: Jarrold and Sons, 1900), 21.

296 Simmons
appointment that paid ten shillings a day, to which was added a sum equal to
ten percent of the value of medicines supplied. Between 1795 and 1806, the
money spent by the Army on medicines amounted to over 800,000, including
70,000 on surgical instruments. The orders were placed via the Apothecary
General with a range of civil firms.31
More is known about drug supply to the Navy and the East India Company.
The Society of Apothecaries, a city of London livery company with responsi-
bilities for examining apprentices and regulating apothecaries activities,
primarily supplied these institutions.32 The Society began manufacturing
drugs at its premises at Apothecaries Hall, Blackfriars, in 1672.33 Its chemical
laboratory was soon described as the largest and the best, with supply to the
Navy starting in 1703 and to the East India Company in 1766.34 In the eigh-
teenth century, the Society benefitted enormously from its unique position as
a livery company, with a role as an arbiter of quality, situated between the
trade and government spheres. This position helped to open up lucrative con-
tracts of drug supply and such trading relationships were strengthened when,
as William Ashworth has highlighted, the events of the 1790s temporarily
halted Britains move to reform and, in fact, reinforced its existing institutions.35
During the Napoleonic Wars demand for the Societys drugs grew further,
with an estimated 120,000 men engaged in the Royal Navy in 1801. Parallels can
be drawn between the advantages for the Navy of purchasing drugs from the
Society and the strengths of the contractor system of government supply that
Roger Knight and Malcolm Wilcox have described in their study of the
31 Neil Cantlie, A History of the Army Medical Department, vol. 1 (London and Edinburgh:
Churchill Livingstone, 1974), 61, 187; Unfortunately I have not yet been able to consult the
Garnier family papers to see if any of these civil firms are named.
32 E.A.Underwood, ed., Cecil Wall and H.C.Cameron, A History of the Worshipful Society of
Apothecaries of London, vol. 1, 1617-1815 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 8-22; Pat-
rick Wallis, Medicines for London: The trade, regulation and lifecycle of London apo
thecaries c.1610-1670 (D.Phil. Thesis, Oxford University, 2002), 23-50.
33 Anna Simmons, Medicines, Monopolies and Mortars: The chemical laboratory and the
pharmaceutical trade at the Society of Apothecaries in the eighteenth century, Ambix 53
(2006): 221-36.
34 W.H.Quarrell and Margaret Mare, eds., London in 1710 from the travels of Zacharius Conrad
von Uffenbach (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 111.
35 William J. Ashworth, Quality and the Roots of Manufacturing Expertise in Eighteenth-
Century Britain, Osiris 25 (2010): 231-54, on 234. In the 1810s the Society supplied the army
in Ireland and hoped to supply the main army as well. Cantlie, Army Medical Department,
p.449 (see note 31).

Victualling Board.36 For the decade up to 1810, the Navy spent an average of
18,072 per annum with the Society for the supply of drugs, chemicals and
galenical medicines, in addition to bottles, phials and mortars. For the same
period, the East India Company spent an average of 20,160 per annum on
medical supplies for its substantial army, plus ships, hospitals and trading
posts, even though some medicines were sourced locally.37 As the Society of
Apothecaries held a monopoly of supply for all of the drugs purchased in
Britain by the East India Company until its demise in 1858, some raw materials
such as quicksilver were shipped from areas under the Companys control to
London, processed at Apothecaries Hall and then re-exported to South Asia.38
Similar circular trading networks via London manufacturers existed across the
Atlantic with drugs such as Barbados aloes.39 Other destinations for the
Societys medicines included hospitals in Ceylon, Malta and Mauritius, a con-
vict establishment in Australia and the Hudsons Bay Company, in addition to
numerous hospitals and institutions in London.40 Not all of the drugs manu-
factured at Apothecaries Hall were supplied direct. A great number of the
Societys preparations were sent via merchants to the West Indies.41 In addi-
tion, individual apothecaries built up extensive Transatlantic trading activities,
supplying drugs, including some purchased from the Hall, to contacts in New
England and the West Indies.42
Chemists and druggists also developed impressive overseas export markets,
which drove the expansion of their businesses. William Jones traded as a drug-
36 Roger Knight and Malcolm Wilcox, Sustaining the Fleet, 1793-1815: War, the British Navy and
the contractor state (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2010), 10-11, 29.
37 Apothecaries Hall Archive (hereafter AHA), MS 8200/1-18, 1617-1926, Court of Assistants
Minute Books (hereafter CM) CM 29 March 1811. For local sourcing see Pratik Chakrabarti,
Materials and Medicine: Trade, conquest and therapeutics in the eighteenth century (Man-
chester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 33-44.
38 AHA, MS 8261, India Orders, 1827-8, state 3,011 lbs. of calomel, was sent to Bengal, Madras,
Canton and Prince of Wales Island.
39 S. Stander, Transatlantic Trade in Pharmaceuticals during the Industrial Revolution, Bul-
letin of the History of Medicine 43 (1969): 326-43, on 340-2.
40 AHA, Annotated Pharmacopoeia Collegii Regalis Medicorum Londinensis (London: Long-
man, 1809); United Stock Account Books, MS 8224, vol. 1 (1812-30), vol. 2 (1831-46); Pen
elope Hunting, A History of the Society of Apothecaries (London: Society of Apothecaries,
1998), 164-87.
41 J.F.A.Gttling, Einige Bermerkungen ber Chemie und Pharmazie in England, Alma-
manach oder Taschenbuch fr Scheideknstler und Apotheker, 1789, 128-44, on 129. With
thanks to Ursula Klein for this reference.
42 I.K.Steele, Atlantic Merchant Apothecary: Letters of Joseph Cruttenden, 1710-1717 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1977).

298 Simmons
gist in Bloomsbury in the mid-eighteenth century and had a UK-wide wholesale

trade, whilst also exporting drugs to Nova Scotia, Gibraltar, and the West
Indies.43 Thomas Corbyn, who traded from 300 High Holborn, had, in addition
to a substantial provincial market, a significant overseas trade, predominantly
with Quakers in North America and also in the West Indies.44 Ledgers and let-
ter books dating from 1776 to 1780 demonstrate that another Quaker, Joseph
Gurney Bevan of Plough Court (the business that ultimately became Allen and
Hanburys), had forty regular customers across the Atlantic, mostly in Jamaica
and Barbados, plus a secondary trade shipping bales of textiles to Europe.45
Such activity was undoubtedly fostered by close ties between the Quaker mer-
chant community on both sides of the Atlantic and its established networks of
commerce and credit.46 It also underlines how this story of production feeds
into a broader history linking therapeutics with colonial expansion and inter-
national trade.47
Sites of Bulk Drug Manufacturing
It is now necessary to return to the question of how those involved in the phar-
maceutical marketplace met the substantial increase in demand for medical
drugs. This was achieved by firms expanding their premises (initially on site
and later elsewhere) and by scaling up production. Thomas Corbyn, in addi-
tion to his premises in Holborn, had a separate laboratory, and owned a large
warehouse at Cold Bath Fields. His warehouse stock book or inventory dated
December 1761 included 2,500 items of materia medica, some of which were
stored in very large quantities.48 A surviving recipe book consisted of over
650 preparations and contained instructions for large-scale pharmaceutical
production.49 Samuel Towers commenced manufacturing at a laboratory in
43 G.M.Watson, Some Eighteenth Century Trading Accounts, F.N.L.Poynter, ed., The Evolu-
tion of Pharmacy in Britain (London: Pitman, 1965), 45-78.
44 Porter and Porter, The Rise of the English Drugs Industry, pp.290-1 (see note 8).
45 Simon S. Stander, A History of the Pharmaceutical Industry with Particular Reference to
Allen and Hanbury, 1775-1843 (M.Sc. Econ. Thesis, London University, 1965), 55, 125.
46 Margaret Stiles, The Quakers in Pharmacy, F.N.L.Poynter, ed., The Evolution of Pharmacy
in Britain (London: Pitman, 1965), 113-30; Renate Wilson, Trading in Drugs through Phila-
delphia in the Eighteenth Century: A transatlantic enterprise, Social History of Medicine
26 (2013): 352-63.
47 Chakrabarti, Materials and Medicine, pp.19-51 (see note 37).
48 Porter and Porter, The Rise of the English Drugs Industry, p.288 (see note 8).
49 Wellcome Library, Corbyn and Co., Manufacturing Recipe Book, 1748-1847, MS 5446.

Oxford Street in the late 1600s. In the eighteenth century, this business moved
to more extensive premises at Mount Pleasant, and sites were subsequently
added in Cold Bath Fields and Maiden Lane, Battle Bridge. The latter location
was used for manufacturing chemicals including ammonia (then known as
hartshorn as it was obtained from distilling stags horns and bones) and oxalic
acid.50
However it was the Society of Apothecaries that had the greatest capacity to
process and manufacture huge quantities of drugs. Their premises at Blackfriars
housed the largest pharmaceutical manufacturing laboratories in London in
the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, with plans dating from 1771
and 1823 illustrating the extent of expansion during this period (see figures
12.1 and 12.2). The German apothecary Johann Gttling visited Apothecaries
Hall whilst in England in 1787 and 1788, shortly after a major extension to the
trading premises had been completed. He praised the Societys manufacturing
capabilities, describing two large laboratories, a still house and hand mill room,
and highlighted how all chemical preparations are prepared in large quan
tities.51 His description of the apparatus for making calx of mercury is
indicative of this. The brick furnace was six to seven feet long and four feet
wide, with its upper part containing a sand bath, where twenty to twenty-five
phials were buried. Each phial held about two pounds of water and was half-
filled with quicksilver.52 Gttling remarked that certain processes operated
more efficiently when carried out in bulk. For example, he noted that the large-
scale purification of ammonium carbonate was less arduous than when
performed with smaller distillations.53 A device for distilling stag horn in order
to obtain the spirit (aqueous solution of ammonia) also impressed him. This
used two large upturned pots, about three and half feet high, placed on top of
each other to serve as a distillation receiver. The device overcame a number of
the problems associated with the distillation and Gttling commented that he
was surprized that a similar arrangement was not yet found in German labora-
tories.54 His remarks suggest that the Halls production method was not widely
known in England either, as Gttling noted that Robert Dossies The Elaboratory
50 Gustave L.M.Strauss, Charles W. Quin, John C. Brough, Thomas Archer, William B. Teget-
meier, and William J. Prowse, Englands Workshops (London: Groombridge and Sons,
1864), 160.
51 J.F.A.Gttling, Einige Bermerkungen, p.129 (see note 41); See also Ursula Klein, Apothe
cary-Chemists in Eighteenth Century Germany, Lawrence Principe, ed., New Narratives in
Eighteenth Century Chemistry (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 97-137, on 115-16.
52 Gttling, Einige Bermerkungen, pp.131-2 (see note 41).

300

Figure 12.1 Ground Plan of Apothecaries Hall, including the Trading Premises, 1771. Image used by kind permission of the Worshipful
Simmons
Society of Apothecaries.
Figure 12.2 Plan of Hall laboratories taken from The Origin, Progress, and Present State of
the Various Establishments for Conducting Chemical Processes, and Other
Medicinal Preparations, at Apothecaries Hall (London: R. Gilbert, 1823).
Image used by kind permission of the Worshipful Society of
Apothecaries.

302 Simmons
Laid Open also referred to the problems experienced when carrying out the
distillation.55 It seems likely that in contrast to the Enlightenment ideals of
openness and freedom of knowledge, the Apothecaries Hall laboratories at
this point were a closed environment.56 Gttling observed that it was very
difficult to gain entry here without a special recommendation.57
In the early nineteenth century, further development occurred to the manu-
facturing premises at Apothecaries Hall, with the construction of a mill house,
initially horse-powered, which enabled large quantities of drugs to be ground
on site.58 This was followed by a state of the art still house, which was signifi-
cant for the novel steam technology it incorporated; a new laboratory with
furnaces; new warehouses; and an eight horse-power steam engine, which
powered machinery for grinding, sifting, triturating and pounding drugs.59 As
the stove for making calx of mercury illustrates, the laboratories contained
existing chemical-pharmaceutical apparatus scaled up for bulk production
and multiplied in number. When this was combined with mechanized drug
mills and a larger workforce, consisting of a chemical operator, a galenical
operator (until 1826), a foreman and around eight to ten laboratory workmen,
the Society was able to manufacture and process huge quantities of drugs for a
non-local market. The speed of production was such that in 1810 the Society
claimed that medicines for an Army of 30,000 men could be provided in the
course of ten days in the case of an emergency.60 The scale of production,
meanwhile, is illustrated by an East India Company indent from 1827-8. The
orders included 879 pounds and 5 ounces of mercury pills shipped to Bengal
and Madras; 3,112 pounds of powdered cinchona lancifolia bark sent to Bengal,
Bombay and Canton; and 36,962 pounds of magnesium sulphate dispatched to
Bengal, Bombay, Madras, Canton and Prince of Wales Island.61 Ursula Klein
has highlighted how similar conditions elsewhere enabled a continuous tran-
sition from small-scale pharmaceutical manufacture to large-scale pharma-
55 Robert Dossie, The Elaboratory Laid Open: Or the secrets of modern chemistry and phar-
macy revealed (London: J. Nourse, 1756), 85-93.
56 Contrastingly, the Hall laboratories were publicized in an attempt to boost the Societys
scientific status in the 1810s. Anna Simmons, Stills, Status, Stocks and Science: The labo-
ratories at Apothecaries Hall in the nineteenth century, Ambix 61 (2014): 141-61.
57 Gttling, Einige Bermerkungen, p.129 (see note 41).
58 AHA, CM 23 October 1801, 16 September 1803.
59 Anon., The Origin, Progress and Present State of the Various Establishments for Conducting
Chemical Processes, and Other Medicinal Preparations, at Apothecaries Hall (London: R.
Gilbert, 1823).
60 AHA, CM 24 October 1810.
61 AHA, MS 8261, India Orders, 1827-8.

ceutical industry, with comparable development occurring at other sites of

wholesale pharmaceutical manufacturing in London.62
The majority of apothecaries, chemists and druggists who began manufac-
turing drugs in the capital in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were
located in the City of London, particularly around its boundaries, with clusters
also situated around Oxford Street, Covent Garden and Holborn.63 However,
this changed in the period c.1760 to c.1840. As London expanded westwards
and the City of London became a business rather than a residential area, the
distribution of manufacturing sites began to shift.64 Many businesses that had
been founded in or near the City of London (with combined production and
retail facilities on one site) constructed separate manufacturing premises
outside of this area. For example, in 1795 the Quaker, Joseph Jewell, began man-
ufacturing chemicals on a larger scale than was possible at the Plough Court
pharmacy (where he was employed as an elaboratory man), at a new labora-
tory in Plaistow, Essex.65 Luke Howard joined fellow Quaker, William Allen, in
partnership at Plough Court in 1797 and together with Jewell concentrated on
developing the Plaistow laboratory. A laboratory journal from the turn of the
nineteenth century provides an insight into its daily operation, as well as high-
lighting the range and extent of production.66 It indexes seventy-one principal
products, including ammonia, borax, nitric and citric acids, camphor, ether,
mercurials and potassium salts.67 The entry for 7 February 1800 records that
3,403 pounds of rough camphor were treated yielding 3,120 pounds of the
sublimed. Costings of labor, glassware and fuel, alongside yields and technical
details are all noted, illustrating how a paper record of commercial factors and
experimental observation was increasingly used to manage workers and the
processes under their supervision.
62 Ursula Klein, Apothecarys Shops, Laboratories and Chemical Manufacture in Eighteenth

Century Germany, Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer and Peter Dear, eds., The Mindful Hand:
Inquiry and invention from the late renaissance to early industrialisation (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2007), 247-76, on 275.
63 A detailed analysis of the location of sites for wholesale pharmaceutical manufacturing in
London will form the focus of a separate article.
64 Michael Ball and David Sunderland, An Economic History of London, 1800-1914 (London:
Routledge, 2001) 121, 171-3, 182, 361-2.
65 A.W.Slater, ed., Autobiographical Memoir of Joseph Jewell, 1763-1846, Camden Miscel-
lany 22 (1964): 113-78, on 115.
66 London Metropolitan Archives, Records of Howards and Sons, Laboratory Journal, ACC
1037 291/1.
67 Anon., Howards of Stratford and Ilford, Chemist and Druggist, 25 April 1914, 115-23, on 116.

304 Simmons
Allen and Howards partnership was amicably dissolved in 1807 and around
this time the laboratory was relocated to larger and more accessible premises
at Stratford.68 Here, with Jewell as a junior partner, Howard specialized in fine
chemicals. At Stratford the large-scale refining of crude Tibetan tincal, niter
and camphor imported by the East India Company expanded further, with,
for example, five tons of saltpeter purchased on 7 September 1819.69 By 1821
Howards employed over thirty workmen, increasing to forty-three by the 1830s.
Despite fluctuating economic conditions, with a boom during the Napoleonic
wars, followed by a post-war slump, sales grew to a peak of 44,916 in 1825.
A severe economic downturn followed and Howard and Jewell retired at the
end of 1830, but sales only once dipped slightly below 30,000 in the years 1826-
37.70 Allen and his successors, meanwhile, continued manufacturing at Plough
Court, with a remarkably consistent turnover of around 15,000 per annum for
much of the period 1816-40.71 They undertook cod liver oil production on site
from the 1840s, before later establishing processing plants in Norway, with
refining carried out at Plough Court.72 It was not until 1878 that a new factory
was opened at Bethnal Green.
For many businesses founded in the early nineteenth century, a shift from
shop-based to factory-based manufacture tended to happen more rapidly, with
the introduction of new product ranges often driving expansion. Having gained
experience in Paris, Thomas Morson started his business in Fleet Market in
1821, and was the first to manufacture quinine sulphate and morphine salts on
a commercial scale in England. His price list from 1821 featured seventeen new
chemical preparations employed as medicine and included morphine, strych-
nine, emetine and quinine sulphate.73 Demand was such that he moved to
bigger premises in Southampton Row in 1826, where a 300-square-foot labora-
tory was built at the rear of his shop.74 Morson erected works in the Hornsey
Road shortly afterwards. There he began manufacturing creosote, which had
68 A.W.Slater, Howards, Chemical Manufacturers, 1797-1837: A study in business history

(M.Sc. Econ. Thesis, London University, 1956), 179, states that the Stratford laboratory
opened in 1807. However most other sources give 1805.
69 Ibid., pp.56-7 (see note 68).
70 Slater, Autobiographical Memoir, pp.121-2 (see note 65); Slater, Howards, pp.320-1 (see
note 68).
71 Stander, A History of the Pharmaceutical Industry, pp.164-5 (see note 45).
72 A plant founded in Newfoundland in 1860 was short-lived. Tweedale, At the Sign of the
Plough, p.75, p.78 (see note 5).
73 Wellcome Library, Records of Thomas N.R.Morson Ltd., Product and Price Lists, 1821-
1900, SA/MORH 1.
74 Morson, Operative Chymist, p.44 (see note 9).

again been recently discovered. In the longer-term, Morson failed to exploit his
early entry into the quinine market. Production continued until the middle of
the nineteenth century, but in 1866 the German firm, Bhringer, supplied
Morson with significant quantities of quinine, suggesting that manufacture
had ceased.75 However, this did not affect the firms growth in other areas. By
the 1860s, Morson was producing over 500 different chemical substances,
made in all grades of purity. There were also more than 250 extracts, essences
and tinctures, in addition to proprietary preparations and gelatine.76
The acquisition of new sites did not only signal an expansion of laboratory
premises or the manufacture of new products. Larger premises might also be
needed for preparing and packaging orders; bigger warehouses were required
for storage; or new partnership agreements meant different properties were
leased or owned. George Maw started in the London pharmaceutical trade by
entering into a partnership in 1807 with his cousin, William Hornby, who was
already established as wholesale druggist at 20 Fenchurch Street. Maw left this
partnership in 1814 to purchase a surgical plaster factory in Whitecross Street,
near Shoreditch. This factory later expanded to produce druggists sundries,
toiletries and pharmaceutical products. Maw then acquired larger premises in
Aldermanbury in 1820 and at Aldersgate Street in 1834, as various relatives
joined the firm and its range of activities diversified.77
As the industry grew, a new sort of manufacturer emerged, of which Maw
was an example. Although the need to refine chemicals to medicinal grade
quality was not new in the pharmaceutical trade, manufacturers had com-
monly carried out these steps themselves to guarantee purity.78 However,
increasingly firms specialized in fine chemicals or manufactured semi-pre-
pared products to supply the pharmaceutical trade. In 1833, Stafford Allen, a
miller at Amersham and the nephew of William Allen of Allen, Hanburys and
Barry (as the firm was then styled), went into partnership with Charles May, a
druggist and herb grower from Ampthill, Bedfordshire. They opened drug mills
in Cowper Street, City Road, London and the site at Ampthill was used to pro-
vide the London business with raw materials. The firm processed these
materials into semi-manufactured products, such as powders, distilled oils,

77 Anon., More Historic London Wholesale Houses, Chemist and Druggist, 31 January 1914,
155-7, on 156; Anon., London Pharmaceutical Industry, Chemist and Druggist, 24 June
1933, 667-95, on 677.
78 For the Society of Apothecaries purification of magnesium sulphate see AHA, E/7 Loose
Papers, Box 3. Evidence for similar practices exists at William Jones Bloomsbury business.

306 Simmons
extracts and emulsions, which were supplied to major London manufacturers

and wholesalers.79 Similarly, a cost price book from Allen, Hanburys and Barry
illustrates how supplies were purchased from various manufacturers and drug
merchants, with substances used in the firms own pharmaceutical production
or sold on directly to customers.80
Networks of Supply
As increasing specialization developed within wholesale pharmaceutical man

ufacturing, firms adapted their business methods to utilize various networks
of supply based on established familial, social, religious and economic con
nections. In this context, the price and purchasing arrangements between
manufacturers that regulated the availability and cost of bulk chemicals
became more significant. Howards had private arrangements with firms
nationwide, which helped the newly formed firm survive price-cutting in the
1810s. For example, Thomas and William Henry of Manchester bought large
quantities of tartaric acid from Howards, whilst Howards purchased most of its
magnesium sulphate from the Henrys. It is not surprizing that in some cases,
price and purchasing arrangements led ultimately to mergers or acquisitions.
Luke Howard had come to a price agreement with John Towers of Cold Bath
Fields, regarding potassium salts in 1808, but Towers subsequently sold out
to Howards in 1816.81 Quaker ties were also important in this respect. In the
1830s Howards began to produce iodine compounds on a large scale and pur-
chased iodine (made from kelp) from their respected Friend Patrick Miller, in
the North. In 1832 Howards agreed to take 2,500 ounces of iodine every three
months on condition that Miller agreed not to sell to any house at a lower
price than that charged to the Messrs Howards, or to send any hydriodate of
potash to London while the contract ran.82
Changes to duties and existing mercantilist laws also had a major impact on
what was manufactured by a firm or purchased from other suppliers.83
79 Anon., Centenary of Stafford Allen and Sons, Chemist and Druggist, 1 July 1933, 22-3;
Entry for Stafford Allen & Sons Ltd in Richmond et al., eds., The Pharmaceutical Industry,
p.83 (see note 7).
80 Royal Pharmaceutical Society, Allen, Hanburys and Barry Cost Price Book, 1822-44, IRA
1997.008.
81 J. Burnby, The Early Years, pp.8-9 (see note 7).
82 Anon., Iodine, Chemist and Druggist, 19 June 1897, 974.
83 Most drugs and chemicals were dutiable in the UK until 1845 (Anon., The Good Old
Times, The Chemist and Druggist, 19 June 1897, 967), with quinine sulphate bearing duty

A broader examination of the trade in cinchona bark and quinine sulphate

production in Europe lies outside the scope of this study.84 However quinine
sulphate provides an interesting example of firms different responses to the
introduction of a new drug into the marketplace. It illustrates how innovation,
in terms of the adoption of new chemical knowledge and practice, was not
exclusively the motor of pharmaceutical development. Pierre-Joseph Pelletier
and Joseph Caventou had first isolated quinine from cinchona in Paris in 1820.85
John Warrick, an importer of foreign drugs and chemicals based in Blackfriars,
reputedly sold the first ounce of quinine in England.86 The purchaser was
Thomas Morson, who then manufactured and sold quinine sulphate from
Fleet Market in 1821. However it was Howards, not Morson, who went on to
dominate quinine production in Britain. Howards first manufactured quinine
sulphate on a commercial scale in 1823,87 but faced strong competition from
French producers, such as Pelletier and Levaillant, selling through London
drug merchants. Luke Howard and Joseph Jewell evolved an extraction process
which produced quinine sulphate of reasonable purity from cinchona bark at
their Stratford factory. However, Howards production capabilities were ham-
pered by the relatively high import duties charged on crude drugs compared to
those incurred on imports of the finished product.88 In such circumstances, it
is not surprizing that other manufacturers decided against developing produc-
tion themselves. Some production was undertaken at Apothecaries Hall in the
early 1820s, but for reasons of quality, price, and the nominal import duty of
one penny per ounce on quinine sulphate, by 1834 the Society of Apothecaries
preferred to import it directly from France.89 Howards lobbied HM Privy
Council for Affairs of Trade and Commerce regarding the discrepancy in duty
up to 1870. For the complications arising from the Navigation Acts for Howards importa-
tion of camphor see Anon., Quinine and Camphor, Chemist and Druggist, 19 June 1897,
974.
84 I am very grateful to Laurence Brockliss, John Cardwell and Michael Moss and for sharing
their research on this trade, which will be published in due course as part of a project on
the health of the Navy.
85 Marcel Delpine, Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Caventou, Journal of Chemical Education
28 (1951): 454-61.
86 Anon., London Wholesalers in 1863 and Now, Chemist and Druggist, 26 July 1913, 143-9,
on 148.
87 Anon., Howards, 1797-1947 (Ilford: Howards & Sons, 1947), 7.
88 Similar problems existed with opium duty. Anon., Cinchona and Opium Duties, The
Chemist and Druggist, 19 June 1897, 975.
89 Report of the Select Committee on Medical Education, Society of Apothecaries, part III (602),
P.P. 1834, XIII, 64-5.

308 Simmons
levels in 1836 and until 1860 British quinine manufacturers were protected by
an import duty of six pence per ounce.90 This mirrors aspects of the complex
history of British industrialization abetted by government protection and reg-
ulation that William J. Ashworth has described for the eighteenth century.91 It
also underlines the importance of strategic political action to support the
development of chemical production, as John Christie has highlighted in his
chapter in relation to Charles Tennants efforts to abolish salt duty. Howards
production of quinine increased steadily: in 1836 it was 6,000 ounces, rising to
15,000 ounces in 1838 and never falling below 100,000 ounces a year after 1847.92
By the 1860s over 200 workmen were employed at Howards Stratford factory
and more than a ton of bark was processed each day the transition to large-
scale pharmaceutical industry had taken place.
Borax refining had been a key part of production for Howards since the
Plaistow laboratory opened at the turn of the century. Both Tibetan tincal
imported via the East India Company, and borate of lime from Peruvian coastal
saline deposits had been used as raw materials.93 In the late 1820s a new source
from Italy, exploited by Count Lardarel, came onto the market and almost
wiped out the Tibetan tincal trade in Europe.94 John Eliot Howard obtained a
sample of this Tuscan boracic acid in 1830 from the wholesale druggist David
Taylor and Sons of Mincing Lane. Analysis showed the sample was of high
quality and free from muriatic acid.95 The firm subsequently inquired how it
would be imported. Taylors reply underlines the value, scale and complexity of
the networks of supply involved in the international borax trade:
We can now tell you [write Grant & Co. on March 14, 1836] how the opera-
tion stands. Larderell is bound to deliver to Hepburn, Pullars & Co.
21,000,000 lbs. of boracic acid at a price somewhat above Liv. 41 (per ton)
in seven lots from 1st January 1837 to the end of June, 1839. Six months
before the end of that period H., P. & Co. can denounce the contract and
pay down Liv. 200,000 as Caparra, [deposit] which is to be discounted
90 Anon., Quinine and Camphor, p.974 (see note 83); Strauss et al., Englands Workshops,
p.146 (see note 50).
91 William J. Ashworth, The Intersection of Industry and the State in Eighteenth Century
Britain, in Roberts et al., eds., The Mindful Hand, 348-77 (see note 62).
92 Redbridge Information and Heritage Service, Archives of Howards and Sons,B.F. Howard,
Howards 1847-1947: A Treatise, 1956, 3.
93 Strauss et al., Englands Workshops, p.146 (see note 50).
94 N.J.Travis and E.J.Cocks, The Tincal Trail: A history of borax (London: Harrap, 1984), 24-6.
With thanks to Andreas Weber for this reference.
95 Anon., An Analysis by John Eliot Howard, Chemist and Druggist, 19 June 1897, 975.

gradually at each delivery as usual when advances are made. Besides

these advances H., P. & Co. lend Larderell Liv. 400,000 for 10 years at 5 p.c.
Larderell issues notes of Liv. 5,000, payable 10 years hence and paying 5
p.c. interest. H., P. & Co. expect to negotiate these notes and be freed
actual disbursements. The first three millions of acid they have resold to
W. Lloyd (the refiner) at about 50 Liv.96
Such arrangements ensured that prices remained high for those in possession
of the raw material after the original supply began to be exploited. They also
underline the relationship between the worldwide commodity market and
bulk manufacturing in the UK at this time. In the 1860s, Howards were amongst
the largest consumers of Tuscan boracic acid worldwide.97 However while
Howards consumption was at a globally significant level, the firm did not deal
directly with overseas customers. By the late 1820s, Allen, Hanburys and Barry
also had few transatlantic contacts.98 Difficulties with shipping and obtaining
payment for goods meant that agents played an increasingly important role
in the networks of supply. When Howards received an enquiry from Mr
H.J.Esszingh in Cologne for refined borax in 1841, they quoted a price of sev-
enty-two shillings per hundredweight and requested that he place his order via
an agent in London.99
Conclusion
The economic drivers of growth in the London pharmaceutical marketplace in

the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries stemmed from the indus-
trys location at the center of an international network of drug supply and
processing, with productivity at its heart.100 As Britains empire increased in
size, the balance of the push and pull relationship between production and
supply became central: sources of raw materials for production expanded, but
the markets for processed drugs and chemicals also grew. Rather than invent-
ing new technologies, it was the scaling up of existing chemical-pharmaceutical
96 Anon., Borax Reminiscences, Chemist and Druggist, 19 June 1897, 975.

97 Strauss et al., Englands Workshops, p.146 (see note 50).
98 Stander, Transatlantic Trade, p.333 (see note 39).
99 Anon., Borax Reminiscences, p.975 (see note 96).
100 On London as an industrial center, see Thomas Misa, From Leonardo to the Internet: Tech-
nology and culture from the renaissance to the present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, 2004), pp.59-73.

310 Simmons
apparatus and expansion in terms of workforce, site and product range that
were significant factors in the development of bulk drug production in London,
as a transition from shop-based to factory-based manufacture occurred.
Instead of the Enlightenment ideals of openness and the free dissemination of
knowledge, tension between the relative values of publicity and secrecy per-
sisted and pricing agreements between rival manufacturers were commonplace.
Long-standing networks of supply based on colonial, economic, social, famil-
ial, and religious connections provided a strong framework for industrial
development and drove the expansion of the industry. Such continuity pro-
vided a context for gradual change and allowed incremental innovations in
practices, techniques and processes to occur.
Wholesale pharmaceutical manufacturing operated in an environment
characterized not by clichs of a British free market, but instead characterized
by a market organized around interactions between sites through networked
exchanges and circulation. In this market, both cooperation and competition
between producers were significant; British governmental policies, contracts
and expenditure provided a major stimulus for growth; and the ability to utilize
the resources of empire whilst also responding to its demands was paramount.
Although this story has a London base, its reach was global as wholesale drug
manufacturing functioned in an intricate productivity network of empire and
international trade.
Acknowledgments
I am very grateful to the editors of this volume and all the members of the
Situating Chemistry Research Network for the feedback and comments they
have provided on this article. I am particularly indebted to Joe Cain and the
Science and Technology Studies Department at University College London for
continuing to support me as an Honorary Research Associate. The Society of
Apothecaries has been most generous in giving permission to use and cite its
archives and Janet Payne, from the Societys Friends of the Archives, has been
extremely helpful with my research. The London Metropolitan Archives,
Redbridge Information and Heritage Service, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society
and the Wellcome Library have also kindly allowed access to their collections.

Chemical Glasgow and its Entrepreneurs, 1760-1860 311
Chapter 13
Chemical Glasgow and its Entrepreneurs, 1760-1860

John R.R. Christie
The principal focus of this essay, the town of Glasgow and the chemical works
of St. Rollox, is local, but has a general resonance, for St. Rollox may be regarded
as a paradigmatic case of industrialized chemical production within the
encompassing orbit of the industrial revolution. Here, inarguably it seems, are
found the kinds of research-based, knowledge-induced technical innovation,
entrepreneurship, growth rates, scale transformations, employment and wage
patterns, which allow assimilation to the historiographical normativity of
industrialization, at least in British terms. The most recent and conceptually
sophisticated treatment of St. Rollox informed by the history of chemistry
is found in Hasok Chang and Catherine Jacksons edited volume on The Life
of Chlorine.1 The authors critique the technologically determinist, linear
approaches of older writers on the history of chemical technique, which
explained the history of chemical and industrial development in chlorine
bleaching through a narrative structured by progressive innovation moving
from science to technological advance to industrial production. In its stead
they recommend an approach emphasizing the complex, contingent and feed-
back looping elements characteristic of interpretation based upon social
shaping of technology.
The approach adopted in this essay has some kinship with this advocacy,
but has additional characteristics. Its most acute focus is upon situation, the
town of Glasgow, and the industrial site of the St. Rollox chemical works within
it.2 It equally emphasizes contemporary Glaswegian sites of chemical produc-
1 Manichi Chung, Saber Farooqi, Jacob Soper and Olympia Brown, Obstacles in the
Establishment of Chlorine Bleaching, Hasok Chang and Catherine Jackson, eds., An Element
of Controversy: The life of chlorine in science, medicine, technology and war (London: British
Society for the History of Science, 2007), 153-178, for chlorine bleaching in this period, and for
St. Rollox in particular 168-74; First published nearly fifty years ago, Alfred Musson and Eric
Robinson, Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1969), 231-371, remains the most informatively detailed treatment of British
chemical technology and manufacture during the period.
2 There exist few archival sources for St. Rollox and no substantial history of the company. The
Mitchell Library Glasgow holds site-development plans 1830-1900, and legal depositions. I have
located an early letter-book, useful primarily for business organization, and have additionally
John R.R. Christie, 2018|doi 10.1163/9789004325562_015


312 Christie
tion other than St. Rollox, and the infrastructural development of educational
and collective commercial institutions within the town. It further focuses
upon the chemical-entrepreneurial figures, Charles Tennant and Charles
Macintosh, at the center of St Rollox chemistry and industrial expansion. As
young men, they worked in a pre-industrial manufacturing setting. Their
careers therefore allow us to track practical chemistrys transition from pre-
industrial to thoroughly industrialized settings, a period coinciding with
the rapid sequence of development in chemical science during this period.
Because some narratives of industrial revolution emphasize qualitative,
ultimately discontinuous change, these two careers thus also provide an
opportunity for critical attention to that historiographical reflex, with respect
both to practical chemistry, and to industrialization. Further, as entrepreneurs
of the Industrial Revolution, Tennant and Macintosh, in their very different
ways, repay analysis of the varied forms of chemical-entrepreneurial activity
they exhibited. This affords critical reflection upon the vocabulary of technical
and economic innovation, and more particularly, upon models of entrepre-
neurship which currently preoccupy economic historians. Are chemical
entrepreneurs easily absorbed by such models as further exemplars, or might
they induce attention to a more nuanced understanding of entrepreneurship?3
A Chemical Behemoth
The St. Rollox Chemical Works, owned and operated by Charles Tennant and
Co. in Glasgow, was often described as being, in its mid-Victorian heyday, the
largest in Europe, if not the world. Across numerous measures (physical exten-
sion, employment, product diversification and output, fuel consumption, cost
reduction) the company exhibited exceptionally impressive growth. Growth
and size are however often matters of relative judgment, and parameter-
dependent. The economic historian may wish to fix upon financial elements,
such as annual financial turnover, rates of profitability and the like, as opposed
to physical extension of site and other physical detail. There is a point to such
used contemporary accounts, family histories and biographies, and informal local and parish
histories.
3 For recent work on entrepreneurship in this period, see Franois Crouzet, The First
Industrialists: The problem of origins ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Joel
Mokyr, Entrepreneurship in the Industrial Revolution, David Landes, Joel Mokyr and William
Baumol eds., The Invention of Enterprise (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012),
183-210.

selectivity. Site-wise a large bleachfield might compare in acreage with early St.
Rollox, indeed there was one such in Glasgow, but its financial parameters
would have nonetheless stood in stark contrast. One might alternatively think
of employment size, for a large site does not of necessity employ large num-
bers (think again of the bleachfield). There is also interesting international
comparison to be made on the question of size. The Gunpowder Manufactory
run by the British military in Ichapur, India, employed more than two thou-
sand workers, at least triple the number of St. Rollox workers in the 1820s, and
at a considerably earlier date, and this example serves also remind us that, dur-
ing the eighteenth century, and into the nineteenth, the employer with the
highest number of workers engaged in manufacturing, on the largest sites, was
the government, in particular the Army and Navy offices, with their extensive
dockyards and munitions works.4
St. Rollox originated as a chlorine bleaching manufacture in 1797, sited in a
semi-rural location, north of Glasgow, close to the newly completed Monkland
Canal. Tennant used a Berthollet chlorine bleaching liquor, then modified with
the addition of lime (as opposed to potash). The move to the Tennant-
Macintosh patented chlorine bleaching powder in 1799 was the key element in
St. Rollox early expansion, the powder remaining an ongoing profitable staple
of production throughout our period. The site diversified internally, producing
sulfuric acid and soap, and after the abolition of salt importation duty in the
early 1820s, Leblanc process soda, both ash and a lesser amount of crystal. Its
physical plant grew, and was improved, with expensive installation of platina
vats (instead of lead) for concentrated vitriol, more furnaces, chimneys, ware-
house storage, canal basin, and railway terminal in 1831. By the 1850s the
company had its own on-site cooperage, a foundry for equipment-making, and
interests in local coal mines. The central chemical works alone had come to
occupy thirteen acres. Tennant also began purchasing sea-going schooners, the
basis by 1848 of a large mercantile fleet on the river Clyde, with steam vessels
for the London and Baltic trades, and coastal sailing vessels for limestone
importation (Ireland) and sulfur (Italy).5 St. Rollox site-expansion was spec-
tacular, but, through Tennants relentless application, it became in local,
national and international terms also geographically tentacular, by rail, and by
water thus Leviathan accompanied Behemoth.
4 Jan Lucassen, Working at the Ichapur Gunpowder Factory in the 1790s, Indian Historical
Review 39 (2012): 19-56 (part 1), 251-71 (part 2); With thanks to Andreas Weber, who brought
this work to my attention.
5 James Dawson Burn, Commercial Enterprise and Social Progress: Or, gleanings in London,
Sheffield, Glasgow and Dublin (London: Piper, Stephenson & Spence, 1858), 118.

314 Christie
Contemporary perceptions of St. Rollox recorded its massive productive

presence in the north of Glasgow. J.D. Burn was struck by its stupendous size
overall, the enormous bulk of the vitriol vats and the chlorination chambers,
the mountainous tonnage of heaped chemical raw materials, the hundreds of
furnaces, the heat, and the staggering amounts of materials consumed and
produced. St. Rolloxs impact upon visitors, dutifully noted in quantitatively
numerical terms, was equally registered in physical, material terms other than
simple tonnages consumed and produced. To Burns awed perception, and in
his laudatory account of a progressive manufacture, there was nonetheless
consciousness of an infernal working environment, an extraordinary laby-
rinth, a devils den, dominated by the monstrous dimensions of an immense
chimney, Tennants Stalk.6 Its material penetration of the surrounding envi-
ronment became as noticeable. George Dodds description a decade earlier
was comparable with Burns, noting St. Rollox gigantism, monstrosity, and the
bewildered impressions of the novice observer, but unlike Burn, it also empha-
sized the deleterious working environment, both hazardous and unhealthy.7
This progressive narrative had already received cultural registration in edu-
cated, popular bourgeois and upper-class reading, whereas one needs to look to
demotic and musical working class expression for registration of dissent from
the progressive narrative, and contrasting emphasis upon working conditions.
Tennant and Co. appeared in Walter Scotts The Antiquary as an item of com-
mon conversation in a provincial east-coast town, its thriving business noted,
and its commercial prospects speculated upon, a readily intelligible sketching
of common communicative life, and to that extent a witness to the companys
rising and pervasive presence in Scottish commercial culture.8 A contrasting
view of St Rollox is found in verses recited by Hugh Aitken Dow at a Royston
School reunion in 1875, a school founded by Tennants for the children of their
workers, so the likelihood is that Dow was a local resident, and had been a St.
6 Ibid., pp. 114-119.

7 George Dodd, Charles Knight, James Thorne, Harriet Martineau, William Harvey and William
Wylie, The Land We Live In: A pictorial, historical and literary sketch-book of the British Islands,
vol. III, Scotland, Ireland and the Devonshire Coast (London: William Orr and Co., 1846), 213.
8 Walter Scott, The Antiquary, original publication 1816, edition referenced is The Antiquary,
vol.1 (New York: Van Winkle and Wiley, 1816), ch.15, 154, 160; The Antiquarys representation
may be somewhat anachronistic. The novel is set in the 1790s, at which time Tennants had
existed at most for four years. It is possible that the companys extended network of business
agents and volume of sales at that time was such as Scott depicted, but it is at least as likely
that it represents the state of affairs around Scotts time of writing, 1815-16.

Rollox chemical worker, perhaps as early as the 1840s.9 Invaluable as a direct

comment by a chemical worker, Dows verses portray the oppressive, sooty and
sulfurous atmosphere of the St. Rollox Works and its surroundings, and also
its physiological effects, smarting eyes, and muffled noses. A netherworld is
again invoked, with a concluding image of Vulcan, but, the verses insist, the god
of fire, forge and metallurgy can no longer compete effectively with St Rollox.
Later in the century, the nose of St. Rollox chief chemist, nicknamed Sniffer
Crystal, had been eroded, by his constant olfactory occupation of gauging
chemicals.10 If St. Rollox was comparable with contemporary English chemical
works, then indoor workers, in the vitriol rooms, the soda sheds, or at the chlo-
rination chambers, would after a number of years be moved to work outside in
the yards, so deleterious were the effects of working the chemical processes.11
Chemical workers were of course acutely aware of such specific occupational
consequences, and of occupational life expectancy.12
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that St. Rollox general environmental
and particular physiological impacts were pervasive, oppressive and unhealthy.
The chimneys poured smoke, soot and chemical fumes into the sky, a subject
of sarcastic pictorial comment. In terms of an Aristotelian material cosmos, St.
Rollox coverage was absolute. Earth and water absorbed its chemical waste.
The air was increasingly contaminated by its carbon and gaseous exhalation,
the fire of the furnaces flamed incessantly, and the ethereal sky was occluded
by the smoke, rising to join Glasgows often low cloud ceiling, whose frequent
rain returned fractions of the furnace carbon and acidic fumes to earth.
None of this is of course particularly surprising. We are narratologically
accustomed to accounts of economically progressive, massive and continu-
ous output expansion, technological innovation, factory labor concentration
and exploitation, with the downside consequences of urban pollution, dis-
ease and crowded, squalid housing, and we are comparably accustomed to an
accompanying, progressive science and technology narrative, old-fashioned
9 Text available at the Royston Road Project, <http://www.roystonroadproject.org.>, sec-

tion Garngad & Royston; For music, listen to Ron Angel or Big Big Sea, The Chemical
Workers Song, both available on YouTube. This is a twentieth century song, also known
as The Process Workers Song, sometimes The ICI Song, and features life expectancy,
caustic burn, gypsum and cyanide.
10 Simon Blow, Broken Blood: The rise and fall of the Tennant family (London: Faber and
Faber, 1987), 59.
11 W.A. Campbell, The Alkali Industry, Colin A. Russell ed., Chemistry, Society and Environ-
ment (Cambridge: The Royal Society of Chemistry, 2000), 75-106, on 82.
12 Anon., Glasgow Sketches, (1889), a compilation of nineteenth century excerpts from
local newspapers, Mitchell Library (Glasgow Room), ref. G330.193.01444 MIL.

316 Christie
perhaps, but still exerting influence, and which may be briefly sketched as fol-
lows. In Sweden, the chemist Scheele observed chlorines bleaching properties,
with experimentation on plant materials. In France, Claude-Louis Berthollet
undertook further experimentation, producing the innovative technique of
chlorine-based liquor bleaching, which he publicized to French bleachers.
James Watt learned of his new process, which, although difficult and dangerous
to manage, possessed potential advantages over existing bleaching techniques,
particularly the reducing of cloth bleaching to direct chlorine treatment, elim-
inating the lengthy techniques of alternative alkalization and acidification
followed by time-and-space consuming exposure to sunlight. It could all be
moved indoors, and done with the newly discovered, liquefied chlorine gas,
with cost reduction and labor-process reconfiguration possessed of develop-
mental potential. Berthollet was close to the heart of the chemical revolution
in France, and its new chemistry of gases. This scientific context had thus
produced dramatically innovative technique, publicized through Berthollets
benevolent, philosophical commitment to human betterment, and James
Watt informed colleagues and compatriots of it when he returned to Britain.
Amongst them were the progenitors of St. Rollox. Tennant and Macintosh
adopted the liquor technique with some modification, and commenced the
new works with it. Within a few years, they effected a radical improvement in
the new chemical technology with a process which produced a powder, and
this produced significant further cost savings, particularly in relation to pack-
aging, transport and distribution, the liquor being much heavier, bulkier, and
prone to lose its efficacy, than the powder. The technical revolution originating
in and accompanying the chemical revolution was now essentially complete,
and the result in Scotland was St. Rollox and its economically expansive and
culturally iconic, if ambivalent history, forged by the practical chemical acuity
and exceptional entrepreneurial abilities of the Tennant and Co. partnership.
Such a linear account, neatly enough, conjoins a history of pure science
terminology of experimentation and discovery and applied science-driven
technological innovation, with the equally significant terminology of innova-
tive industrial entrepreneurship a tale of two revolutions, discontinuously
instituting modern chemistry and modern urban industry, whose integration
proved to be an unstoppably powerful and transformative historical force,
whatever evaluative attitudes historians may hold towards it. Without deny-
ing the factual basis for the progressivist narratives of chemistry and industry,
it is nonetheless possible to use further historical detail in ways which refuse
simple endorsement of them, and introduce further resources for conceptual-
izing and narrating the origins and development of key aspects of chemical
manufacture and industry, practical chemical technique, chemical science

and education, chemical entrepreneurship, and Glasgow itself, within the

period 1760-1860.
Behemoth Deconstructed
We have long known of the very considerable difficulties, of chemical tech-

nique, experimental and practical development, of competition and cost and
hazard to health, which attended attempts to introduce Berthollets oxymuri-
atic liquor into commercial production in the late 1780s and 1790s. The extensive
and detailed research of Musson and Robinson revealed a lengthy series of
efforts, in Lancashire, Nottinghamshire and the west of Scotland, to introduce
chlorine bleaching on a commercially viable scale.13 From Berthollets original
work until the patent application for the Tennants powder took fourteen years.
Those years were filled with further practical chemistry experimentation,
numerous trials involving a variety of different technical apparatus (contain-
ment vessels for acid and gas, complicated flask arrangements for managing
the gas, a measurement device for gauging bleaching strengths), direct gas-to-
cloth treatment, and a number of different chemical additives to liquors to
manage both the degree of caustic strength and the respiratory and ocular haz-
ards of working with chlorine.
Processes which worked with linen did not necessarily work with cotton.
Printed calicos offered further problems. Alkaline addition diluted bleaching
efficacy, and transport of bulky, heavy liquor was not propitious. Some became
convinced that even with workable and reliable liquor, the whole process
would be just too costly for commercial viability. The competitive environ-
ment induced levels of secrecy, and of betrayal, among the groups trialling the
varieties of new processes. The new processes themselves, if successful, would,
it was feared, face further competition from combinations of old-method
bleachers, who would co-operate to undercut new-method prices, a particular
vulnerability given the anxious cost estimates of new-method trialists. Several
competing groups of manufacturing chemists devoted sizeable investment of
time and money, convinced of the chlorine route to a radically reformed com-
mercial bleaching. At least three of these groups, each containing experienced
bleachers and reputable practical chemists, nonetheless ended in failure, and
were obliged to give up on this particular chemical quest. Then when some
reliably usable liquors were formulated, and the Tennants powder emerged as
13 Musson and Robinson, Science and Technology, pp.251-337 (see note 1).

318 Christie
a further reliable option, this by no means signaled the effacement of the older
techniques.
The process of innovation was not simply difficult and bumpy; this really
does not capture the reality of the case. It was long-drawn-out, populated with
serious financial hazard and a substantial business failure rate; at any given
moment within the period, it appeared as entirely contingent upon a large
number of chemical, technical and business variables; and as an historical pro-
cess it continued to remain incomplete, as the persistence of older methods in
tandem with new tended to demonstrate. Any account of the chlorine innova-
tion which focuses simply on Berthollets discovery at one end and successful
powder manufacture at the other is thus prone to ignore the actual historical
process of what gets called, and singularized, as innovation. The process was
multiple in its attempted novelties, and most of them failed over the medium
term.
Further investigation, details of which now follow, tends to indicate the mis-
leading insufficiency of solely revolutionary narratives, insofar as their
underlying concept of change is one confined to radical innovation inducing
discontinuous development. It also indicates the inadequacy of accounts of
chemical Glasgows patterns of development focused solely on the pre-emi-
nent case of St. Rollox, and questions the limiting nature of entrepreneurial
modelling derived from the paradigm industries of the period, cotton, steam,
coal, mechanics and the like.
Chemical Glasgow
The analysis which follows is geographical in the first instance, based as it is on

an informative Glasgow map of 1828.14 Its particular virtue is clear identifica-
tion of Glasgows sites of manufacture with precise location, and calculable
area occupied by works sites. It is firstly possible to form an accurate impres-
sion of the range and number of manufacturing concerns. Cotton Works
(twenty-two) and Foundries (eighteen) predominate numerically, and there
are only two strictly denominated Chemical Works. To form a more accurate
impression of chemical manufacture, we should however add to these the
other producers of chemicals, the four Soda Works, two Gas Works, and the
14 David Smith, Plan of the City of Glasgow and its Environs (Glasgow: Wardlaw & Co., 1828);
For zoom facility, legibility and close inspection navigation, see University of Glasgow
Librarys site: <http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/library/collections/virtualdisplays/mapsof
glasgowhistoricaltodigital/davidsmith1828planofthecityofglasgowanditsenvirons/>

Acid and Vinegar Works; and also the eight Dye Works, the two Crystal (leaded
glass) Works and the Coal Tar Works, making a total of twenty-one manufac-
tures where chemical products, crucial chemical processes, manipulation and
practical chemical expertise were fundamentally involved.15
This total still excludes the highly chemical potteries, the refineries, brewer-
ies and distilleries, but for chemical completism with reference to Glasgow,
note two further sites, those of the University of Glasgow and the Andersonian
Institution, where chemical science was taught. In this overall picture of
chemical Glasgow, the sheer size of St. Rollox, (the dark section at the top of
the north-west quadrant of map section, Fig. 13.1) still predominates as notably
the largest manufacturing site in the city; but we should note too that the larg-
est sites tend to be chemical, exemplified in addition to St. Rollox by the main
gasworks (south-west quadrant), and the Cudbear Works (south-east quad-
rant). The latter two will also prove to be of particular significance in the
developmental pathways we will shortly follow. For the time being, the consid-
erable presence of both cotton and iron manufactures, each of them probably
outnumbering chemical manufactures in employment terms, may be noted,
along with the extensive areas occupied by chemical production.
The textile sector and the chemical cannot of course be functionally sepa-
rated in local or national terms, in that the expansion of bleaching and dyeing
materials which is registered on David Smiths map is directly ascribable to
coeval expansion of cotton textile production, witnessed by the number of
Glasgow cotton works. The contrast between Glasgow textiles and chemi-
cals at this time is between the large number of smaller units of production
in cotton, and the smaller number of large units of production in chemicals.
The proliferation of four soda works in addition to St. Rollox is explicable in
terms of the recent abolition of salt importation duty, reminding us of the
crucial role played by government policy in directing the course of industrial
development.
To this picture of the comparative placement of chemical manufacture
within Glasgows industrial setting we can add further relevant detail from aca-
demic, educational chemistry. Andersons Institute numbered in its trustees
and professors men with chemical interests. Macintosh was a trustee, as was
his business associate John Wilson, whilst Willian Couper, another friend and
business associate, became a teacher of chemistry there.16 The University of
15 Figures compiled from Smith, Plan of Glasgow (see note 14).

16 Roger Emerson and Paul Wood, Science and Enlightenment in Glasgow, 1690-1802,
Charles Withers and Paul Wood, eds., Science and Medicine in the Scottish Enlightenment
(East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2002), 79-143, on 97-99.

320

Figure 13.1 Section of David Smith, Plan of the City of Glasgow and its Environs, 1828. Showing (1) St. Rollox Chemical Works, Charles Tennant
Christie
& Co. (2) Glasgow Gas Works (3) Cudbear Dye Works, George and Charles Macintosh. Used with the kind permission of
University of Glasgow Library.
Glasgow by this time possessed a distinguished genealogy of teachers of chem-

istry, including William Cullen, who worked on both salt and bleaching process
manufacture in the 1750s, Joseph Black who worked on bleaching agents and
pursued artificial soda with James Watt, and William Irvine, with his particu-
larly relevant and meticulously quantified analysis of the properties of sulfur
in heating and cooling.17 By the time of this survey of the late 1820s, the
Universitys professor of chemistry was Thomas Thomson, an early supporter
of Daltonian atomism, with interests also in pursuing the gains made by
German analytical chemistry, and making these gains tell with regard to chem-
ical teaching and research.18 The work of these academic chemists had a
variety of bearings upon the practical chemistry of manufacturers, in particu-
lar the early attention (1750s-1770s) to alkalization in bleaching and the
potential of lime, and Thomsons enthusiasm for Hermann Klaproths ruthless
analytics, which left no residue unexamined.
Some of William Irvines pupils and associates formed a small Chemical
Society whilst in Glasgow, in 1785-7. Whatever the chemical preoccupations of
the Glasgow students, the society helped cement relations between two young
men who would continue their association momentously, as original, founding
partners of Tennant and Co., namely Charles Macintosh and the above-men-
tioned William Couper.19 This noteworthy group also contained two more
sometime professors of chemistry, Adair Crawford of the Woolwich Military
Academy, and John McLean, professor at the College of New Jersey; also
Alexander Tilloch, publisher of The Philosophical Magazine, John Finlay, a
close chemical correspondent of Macintosh, and John Wilson of Hurlet, where
he and Macintosh would initiate Scotlands first alum works. Macintosh
contributed papers on dyeing, crystallization and alcohol, this last exhibiting
familiarity with Lavoisian chemistry.20
The Chemical Society thus offered opportunity for young chemists to pur-
sue their particular, practical chemical interests, but at least as important for
the future of manufacturing chemistry were the emergent associative bonds
which it fostered. From this associational point of view, two further institu-
tional venues have relevance. The Glasgow Chamber of Commerce, the first of
17 William Irvine, Essays, Chiefly on Chemical Subjects (London: J. Mawman, 1805), 475-90.
18 For Thomson, see J.B. Morrell, Thomas Thomson: Professor of chemistry and university
reformer, British Journal for the History of Science 4 (1969): 245-286; and idem. The Chem-
ist Breeders: The research schools of Liebig and Thomas Thomson, Ambix 9 (1972): 1-46.
19 Emerson and Wood, Science and Enlightenment, pp.128-129 (see note 16) fn.63 has
detail on this society; An earlier useful source is George Macintosh, Biographical Memoir
of the Late Charles Macintosh (Glasgow: Blackie & Co., 1847), 6-8.
20 Ibid., pp. 6-8.

322 Christie
its kind in Britain, was started in 1783, immediately in the wake of the peace
ending the American War of Independence. The 1780s marked something of a
shift of commercial focus, away from colonial trade monopolization of tobacco
and toward domestic manufacture. This shift is noticeable in the Chamber of
Commerces early focus upon improving the quality of manufactures, and
influencing government on tax and tariff. Charles Macintosh became a mem-
ber, and his father, George, was an early president of the institution. Thus,
when Macintosh joined the founding partnership of St. Rollox, it meant that
Tennant, who tends to be regarded as senior partner (he took over financial
control early on), was forging a relationship with the pre-eminent chemical
manufacturers of Glasgow, the Macintosh family. One might begin to think
therefore, that Tennant joined the Macintoshes, rather than the reverse; in the
Memoir of his father, George jnr. mentions that Macintosh and Tennant were,
for several years previous, business partners by the time of both St. Rollox
bleaching patents (that is, previous to 1797).21 The thought is reinforced by con-
sideration of the fact that two of Charles Macintoshs business associates in the
Hurlet alum works, John Wilson and James Knox, were also partners in Tennant
and Co. The Hurlet alum works was virtually contemporary in origin with St.
Rollox, and in associational business terms, the firms had overlapping partner-
ships. This circumstance, and its timing, serves to emphasize the way in which,
by the second half of the 1790s, this forceful grouping of chemically-inflected
manufacturers had attained the chemical and commercial confidence to
undertake not a single but a double initiative with reference to the foundation
of major new enterprises.
In the 1780s and 1790s then, Glasgow clearly exhibited a set of educational
and collective commercial institutions, voluntarist in nature other than the
University. From our viewpoint, these institutions did not simply teach and
promote chemical science and its manufacturing uses and potentials. They
also generated and sustained a chemico-commercial culture, visible nodes of
association for commercially-oriented chemists whose ties of friendship,
family and manufacturing business would provide social cohesion to the
development of Glasgows chemical manufactures in the coming decades.
Chemical Entrepreneurship. The Staple Highway: Charles Tennant
The narrative of St. Rollox origin, foundation, spectacular growth and com-
mercial success, whilst acknowledging the significance of Charles Macintosh,
21 Macintosh, Biographical Memoir, p.37 (see note 19).

tends to be understandably dominated, in terms of human agency, by the fig-

ure of Charles Tennant, a compelling story of transformation of a young rural
silk weaver into the industrial Colossus of St. Rollox, an epic socio-economic
trajectory of the industrial revolution. Young Tennant was a silk weaver, work-
ing in this highly-skilled occupation in Ayrshire. Aware perhaps of the
increasing demand for textile bleaching, from long-established linen and
recently growing cotton textile production, he switched occupation to bleach-
ing, and ran a rural bleachfield in Darnley, Ayrshire, from 1788. There, hearing
of Berthollets chlorine technique, most likely via James Watt or Watts father-
in-law the bleacher John McGrigor, both of whom were working on im-
provements to the Berthollet technique, Tennant commenced, after some
experimentation, using the Berthollet potash-chlorine liquor with success,
eventually modifying it by substituting lime for the potash. His neighbour at
Darnley was William Wilson, whose daughter Tennant would later marry in
1795. Wilson, a merchant and factor to the Earl of Glasgow, also had a son,
name of John, whom we have already met, a fellow member of the University
Chemical Society with Charles Macintosh, and a business associate of
Macintosh in the nearby Hurlet Alum Works, sited on land owned by the Earl.
Three years later, shortly after the foundation of Tennant and Co., the firm took
out a patent for the chlorine liquor (eventually lost in an informative court
case of 1802), but further experimentation, using slaked lime and chlorine gas,
produced the solid bleaching powder which replaced the liquor, and provided
the chemical basis of St. Rollox early ascent, and some financial basis for its
expansion. The local communicative networks of family, friends, Chemical
Society and business association were clearly instrumental in forming the gen-
esis of St. Rollox and its new bleaching chemistry.
Thus far we have Tennant as the alert, opportunistic, young entrepreneur,
moving occupation riskily from a skilled to a less skilled occupation with more
expansive potential, pursuing new processes, recognizing talented exper-
tise and incorporating it by business association into ambitious commercial
novelty. This does not, however, suffice as a characterization of the way he
developed St. Rollox, which, after the new bleaching powder, may be con-
sidered as chemically conservative. That is, it concentrated on long existent
methods, not chemical innovation, for producing basic staples, such as soap
and sulfuric acid, rather than new methods for new products. When Leblanc
process soda was adopted in the 1820s, it was certainly new in Glaswegian
and Scottish terms, but it was by no means the first artificial soda, and all the
pre-installation start-up costs, experimental research, up-scaling, equipment
design, were absent, for by then it was a known and tried process of chemi-
cal production, with a waiting market, relatively riskless. Similarly, the lead

324 Christie
chamber process for sulfuric acid had been practiced in Scotland since 1749, at
John Roebucks Prestonpans manufacture. Tennants concentration was not on
radically innovative technique, other than the bleaching powder, but on using
St. Rollox for radically increasing the quantities of common, basic chemical
materials and products. The language of growth, expansion and innova-
tion tends to obscure this conservative, and fundamental, feature of St. Rollox
chemical production.
Other notable features of Tennants entrepreneurial practice include the
distributed network of sales agents, and his concentration on packaging, trans-
port and product distribution. One reason the Glasgow-Garnkirk railway was
an early arrival in Scottish rail development terms was Tennants early realiza-
tion of railways advantages. He befriended George Stephenson, and worked to
ensure the Caledonian Railway spur to Garnkirk. The mercantile fleet also
displayed his attention to transport, now in national and international import-
export terms. In all these forms of development, Tennants entrepreneurial
style exhibited the impulse to own and control as many facets of the com-
merce as possible. In addition to production of relatively riskless chemical
staples, the on-site packaging, immediate rail and water access, and the sea-
going fleet bespoke a quest for, and ability to achieve, not simply maximal
control and the co-ordination advantages derived therefrom, but as much
independence as possible, relative freedom from reliance upon other packag-
ers, distributors, and raw material suppliers.
Externally to the company, Tennant also paid effective attention to politics,
acting for the advance of St. Rollox with the Leblanc process by pushing for
abolition of salt importation duty, and opposing one chemical vested interest,
which wished to prevent the advent of artificial soda. This interest was the
Kelpers, numerous on the Scottish islands and west coast, the gatherers and
burners of seaweed, or at least the proprietors and managers of estates where
such work occurred. They produced much of the potash used in Britain, a stra-
tegically significant group in terms of chemical manufacture. This was the
underlying conflict. It was about whether or not artificial soda, which needed
mineral salt, would chemically supplant the established, vegetable-derived
potash, rather than simply about free trade and Treasury receipts on salt, and
Tennant and St. Rollox emerged a winner in the conflict.22
22 Obituary of Charles Tennant, Institution of Civil Engineers Letter Books, 9 vols. 1839-49,
vol. 1, Shelf Mark 624/629 (410)31G.

Secret Works and Serial Invention: Charles Macintosh
If Tennants entrepreneurship after bleaching powder can be described

as chemically conservative, staple-focused quantitative expansion, com-
plemented by strategic political action where necessary, and by in-house
development and control of as many commercial factors as possible, then
consideration of Charles Macintoshs complex and varied career, marked by
serial manufacturing initiatives, multiple business associations and chemical
invention, offers a striking contrast in entrepreneurial character. The relevant
background pre-dates his birth in 1766, for the Macintosh family were already
chemical manufacturers. His father George, with the financial aid provided
by the Glasgow tobacco trader John Glassford, took over an established and
patented, though then failing, dye making business in the 1770s, starting manu-
facture at Dunchatton in east Glasgow (see Fig. 13.1 for location of cudbear
dye works). Macintosh Snr., who is a great hunter after secrets, employed the
previous owners of the process as managers.23 The dye, named cudbear, was
lichen-derived, and chemically capable of manipulation of color gradations
through pink and red to blue and purple, and the Macintosh manufacture
proved successful and long-lived. At its inception and for decades after it pos-
sessed two very striking features. It was surrounded by high walls, to hide
the production processes from the curious eyes of intelligencers or spies. In
this its protective design followed that of Roebucks lead vat acid process at
Prestonpans. Even more striking was the work force, composed of Highlanders
who were largely monoglot Gaelic speakers. The Macintosh family came from
the northern county of Ross-shire, and they knew that Scots Highlanders were
already familiar with the process, at least in undeveloped terms, because they
used lichen to make their own textile dyes. The work force was essentially
internally imported, semi-skilled labor, and the workers numerous. They were
moreover sworn to secrecy, attended a nightly roll call, and were housed on-
site, inside the walls. Many rarely left the compound, nor learned any English.24
George Macintosh had erected a quadruple security barrier, of oath, roll call,
wall and language, to protect the details and practice of the cudbear process,
and the security would seem to have worked insofar as no other cudbear
23 McGrigor to Watt, April, 1788, cited in Musson and Robinson, Science and Technology,
p.293 (see note 1).
24 George Stewart, Curiosities of Glasgow Citizenship; As exhibited chiefly in the business
career of its old commercial aristocracy (Glasgow: Maclehose, 1881), 70.

326 Christie
manufacture appeared in Glasgow.25 Dunchatton was thus a remarkable socio-

historical enclave, a site of production whose fuller comprehension requires
appreciation of internal migration from the Gaidhealtachd.26 Industrial urban-
ization of such populations, and the persistence of local Gaelic cultures in such
circumstances are also important.27 This place, of chemical enclosure and jeal-
ously guarded secrecy, was where Charles lived from childhood, the Macintosh
house being on site and also functioning as the company office.
Charles at a still youthful age, as well as attending the chemistry class at
Glasgow University (and Joseph Blacks in Edinburgh, also later Thomsons in
Glasgow), participated in the family business, traveling on at least two occa-
sions, to Germany, Holland and France, on sales business for the company, and
for the Prestonpans acid works, now taken over by John Glassford. He prob-
ably also pursued chemical intelligence, experimenting on French plants for
dye potential, and noting Hollands sugar of lead manufacture and its suc-
cessful export business to Britain.28 He started his own entrepreneurial career
before he was twenty, a sal ammoniac plant comparable to James Huttons
in Edinburgh. This commenced an entrepreneurial career of a large number
of chemical manufacture initiatives, by no means all successful, but some of
which brought him further prosperity, scientific reputation (F.R.S 1823), and
eponymous commercial renown (the Mackintosh [sic], a waterproof coat).
He commenced sugar of lead manufacture in 1786, apparently lowering costs
enough to export to Rotterdam, successfully undercutting prices of the Dutch
sugar of lead manufacture which had so impressed him on his continental
tour. He and his father learned of efforts in trials of the new chemical bleach-
ing, and in 1788 Charles was making experiments at home in order to find out
the secret, then traveling to Manchester to learn more.29 He had also launched
mineral acetate production, substituting lime for alumina, a British novelty,
and of use particularly in calico printing. He would start the Hurlet Alum
works with John Wilson, and initiated a further alum site north east of Glasgow
25 Though see ibid., p.71, where he records that one Highlander absconded to London, pro-
viding technical information to a company which set up short-lived cudbear production.
26 The Gaelic speaking areas of Scotland.
27 For informative analysis of such processes, see Charles Withers, Urban Highlanders: High-
land-lowland migration and urban Gaelic culture, 1700-1900 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press,
1998).
28 This and following detail on Macintoshs chemical career are taken from Macintosh, Bio-
graphical Memoir, particularly the Introduction, pp. xii-xix, and the additionally nar-
rated accounts of Macintoshs activities throughout the main text (see note 19).
29 Musson and Robinson, Science and Technology, pp.293-4 (see note 1).

in the Campsie hills. The production of the chlorine bleaching powder for the
new Tennant Co. in 1798, again highly novel in its gas-to-solid (chlorine-to-
slaked lime) reaction, occasionally ascribed to Tennant, was the foundational
experimental work of Macintosh.
The torrent of manufacturing processes did not cease with the establish-
ment of St. Rollox, where he remained as a partner until 1814. For the East India
Co. he produced a fused saltpeter process with considerable weight and space
saving for stowage capacity for sea transport from India, the process demon-
strated to the Directors satisfaction, but not adopted. On the dyeing front, in
addition to continuing the Cudbear Works, and the Turkey Red dyeworks
started by his father in 1787 with the aid of Papillons expertise in the secret,
he established a Prussian Blue process, and prussiate of potash for calico print-
ing.30 Prospecting at the Glasgow Gas Works he found naphtha (a coal tar
derivative), a by-product of the coal-gas production. Either detecting its India
rubber-dissolving property himself, or more likely knowing of James Symes
discovery of it in Edinburgh in 1818, he formulated the production of water-
proofed cotton by using sheets of rubberized naphtha sandwiched between
layers of cotton, an eventually successful manufacture which he relocated to
Manchester. His last significant cooperative venture was with James Nielson,
an eventually successful patenting, in 1828, for Nielsons hot- blast furnace
metal-smelting process. His initial acquaintance with Nielson was probably a
result of his prospecting of the coal tar by-products at the Glasgow Gas Works,
where Nielson was a foreman. Prior to that, he had produced a new prepara-
tion of iodine, further innovations in textile treatment for calico printing,
started a yeast factory in London (eventually failing), and patented an iron-
steel conversion process with carburetted hydrogen.
Overall, his activity differed substantially from that of Charles Tennant. Less
single-minded and more diversified than Tennant, his operations nonetheless
possessed an identifiable internal coherence, for instance in the number of
projects focused upon textile treatment and dyeing. The alum works and ace-
tate process were relevant from this viewpoint, the potential application
among others being their specific properties as mordants. He also used Glasgow
Gas Works ammonia by-product in the Cudbear processes. We tend perhaps to
over-individuate in our focus on sites, and this can misdescribe their function-
ality. Instead of individualized accounts of Macintoshs apparently diverse
manufactures, an account which recognizes a chain of enterprises, succes-
30 Macintosh, Biographical Memoir, p.22 (see note 19); George Macintosh Snr., writing to
Charles, claimed to have thoroughly improved upon what they had from Papillon, improv-
ing color and shortening dyeing time.

328 Christie
sively connecting alum, ammonia and acetate with cudbear, Turkey Red and
thence outward to calico printing, is more realistic for appreciating the overall
coherence of these aspects of Macintoshs entrepreneurship.
Further characteristics reinforce the contrast with Tennant. Macintosh was
far more mobile, a well-traveled and well-educated practical chemist, not
solely Glasgow-sited, and willing to divest himself of existing enterprises (the
Turkey Red Works and St. Rollox) to free his capacity for further initiative in
chemical production. His multiple projects tended to remain of medium size,
unlike the singular gigantism of St. Rollox, and a thread of persistent chemical
novelty, chlorine powder, mineral acetates, dyes and mordants for calico print-
ing, rubberized cotton, ran through them. Stated thus, the Macintosh successive
chemical coverage of the key chemical processes prior to actual textile treat-
ment by bleach and dye becomes readily apparent.
Just as indicative of his entrepreneurial character was his already indicated
habit of chemical prospecting and scavenging. His first effort, sal ammoniac
manufacture, relied, like Huttons, on the free waste product of soot. The alum
works were firstly based on cast off schist from local coal mines. The naphtha
was an unused gas production by-product, like the ammonia. The point of
scavenging in this sense is not just the finding of new materials. The materials
were available, unintentionally as it were, and in the first instance, as the result
of the labor of others. First-phase production thus came if not for free, at least
for reduced cost. Nowadays we might understandably call him a chemical recy-
cler, or re-purposer, but perhaps that does not quite capture the prospecting
and scavenging habit quite spectacularly displayed by Macintosh. Rather, he
gave chemical purpose and commercial value to the purposeless and valueless
cast-offs of others labor.31 Mobile, prospective, scavenging, qualitatively diver
sifying rather than quantitatively accreting, this increasingly expert and
chemically innovative entrepreneurial practice thus provides a thorough and
instructive contrast with Tennants and St. Rollox.
These chemical entrepreneurs were indubitably successful in chemico-
economic terms, but the routes to success, the staple chemical highway of
St. Rollox, the longer, twisting trail of multiple chemical and manufacturing
initiatives followed by Macintosh, show that in this period, no singular entre-
preneurial mode was definitive of chemical manufacturing success. Nor are
these entrepreneurs straightforwardly assimilated by current modelling of
industrial revolution owner-industrialists and of entrepreneurship, although a
degree of comparative light is thrown upon them by recent work.32 They may,
31 See Simon Werretts and Lissa Roberts and Joppe van Driels essays in this volume.
32 Crouzet, The First Industrialists, and Mokyr, Entrepreneurship, (see note 3).

for instance, be described as broadly middling rank in origin (Tennant specifi-

cally a skilled, independent artisan), and both had extensive prior experience in
the manufactures they industrialized. However, unlike some other significant
industrial-scale works owners, Tennant did not undertake sector diversifica-
tion that we know of into forms of finance, nor into non-chemicals within
the manufacturing sector, nor enterprise outside manufacturing other than
his in-house mercantile shipping.33 Judgment of Macintoshs entrepreneurial
characteristics should not allow his diverse set of medium scale operations
to obscure the sense of coherent functional interaction of the textile-directed
chain of the various operations, nor ignore his prospecting and scavenging
proclivities, modes of entrepreneurship not easily recognizable in available
models. As partner-owner of one large-scale enterprise, and with reference
particularly to his range of inventive abilities, technical expertise and scientific
cultivation, he is comparable especially with fellow-Scot James Watt, perhaps
also with James Keir in the Midlands, and Thomas Henry in Manchester. The
work of Peter Jones has rendered this a type more categorically recognisable
than hitherto, the distinctive Savant-Fabricant figures of early industrializa-
tion, men who successfully combined scientific knowledge, technical expertise
and manufacturing experience.34
Joel Mokyrs essay on entrepreneurs in the industrial revolution continues
his strategic interpretive stress upon institutional and cultural factors.35 He
picks out the behavioral normativity of gentlemanly politeness and trust, the
latter particularly significant with respect to contract and credit; trade associa-
tions and informational networks; and the strategic importance of choice of
partners in new industrial ventures. This latter point is dramatically endorsed
by the St. Rollox partnership of Tennant and Macintosh. With respect to local
Glasgow commercial culture, we might add two sorts of relevant institution
not covered by Mokyr, the new formal and quickly chartered collective institu-
tion, the Chamber of Commerce, with its focus on manufacture; and, of genetic
significance, the University, not simply for its chemical teaching, nor yet for
any commitment to techno-scientific public communication, but for the vol-
untarist association of the Chemical Society, and the combination of chemical
enthusiasms, personal and commercial associations at whose origins it lay.
Overall then, we may at least start to think of Glaswegian chemical entrepre-
neurship as partially intelligible within some recent analytical perspectives of
33 For such diversification see Crouzet, First Industrialists, pp.16-17 (see note 3).
34 Peter Jones, Industrial Enlightenment: Science, technology and culture, in Birmingham and
the West Midlands, 1760-1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 116-29.
35 Mokyr, Entrepreneurship, (see note 3).

330 Christie
economic history, but at the same time, as having additional and different fea-
tures to extend and qualify such historical understandings.
Conclusion
By way of conclusion, it may be worth reflecting on the broader issue of the

nature of the historical developments involved, as premised in discontinuous
conceptions of chemical and industrial revolutionary change, and as gesturally
represented above (in the section Chemical Behemoth). Certainly the
expanding St. Rollox site represented a visibly dramatic step-change, both for
chemical manufacture generally, and for bleaching powder, then acid and soda
production specifically. Also certainly, the chemical knowledge of Macintosh
was up-to-date, informed by the new chemistry of Lavoisier and his French
colleagues, and the new chemical technique of St. Rollox is directly relatable to
a key component of revolutionary chemistry, namely the multiplication of gas
discovery, the properties and compositional implications thence investigated,
and the provocation all this provided for a systematic reformulation of the
science, together with its practical methods of analytical and synthetic proce-
dure. Macintoshs chemical circle was clearly aware of this. One friend wrote,
in 1786, four years before the English translation of Lavoisiers Trait
lmentaire, From the perusal of Fourcroys chemistry, I have become a per-
fect convert to the aerial system, although I think most of the disputes on this
subject, and the doctrine of phlogiston, are mere playing on words.36 This evi-
denced the chemical attitudes of the young practical chemists, keenly
interested in the very latest chemistry, their focus particularly on the systemic
role of gas components, the aerial system, but not overly distracted by intrac-
table theoretical dispute. To this not inconsiderable extent, the changes in
question, chemical, technical and economically productive, do not require vio-
lent shoe-horning into a narrative stressing intensive, discontinuous change.
There are however other detailed features of change which further compli-
cate any straightforwardly discontinuous emphasis. Remaining for the moment
with the chemical dimension of manufacture, the key role of chlorine needs a
fundamentally qualifying addition. The first Tennant & Co. patent, for bleach-
ing liquor was lost in 1802, because it also specified lime in suspension, which
Tennant had used to replace Berthollets potash additive, and lime was already
in comparable bleaching use, a point sufficient in the legal specifications of
36 John Finlay to Charles Macintosh, February 1786, in Macintosh, Biographical Memoir, p.19
(see note 19).

the time to invalidate the patent. The second St. Rollox patent was for the dry
bleaching powder process, chlorine-based but crucially dependent on the
reaction with slaked lime to produce not liquor but powder, the great commer-
cial advantage of St. Rollox. Whence and why the lime?
Since 1750, bleaching had chemically modernized with sulfuric acid, pro-
duced by Roebucks works, and considerably shortening bleaching time. In the
1760s Edinburghs academic chemists Joseph Black and Francis Home had
argued chemically for the introduction of legally banned lime, convinced of its
relevant property, under appropriately focused quantitative management.37
Tennant and Macintosh were also lime enthusiasts in this genealogy of Scottish
bleaching technique, Macintosh in particular likely to have known of the work
of Black and Home. From this viewpoint, first Tennant, then Macintosh, might
be considered not as adding lime to chlorine, but adding French chlorine
to chemically established Scottish lime. If that may be thought of as tenden-
tiously overstating the case, then consider also Macintoshs statement to a
correspondent: Lime has long been a favourite nostrum of mine, having first
used it many years ago.38 He used it with reference to sal ammoniac, alum and
elsewhere, and had thorough familiarity with its properties in its mild, caustic,
liquid and slaked states. It was his familiar chemical standby, a first port of
reactive chemical call. It was thus utterly unsurprizing that he should investi-
gate its potentials in chlorine combinations. Lime, so to speak, does the
business, in its itinerary through sal ammoniac, acetate, alum and chlorine
processes of production. In this sense, Macintosh was not simply a modern
chemist, but an educated and knowledgeable inheritor of the previous genera-
tion of pre-revolutionary chemists practical and theoretical knowledge.
Chemically, therefore, we require an equal stress upon pre-revolutionary
chemistry to understand the genealogy of St. Rollox bleaching. That in turn
induces an authentically continuous dimension to the chemical history of St.
Rollox.
Distinctive features of the Cudbear Works also bear more extended exami-
nation for their presence elsewhere. Its early modern, pre-industrial retentive
secrecy, reminiscent of Prestonpans, was not Macintoshs only secretive pro-
cess. The Campsie alum works was also known as the secret works, as, in
imitation of cudbear manufacture in Glasgow, Macintosh attempted to seques-
ter details of his alum process. The Turkey Red Works and secret were also
37 Joseph Black, An Explanation of the Effect of Lime upon Alkaline Salts, Francis Home,
Experiments on Bleaching (Dublin: T. Ewing, 1771), 265-282.
38 Macintosh to his Tennant business partner, James Knox, Glasgow, 20th January, 1800, in
Macintosh, Biographical Memoir, p.25 (see note 19).

332 Christie
sequestered. This surviving ethos of pre-industrial manufacture can be con-

trasted with Tennants far more communicative attitude, for example his
willingness to instruct Irish bleachers. Macintosh worked for a time with
Lancashire bleachers, but retained an attitude of guarded secrecy toward
aspects of development of the Berthollet process, as indeed did James Watt,
both men unwilling to forego any competitive edge which withheld chemical
knowledge might provide.39
The partners practices, both convergent and divergent at particular mo-
ments, illustrate the ways in which pre-industrial behavioral reflexes could
and did persist, contemporary with the supposed liberal openness of a knowl-
edge-based industrial economy, or more precisely, the way in which a publicly
communicative ethos of accessible exchange of scientific and technical knowl-
edge had a differential uptake with respect to manufacturing practice, even as
between close entrepreneurial partners.40 These kinds of concluding examples,
emphasizing the persistence of various kinds of pre-revolutionary commercial
forms and behaviors, and of chemical knowledge and practice, coeval none-
theless with consciousness of fundamental change in chemical science and
with comparably fundamental economic development, reinforce the need for
a more nuanced historiographical semantics, capable of registering and relat-
ing all relevant forms of change during the industrial and chemical revolutions.
39 For the introduction of Berthollets process in Britain and the role of James Watt, see Mus-
son and Robinson, Science and Technology, pp.251-337 (see note 1).
40 The thesis of the growth of an openly communicative techno-scientific culture in this
period is argued in Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An economic history of Britain,
1700-1850 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009).

Relations between Industry and Academe in Scotland 333
Chapter 14
Relations between Industry and Academe in

Scotland, and the Case of Dyeing: 1760 to 1840
Robert G.W. Anderson
What was the role of academic chemists in relation to those who were directly
involved in developing Scotlands burgeoning chemical industry between 1760
and 1840? Traditionally, most historians have suggested that there was little
involvement between academics and manufacturers across Europe. More
recently, some historians suggest that it is difficult to disentangle their rela-
tions; it is best, they argue, to speak of hybrid identities. Neither extreme is
sustainable when Scottish evidence is examined; an intermediate position,
depending on the particular individual concerned, paints a more plausible pic-
ture. Some academics interacted closely with enterprising manufacturers,
others less so. This essay provides a general introduction to the issues, followed
by an analysis of the case of the pre-synthetic dyestuffs industry.
The traditional view holds that the academic world of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries did not play a role. In a paper of 1797, Theophilus
Lewis Rupp (d.1805), a German-born Manchester cotton manufacturer wrote,
The arts, which supply the luxuries, conveniences, and necessaries of life,
have derived but little advantage from philosophers [] The chemist, in
particular, if we except the pharmaceutical laboratory, has but little claim
on the arts: on the contrary, he is indebted to them for the greatest discov-
eries and a prodigious number of facts, which form the basis of his
science [] [N]o brand of the useful arts is less indebted to him than that
of changing the colours of substances. The art of dyeing has attained a
high degree of perfection without the aid of the chemist, who is totally
ignorant of the rationale of many of its processes, and the little he knows
of this subject is of a late date.1
1 Theophilus Lewis Rupp, On the Process of Bleaching with the Oxygenated Muriatic Acid; and
a Description of a New Apparatus for Bleaching Cloths, with that Acid Dissolved in Water,
without the Addition of Alkali, Memoirs of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society
5 (1798): 298-313.
Robert G.W. Anderson, 2018|doi 10.1163/9789004325562_016


334 Anderson
This view was reiterated by the American economic historian Witt Bowden
(1885-1979) in 1925 and by British economic historian, Peter Matthias (b.1928),
who in 1983 wrote, innovations were not the result of the formal application
of applied science, nor a formal product of the educational system [] deter-
mination, intense curiosity, quick wits, clever fingers, luck, capital [] and a
backer [] were more important [] than a scientific training.2
A recent opposing view to this distinction between the academic world and
industry has been developed by historian of science Ursula Klein, who asserts
that throughout the eighteenth century,
[] chemical science and technology were strongly and systematically

linked with one another. The interconnection of chemical science and
technology was not promoted by a few individuals occupied with both
scientific and technological enterprises. Rather, this interaction was
firmly established on the communal and institutional level of eighteenth-
century chemistry.
She stresses her point by applying the seemingly anachronistic concept of

technoscience, the intricate entanglement of what have conventionally been
considered as two different cultures, to cover both savants experimenting at
academic institutions and craftsmen and artisans producing in workshops.3
Practitioners, it is argued, essentially merged towards a single chemical cul-
ture. It must be asked, however, how generally applicable this was throughout
Europe? Kleins evidence is largely taken from the German world (particularly
that described in Karl Hufbauers The Formation of the German Chemical
2 Peter Mathias, The First Industrial Nation: An economic history of Britain, 1700-1914, second
edition (London: Methuen, 1983), 124-25; Witt Bowden, Industrial Society in England Towards
the End of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1925); second edition (London: Frank
Cass & Co., 1965), 11.
3 Ursula Klein, Technoscience Avant la Lettre, Perspectives on Science 13 (2005): 226-66, quota-
tions on 226-27; Klein goes so far as to use the term fusion (226) to describe the degree of
merging of the chemical cultures. On chemistry as a technoscience, see also Bernadette
Bensaude-Vincent, Chemistry as a Technoscience, Jean-Pierre Llored, ed., The Philosophy of
Chemistry: Practices, methodologies, and concepts (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2013), 330-41; For an intermediate view, see Eda Kranakis, Hybrid Careers and the
Interaction of Science and Technology, Peter Kroes and Martijn Baker, eds., Technological
Development and Science in the Industrial Age (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992),
177-204, on 178.

Community).4 But if we attend to the relations in Scotland between university

chemists and those who employed chemistry in the fields of manufacture and
commerce over the period 1760 to 1840, the more sophisticated and integrated
German chemistry culture (particularly that in relation to pharmacy) cannot
be assumed.5 Similarly, the German level of organisation in the field of mining,
with its academies and ceremonial, did not exist in the same way in Scotland;
neither did posts associated with them. Klein also describes the field of organic
chemistry, in which new carbon compounds were produced, as technoscien-
tific. But it was a particularly German and French development from the 1820s,
whose activity led to an alliance between chemical science and the synthetic
dye industry from the late 1850s.
Edinburgh, situated near the Forth valley where industrial initiatives were
rapidly developing, was one of Europes major centers of chemistry teaching in
the later eighteenth century. To an extent the cultures of chemical pedagogy
and industrial practices overlapped there. There was a significant amount of
social interaction between many academic chemists and entrepreneurs and
for some this extended further to levels of co-operation and advice. Their iden-
tities, however, generally remained connected either to academe or the
industrial and commercial world. While academics were in touch with indus-
try in a variety of ways, their main concern was clearly seen as transmitting
chemical knowledge to future medical practitioners.6
Industrialists were certainly never involved in formal teaching activities and
practically all chemistry teaching was conducted by those who had graduated
with medical degrees. A few entrepreneurs had undertaken formal university
education and some did subscribe to a course of chemistry lectures as non-
matriculated students. On occasion, academics were asked by industrialists,
government agencies and publically funded bodies to offer advice on in-
dustrial and health matters. But, as said, they largely maintained their distinct
identities.
4 Karl Hufbauer, The Formation of the German Chemical Community 1720-1795 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1982).
5 Ursula Klein, Apothecary Shops, Laboratories and Chemical Manufacture in Eighteenth-
century Germany, Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer and Peter Dear, eds., The Mindful Hand:
Inquiry and invention from the late Renaissance to early industrialisation (Amsterdam: Royal
Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2007), 247-78.
6 The requirement for physicians to have knowledge of general chemistry has been little dis-
cussed by historians. The chemistry curricula taught includes a great deal of chemistry which
had no bearing on their professional needs. Courses by chair holders in materia medica and
botany which would have been much more relevant to the daily work of a general
practitioner.

336 Anderson
From the foundation of the Edinburgh medical faculty in 1726, it is possible

to observe three phases in the relationship between the chemistry professors
and industry up to the 1840s. During the first phase, the professor Andrew
Plummer was directly involved with his medical colleagues in the production
of drugs for distribution to pharmacies around Edinburgh, at least until 1742.
They played a strongly entrepreneurial role: they were unsalaried and needed
to earn more than their student fees brought in.
A second phase involving William Cullen and Joseph Black between 1747
and 1799, saw their close but distinctive relationship with industrialists, with
whom their interests coincided. William Cullen (1710-90), lecturer in chemistry
in Glasgow from 1747 and successor to Plummer in Edinburgh from 1756, was
particularly damning of his teaching. He wrote in his notes, Pharmaceutical
Courses of Chemistry have not deserved the place they have hitherto held in
our Schools that they are not fitted to lead us to a general knowledge of
Chemistry.7 Furthermore, he taught, Some persons may expect very particu-
lar Inquiries on the Subject of certain Arts. Examples of the practice of these
and Essays made for their Improvement and these arts they would chiefly
attend to but I here must inform such persons that we dont pretend to shew
the practice of particular Arts in the way of Trade & Business.8 The emphasis
Cullen was making here was that he would not teach particular Arts his
teaching, while practical, would be generally applicable.
The third phase, involving Thomas Charles Hope, 1796 to 1843, saw much
more polarization. Hope (1766-1844) was initially antagonistic even to the
teaching of practical chemistry, though his attitude softened later in his career.
In the world outside his lecture theater, major developments such as chlorine
bleaching, were being pursued by industrialists (in Scotland, particularly by
Charles Tennant (1768-1838) in Glasgow). Hopes only involvement with bleach-
ing, however, seems to have entailed a single experiment, conducted in the
presence of Humphry Davy (1778-1829) and other gentlemen, which concerned
theory rather than practice.9 Hopes territory was based around the universitys
Old College and in the social round in Edinburghs New Town, rather than sites
of industry. His successor, William Gregory (1803-1858), did have some personal
connection with the alkaloid industry in Edinburgh in that his method of mor-
7 R.G.W. Anderson, The Playfair Collection and the Teaching of Chemistry at the University of
Edinburgh 1713-1858 (Edinburgh: Royal Scottish Museum, 1978), 11; Cullen probably attended
Plummers lectures as a student.
8 Ibid.
9 Archibald Clow and Nan L. Clow, The Chemical Revolution: A contribution to social technology
(London: Batchworth Press, 1952), 500.

phine production was taken up by the firm of J.F. Macfarlan in the 1830s, though
this was more than a decade before he was selected for the Edinburgh chair.10
Two years before his appointment in 1844, Gregory wrote a telling letter to the
4th Earl of Aberdeen (1784-1860), indicating a very different attitude from that
of Hope:
If any nation is bound to encourage and promote the study of practical

chemistry it is the British nation, which has derived, and continues to
derive, such vast advantages from the applications of its principles to the
useful arts. Yet, if we investigate the subject, we find that the opportuni-
ties afforded in this country for the study of practical chemistry are
exceedingly limited.11
Glasgow offers other cases that are a bit more ambiguous. Andrew Ure (1778-
1857) served as professor of natural philosophy at Glasgows Andersons
Institution, lecturing also on chemistry and mechanics, from 1804 to 1830,
when he resigned his post to become what his biographer has called the first
consulting chemist in Britain.12 While his resignation emphasized a separa-
tion between the academic world and the realm of chemical industry, Ure had,
for example, worked as a consultant to the Irish Linen Board in 1814. And,
reflecting on his career in his highly successful Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures
and Mines of 1839, which he described as embodying the results of my long
experience as a Professor of Practical Science, Ure spoke of his continued
interest in educating his nations practitioners.13
Those who studied in Thomas Thomsons laboratory in Glasgow University
(where he was professor of chemistry from 1818 to 1852) also present us with a
picture that neither conforms clearly to the traditional distinction between
academic and industrial chemists nor the claim of chemists as hybrid techno-
scientists. In his study of this cohort, Jack Morrell does divide them between
the categories of academic and industrial chemists. But he is quick to add
10 Anderson, The Playfair Collection, p.48 (see note 7).

11 William Gregory, Letter to the Right Honourable George, Earl of Aberdeen, K.T. [] on the
State of the Schools of Chemistry in the United Kingdom (London: Taylor & Walton, 1842),
12.
12 Donald Cardwell, Ure, Andrew, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford
13 Andrew Ure, Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures and Mines (London: Longman, Orme,
Brown, Greene, & Longmans, 1839), iv-v; For further consideration of Ures career, see the
discussion on his research on dyes below.

338 Anderson
that the above classification is arbitrary and specifically mentions Walter

Crum, whose work in the field of dyeing is discussed below, as a case in point.14
Chemistry Teaching in Scotland
Formal academic teaching of chemistry in Great Britain over the period 1760 to
the late 1820s essentially entailed the courses available at Scottish universities,
especially those of Glasgow and Edinburgh. The English universities, Oxford
and Cambridge, did offer chemistry classes from time to time but the subject
did not form part of the examined curriculum.15 The University of London
treated chemistry seriously from its beginning but that was not until after its
foundation in 1826. The other two Scottish universities, St Andrews and
Aberdeen, were small and did not particularly promote the subject of chemis-
try, though there was sporadic activity from certain professors. In contrast,
Edinburgh and Glasgow were seriously involved with the subject. Edinburgh
established a chair of chemistry and medicine in 1713 and its medical faculty
thirteen years later.16 The University of Glasgow set up a lectureship from 1747
and appointed William Cullen.17 From these years onwards, a continuous
series of appointments was made. In Glasgow, a Regius chair in chemistry was
established in 1818. Both universities drew large classes. In the 1820s, Thomas
Charles Hopes class at Edinburgh on occasion attracted more than 500 sub-
scribers per annum.18
14 Jack Morrell, The Research Breeders: the Research Schools of Liebig and Thomas Thom-
son, Ambix 19 (1972): 1-46, see particularly the lists on 21, 22; quotation on 21.
15 Mary D. Archer and Christopher D. Haley, eds., The 1702 Chair of Chemistry at Cambridge:
Transformation and change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Peter J.T.
Morris, The Eighteenth Century: Chemistry Allied to Anatomy, Robert Joseph Paton Wil-
liams, Allan Chapman and John Shipley Rowlinson, eds., Chemistry at Oxford: A history
from 1600 to 2005 (London: Royal Society of Chemistry, 2008), 52-78.
16 John C. Powers, Leiden Chemistry in Edinburgh: Herman Boerhaave, James Crawford
and Andrew Plummer, Robert G.W. Anderson, ed., Cradle of Chemistry: The early years of
chemistry at the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2015), 25-58.
17 Andrew Kent, ed., An Eighteenth Century Lectureship in Chemistry: Essays and bicentenary
addresses relating to the chemistry department of Glasgow University (Glasgow: Jackson
Son & Co, 1950).
18 For numbers of students registering for the annual course of chemistry lectures given by
Thomas Charles Hope, see Jack Morrell, Practical Chemistry in the University of Edin-
burgh, 1799-1843, Ambix 16 (1969): 66-80 (on 76, note 84).

It is important not to ignore Andersons Institution in Glasgow, established

in 1796 (from 1828, renamed Andersons University) through a legacy of John
Anderson (1726-96), professor of natural philosophy at the University of
Glasgow.19 Because the funds he bequeathed were insufficient to establish a
fully-fledged university, it was decided to begin teaching natural philosophy
and chemistry; other subjects were added subsequently. This was because the
institution was established specially to teach manufacturers and artificers who
had not previously undertaken mathematical studies. In some ways it can be
seen as a precursor of mechanics institutes. George Birkbeck (1776-1841), who
is regarded as the prime originator of mechanics institutes, taught at
Andersons Institution from 1799. It might thus be seen as ironic that it was this
institution which Ure left to become an independent chemical consultant.
Scotlands Universities and Industry
Eighteenth-century Scottish chemists were encouraged to develop interests in

industry by benefiting from premiums made available through a body which
was established to promote the Scottish economy, the Board of Trustees for
Fisheries and Manufactures in Scotland. This offered financial inducements,
provided by the London-based British Government.20 From when it started in
the 1720s, the initial sum set aside for this purpose was 6000 per annum.
Among the higher priorities was encouragement of the linen industry, for
which 2650 had been ring-fenced. The traditional means of whitening cloth
leaving it laid out on bleachfields for several days in the sun, sometimes add-
ing sour milk was clearly inefficient. Black and his colleagues suggested
innovative bleaching techniques. Francis Home (1719-1813), professor of mate-
ria medica, was awarded a prize of 100 for his proposal to use dilute sulfuric
acid in the process rather than sour milk. But it was not always to larger-scale
industries that Black offered advice. In 1783 the Board asked him to adjudicate
on Mrs Gordons method of making wine vinegar.21
19 James Muir, John Anderson, Pioneer of Technical Education and the College he Founded
(Glasgow: John Smith & Son, 1950); John Butt, John Andersons Legacy: The University of
Strathclyde and its antecedents (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996), 1-24.
20 Annette M. Smith, State Aid to Industry an Eighteenth Century Example, T.M. Devine,
ed., Lairds and Improvement in the Scotland of the Enlightenment (Glasgow: 9th Scottish
Historical Conference, 1978), 21-30.
21 For this example, see Robert G.W. Anderson and Jean Jones, eds., The Correspondence of
Joseph Black, 2 vols. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), vol. 1, 614-15; Mrs Gordon could not be iden-
tified.

340 Anderson
Andrew Ure reflected on this increasing input by academic chemists into

manufacturing practices in the preface to his Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures
and Mines.
I have embodied in this work the results of my long experience as a

Professor of Practical Science. Since the year 1805, when I entered at an
early age upon the arduous task of conducting the school of chemistry
and manufactures in the Andersonian Institution, up to the present day,
I have been assiduously engaged in the study and improvement of most
of the chemical and many of the mechanical arts. Consulted profes
sionally by proprietors of factories, workshops and mines, of various
descriptions, both in this country and abroad, concerning derangement
in their operations, or defects in their products, I have enjoyed peculiar
opportunities of becoming familiar with their minutest details, and have
frequently had the good fortune to rectify what was amiss, or to supply
what was wanting.22
This judgment was by no means unique. In 1814, Sir John Sinclair (1754-1835),
who promoted the compilation of the Statistical Account of Scotland, declared:
At present there are a greater number of intelligent practical chemists in
Scotland, in proportion to the population, than perhaps in any other country
of the world.23
Not much is known about laboratories situated in Scottish universities up to
1820, and what went on in them. Occasional details are indicated when funds
were applied for either from the University or (in Edinburghs case) its patron,
the Town Council. A certain amount can be deduced about extra-mural chemi-
cal laboratories, which were developed by freelance chemists to teach students
who preferred to learn the subject outside the confines of a university.24 Other
laboratories which were set up throughout Britain after 1821 included those
attached to mechanics institutes, bodies which initially were dedicated to pro-
viding education for the working class. The first one of these was the Edinburgh
School of Arts.25 Its Glasgow counterpart, the Glasgow Mechanics Institution,
22 Ure, Dictionary of Arts, p. iv (see note 13).

23 John Sinclair, General Report of the Agricultural State and Political Circumstances of Scot-
land (Edinburgh, 1814), appendix 2, 307.
24 Robert G.W. Anderson, Chemistry Beyond the Academy: Diversity in Scotland in the
early nineteenth century, Ambix 57 (2010): 84-103.
25 P.N. OFarrell, Heriot Watt University. An illustrated history (Harlow: Pearson Educational,
2004).

emerged two years later from a split in the mechanics class of Andersons
Institution. These various bodies were mainly concerned with teaching work-
ers science. Much less is known about private laboratories (as opposed to
teaching lecture theaters) used for experimental activity by the professors
where personal investigation and research could be carried out. Black must
have had private facilities for conducting his many analyses.26
Knowing about social relationships between academic chemists and entre-
preneurs is useful to determine the role of each. Very little can be gleaned from
published books and papers; more is available from correspondence. It is likely
that much of the interaction was informal. The loosely structured Lunar
Society in Birmingham was a locus for the exchange of ideas, but no formal
minutes were kept which could provide evidence.27 In Edinburgh and Glasgow
there were plenty of social clubs, but these, by their nature, left very little trace
of what went on in them. Occasional light is shed in social letters. In one writ-
ten in May 1784, John Hope (1725-86), professor of botany at Edinburgh,
revealed to Matthew Boulton, Last night we had a full meeting at the Oyster
Cellar, Mr Cort, Lord Dundonald, Hutton, Black, MacGowan, etc. Dr Hutton
whispered to me, what a number of projectors, and Black said I was a fool of a
one myself. We had as usual a great deal of pleasantry, and every now and then
some useful and interesting conversation.28 This makes it clear that the Oyster
Club brought together a group whose interests were complementary. The land-
owning aristocracy was represented by Lord Dundonald (1749-1831) whose
estate at Culross was used for various industrial purposes; John McGowan
(d.1803) was solicitor to the Customs and Excise; Henry Cort (1741-1800) was an
innovative ironmaster; and James Hutton (1726-1797) could be described as an
Edinburgh chemical manufacturer (that was where his income was made; he
held no post in geology).29 These men were carousing on equal terms with the
university professoriate represented by Joseph Black and John Hope (1725-86),
whilst having every now and then some useful and interesting conversation.
This indicates the importance of letters as evidence. Blacks correspondence
of about 830 items is the key to revealing his relationship with entrepreneurs
26 Black certainly had a private room: Adam Ferguson made a comment about its tidiness, it
never being lumbered with [] the apparatus of experiments, see Anderson and Jones,
Correspondence, vol. 1, p.49 (see note 21).
27 What evidence there is has been assembled by Peter M. Jones, see his Industrial Enlighten-
ment: Science, technology and culture in Birmingham and the West Midlands (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2009), 82-94, especially Table 3.0 on 92-3.
28 Clow and Clow, The Chemical Revolution, p.415 (see note 9).
29 On Hutton, see the essay by Lissa Roberts and Joppe van Driel in this volume.

342 Anderson
and industrialists.30 Nearly seventy of his correspondents sought direct advice

on industrial issues. Through this evidence, there can be no doubt that Black
contributed a great deal to the developing chemical industry in Scotland and
elsewhere. It is possible to categorize his assistance under five heads. He cor-
responded with landowners who wanted to improve agricultural yields. For
this cohort he also conducted mineral analyses in his laboratory to determine
how to extract metals profitably. He was frequently contacted by the Board of
Fisheries and Manufactures to help them make judgments on giving grants
and premiums to those submitting new ideas for improving various processes.
The Board of Customs asked him about issues concerning taxation. Finally, he
was contacted by those seeking advice on the likely commercial viability of
developing new chemical works.
Throughout all this, it is not clear what Black himself gained. Was he was
simply being philanthropically responsive? One scheme certainly did occupy
his time, thought and energy. This was his own attempt to produce alkali by a
cheap method. Soda and potash were important in the Scottish industry, not
only textiles but glass and soap as well. Traditional methods of alkali produc-
tion, by burning wood or seaweed and leaching-out salts, were extremely
inefficient, though Black advised on this, determining experimentally which
ferns from various Scottish estates offered the best yield.31 Statistics were also
determined for kelp found on various Scottish beaches.32 It was important
because imports from overseas, especially Spanish barilla, were subject to
interruption by the many wars and skirmishes of the period. There would be
significant financial rewards if a new chemical process using cheap reagents
could be made to work. The attempted method was to juxtapose plates of solid
salt and lime, hoping to get them to react together by means of a double
decomposition which, it was hoped, would result in soda and chloride of cal-
cium. Experiments by Black were conducted in parallel with James Watts in
Glasgow and their correspondence reveals their frustration at their failure,
even though over-optimistically, at the same time, they talked about patenting
the process. Watts work was on a large scale; he refers to a reagent house
being constructed, 36 feet in length, 18 feet wide and 15 feet in height; he esti-
mated that after one year, nine tons of alkali would be produced. Black at a
30 Anderson and Jones, Correspondence, 2 vols. passim (see note 21).

31 Ibid., pp.511-13, letter from Black to Ebenezer Macculloch, 9 July 1782; Mcculloch is
described here as General Surveyor of the Linen Manufactures, under the Honble. Board
of Trustees.
32 Blacks experiments on kelp are recorded by Andrew Fyfe, On the Comparative Value of
Kelp and Barilla, Transactions of the Highland Society 5 (1820): 10-64, on 29.

later stage spoke in general about how long his experiments took to conduct
(though he did not specify which experiments these were).33 Both men were
certainly concerned that others would develop a viable scheme before they
did.34 This hands-on experimentation with an industrial process in mind was
exceptional. It seems unlikely that Blacks laboratory facilities resembled
Kleins description: large parts of the academic chemical laboratory instru-
ments resembled the instruments of assayers, smelters, apothecaries, and
distillers; there was simply insufficient space.35
More details are known about experiments requested by others because
some replies survive. Black had a particularly extensive correspondence with
Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696-1782), a scientifically minded judge, agricul-
tural improver and leading member of the Edinburgh literati.36 Kames was
attempting to drain part of his estate and turned to Black because he wanted
to know about the nature of alluvial clays. He wrote in a preface to one of his
books, An imprimatur from one of the ablest chymists of the present age [that
is, Black] has given me some confidence of being on the right track.37
The Board of Fisheries and Manufactures generally turned to the academic
world for advice on practical matters. An example involving Black (and James
Hutton) concerned the development of a new type of furnace designed by one
William Cottrell (fl.1780s), intended for the smelting of ores to produce pig
iron.38 Black and Hutton had their doubts from the outset, but Since so much
has already been laid out upon an experiment, which seems to be conducted
with ingenuity, we should be sorry not to see it brought to some conclusion.39
A very thorough report was finally submitted on 27 October 1783.40
33 Anderson and Jones, Correspondence, vol. 2, pp.1068-69 (see note 21).

34 See correspondence between Black and Watt, 23 January to 10 July 1769 in ibid., vol. 1,
especially pp.206-13.
35 Klein, Technoscience, p.240 (see note 3).
36 Anderson and Jones, Correspondence, vol. 1, pp.312-322 and 323-329 (see note 21).
37 Henry Home, The Gentleman Farmer; Being an attempt to improve Agriculture by subject-
ing it to the test of rational principles (Edinburgh: W. Creech, 1776), xii-xiii.
38 Anderson and Jones, Correspondence, vol. 1, pp.649-50 (see note 21). Letter from Robert
Arbuthnot, Secretary to the Board, to Black and Hutton, 27 June 1783.
39 Ibid., vol. 1. pp.650-52. Draft letters from Black and Hutton to the Board of Fisheries and
Manufactures, after 27 June 1783.
40 Ibid., vol. 1, pp.670-75. Report of Black and Hutton submitted to the Board of Fisheries
and Manufactures, 27 October 1783.

344 Anderson
The Board of Customs consulted Black about the point at which poor qual-
ity, untaxed culm becomes taxable, good quality coal.41 Another commission
for Customs and Excise carried out by Black related to whether tax should be
exacted on the other salts in sea water, as it was on common salt and focused
on the substance bittern (the solution remaining when seawater has been con-
centrated by evaporation, to the point where the common salt component has
crystallized out).42 The Collector of Customs at Port Glasgow wanted to know,
for a start, what it was. Although Black was willing to give advice on scientific
aspects of the matter and carry out calculations, he made it clear that he did
not want to be drawn into giving an opinion which would affect tax legislation.43
Black was astute when it came to judging financial consequences of estab-
lishing industrial processes, something which perhaps would not be expected
of an eighteenth century academic scientist. This comes through very clearly
from Blacks correspondence with Archibald Cochrane, 9th Earl of Dundonald.
Cochrane owned an estate on the north shore of the Firth of Forth at Culross.
Not a wealthy man, he developed various industrial schemes which, he hoped,
would ease his financial situation. Black was cautious about Cochranes ability
to bring anything he started to a successful conclusion. He wrote to Cochranes
brother-in-law in surprizingly forthright terms:
In my preceeding conversations with his Lordship he had appeared to me

to be very ingenious & acute but at the same time so overflowing with
Projects & so extreamly [sic] sanguine [] I may say extravagant in his
estimation of them that I neither expected to find any thing Solid or
Satisfactory nor had the least hope that my advice or opinion would be
attended to.44
One of these Projects was tar production, which Cochrane intended to pro-
duce by distilling coal, available on his estate. Cochrane had ambitions to sell
41 Ibid., vol. 1, pp.345-38; On culm, see also the essay by Roberts and Van Driel in this vol-
ume.
42 Ibid., vol. 2, pp.1214-15 and 1216-23.
43 William Ramsay, Life and Letters of Joseph Black (London: Constable, 1918), 108; The letter
from which Ramsay made this judgment no longer survives. Contrast this with the role of
academic chemists as advisors to the Dutch government, see Joppe van Driel and Lissa
Roberts, Circulating Salts: Chemical governance and the bifurcation of nature and
society, Eighteenth Century Studies 49 (2016): 233-63.
44 Anderson and Jones, Correspondence, vol. 2, pp.599-602 (see note 21). Letter, Black to
Andrew Stuart, Edinburgh, 25 January 1783.

his tar to the Navy to preserve ships bottoms from becoming worm-eaten.
Blacks analysis was very detailed, considered under six separate headings. He
performed different sets of calculations showing that the income at time of
war would be greater than if the country were at peace (the weekly value would
be 88.8.0 compared with 69.16.0, respectively).45 Of Blacks highly practical
contribution to Cochranes enterprise, Sir John Dalrymple, Solicitor General
for Scotland, wrote that Black was, the best judge, perhaps in Europe, of the
merit of such inventions.46
Though it is clear that Black was a key figure in advising on the development
of a variety of industrial ventures, he was cautious about getting too involved
and he was good at making excuses, even to the aristocracy. When the Earl of
Hopetoun, who had asked Black to analyze samples of gravel for gold, sum-
moned him to Hopetoun House in March 1772, a distance of less than 13 miles,
Black wrote, I intended to have taken the opportunity of the present holidays
to have paid my respects to your Ldship at Hp. House but the change of the
weather made me delay that Ride to another time.47 There are other similar
examples of this attitude.
Thomas Charles Hope did not play the same sort of role as Black in advising
those developing industries, though much less is known about his personal
inclinations; very little of his correspondence survives. Hope himself declared,
I consider my vocation to be the teaching the science [chemistry].48 Until
recently, it was thought that Hope cared little about developing up-to-date
content for his chemistry course, but reference to his teaching notes show that
he was well aware of innovations and he updated his teaching continually.49
Though it is fair to say that he concentrated largely on more theoretical aspects,
he did not ignore the industrial side of chemistry as seen in relation to dyes.
George Wilson (1818-59) was an Edinburgh figure who operated at the bor-
ders of university teaching and was significantly involved with industrialists.50
45 Ibid., vol. 1, pp.580-89. Blacks notes and calculations.

46 John Dalrymple, Addresses and Proposals [] on the Subject of Coal, Tar and Iron Branches
of Trade (Edinburgh: Thomson Gale, 1784).
47 Anderson and Jones, Correspondence, vol. 1, pp.250-52. Letter, Joseph Black to the 2nd Earl
of Hopetoun, 14 March 1772.
48 Thomas Stewart Traill, Memoir of Dr Thomas Charles Hope, Transactions of the Royal
Society of Edinburgh 16 (1849): 419-34, on 431.
49 Robert G.W. Anderson, Thomas Charles Hope and the Limiting Legacy of Joseph Black,
Anderson, ed. Cradle of Chemistry, pp.147-62 (see note 16).
50 Jessie Aitken Wilson, Memoirs of George Wilson (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas,
1860).

346 Anderson
Trained in medicine at Edinburgh, Wilson had no intention of practising, see-

ing his training as preparing him for a career in chemistry. After graduation in
1838 he turned down an offer to work with Thomas Graham at University
College, London, settling into a life of teaching chemistry extramurally in
Edinburgh. In 1855, when a search was on for someone to direct the newly
established Industrial Museum of Scotland, one of Wilsons former university
colleagues, the influential Lyon Playfair (1818-98), recommended him for the
job. Though it would be several years before a museum building became avail-
able, Wilson was immediately active in summoning the help of industrialists
to fill his stores with teaching material.51 The University became concerned
that Wilson, a popular teacher, would usurp the role of professor of chemistry,
so it created a Regius Professorship of Technology and appointed Wilson to it.
It could thereby exert a degree of control over his activities. Wilsons policy for
teaching industrial processes was clearly set out in two lectures given at the
Philosophical Institution in 1856.52 At least forty-eight extramural chemistry
lecturers who taught courses starting between 1768 and 1855 were involved in
a similar way.53 A small proportion of these were involved in industrialization.
George Dixon Longstaff (1799-1892), for example, conducted tar distillation at
Leith shortly after graduating and then returned to England where he devel-
oped industrial interests in oils, colors and varnish while teaching at mechanics
institutions.54
The Case of Dyes
The considerable importance of the linen and cotton industry in Scotland pro-
vides context for Joseph Blacks keen interest in dyeing.55 He prepared Prussian
Blue in front of his class, a fact recorded by Thomas Charles Hope in his student
51 R.G.W. Anderson, What is Technology?: Education Through museums in the mid-nine-

teenth century, British Journal for the History of Science 25 (1992): 169-84.
52 George Wilson, On the Objects of Technology and Industrial Museums. Two lectures
addressed to the Philosophical Institution, Edinburgh, in February 1856 (Edinburgh: Suther-
land & Knox, 1856).
53 Robert G.W. Anderson, Chemistry Beyond the Academy: Diversity in Scotland in the
early nineteenth century, Ambix 57 (2010): 84-103.
54 Anon., George Dixon Wagstaff, Journal of the Chemical Society 63 (1893): 751-54.
55 Alastair J. Durie, The Scottish Linen Industry in the Eighteenth Century (Edinburgh: John
Donald, 1979), 32-94.

lecture notes as having taken place in March 1784.56 Some of Blacks correspon-
dence is directly concerned with dyestuffs, especially the dyes cudbear and
Turkey red.57 George Mackintosh (1739-1807), partner in a Glasgow concern
which manufactured these dyestuffs wrote to Black: I have late discovered a
preparation which makes cudbear dye linen and cotton with the same ease, as
it does woollens, which till now it could not do. I would cheerfully lay my pro-
cess before you could I expect to be honoured with your sentiments upon it, as
I want to have it fully complete before I discover it to the public.58 Obvious
from this is that Mackintosh was seeking Blacks valued imprimatur.
In November 1782, Mackintosh wrote again to thank Black and ask for his
approbation and opinion [of] the late discovery I made of making cudbear
strick [sic] on linens and cottons.59 Later in November 1782, he sent six sam-
ples of dyed linen and five samples of dyed silk thread to Black. Perhaps
Mackintosh felt that he was writing too often, [b]ut it is an affair of some
importance to individuals.60 Blacks replied encouragingly, ending his letter
with a friendly promise to keep details of their correspondence secret,61
The final letter of the sequence is from Mackintosh to Black in 1785, when he
sent Black six handkerchiefs of a very excellent colour. The letter refers to a
French dyer, probably Pierre Jacques Papillon (fl.1780s-90s), who came to work
in the extensive dyeworks at Dalmarnock established by Mackintosh and
David Dale. He was one of a succession of European dyers who struggled to
learn the secret of making fast red dye from madder. Papillon arrived in
Glasgow in 1785, via Manchester. The dye he produced was considered to be
excellent, though he was an employee rather than a partner and he left in 1787.
He petitioned the Board of Manufactures on three occasions, between 1787
and 1790, for a grant to set up and run his own dyeworks, to which they were
sympathetic, but quickly realized that they could scarcely offer him money
56 Thomas Charles Hopes lecture notes taken in Blacks class, 1783-84, Edinburgh University
Library Research Collections, MS Dc.10.95. Hope dated the demonstration as being done
in March 1784.
57 Turkey red was used widely in Scottish works, developed in 1785 at Dalmarnock on the
River Clyde near Glasgow. The excellent color was obtained from the rubia plant by a
complicated process. See W.T. Johnston, The Secret of Turkey Red (Livingston: Officina
W.T. Johnston, 1993); see also Clow and Clow, Chemical Revolution, pp.217-19 (see note 9).
58 Anderson and Jones, Correspondence, vol. 1, pp.522-24 (see note 21). Letter, Mackintosh to
Black, 31 August 1782.
59 Ibid., vol. 1, pp.543-45. Letter, Mackintosh to Black, 2 November 1782.
60 Ibid., vol. 1, pp.545-57. Letter, Mackintosh to Black, 4 November 1782.
61 Ibid., vol. 1, pp.550-1. Draft letter, Black to Mackintosh, n.d.

348 Anderson
from public funds for a secret process.62 A solution was eventually found: Black
was asked to examine Papillons petition, in confidence, and adjudicate it. This
he did, with a positive recommendation. It was agreed that there would be a
ban on publication of the process for a period of twelve years, after which it
would be made publicly available.63
Another interaction Black had concerning dyes was with William Hamilton
(1758-1807) in 1791. Hamilton was an Irishman who had been a student of
Blacks when working for his MD, awarded in 1779. Hamilton had been translat-
ing lments de lArt de la Teinture by Claude Louis Berthollet (1748-1822),
published in Paris in 1791. He complained to Black that someone else was pub-
lishing another translation of the same book, implying piracy, and that Black
had sanctioned it.64 Black explained in a reply that he had asked for a copy of
the original French version, and having received a copy, he was asked by a pub-
lishing firm whether it should be translated.65 Black commended it highly,
saying that it would be very useful and should be published in English. Sample
pages of translation received a favorable opinion from him and the book was
duly produced which was what so distressed Hamilton. Again, this incident
indicates the status which Black had achieved in being sought to make judg-
ments on industrial matters.
In 1795, Black purchased a bond for 500 sterling from Robert Graham of
Gartmore (1735-1797) in the Culcreach (or Culcruech) Cotton Company, a very
substantial sum.66 Blacks relationship with Graham, who was a considerable
landowner, politician and poet, is not known; no correspondence between
them survives. Graham was Rector of Glasgow University between 1785 and
1787, which possibly explains how they knew each other. The Culcreach
Company had been established at Fintry, in the Campsie Hills, twenty miles
north of Glasgow, by Alexander Spiers.67 Black also took out a 500 sterling
bond with the Edinburgh and Leith Glasshouse Company. He had developed a
close friendship with its proprietor, Archibald Geddes, but the professional
62 Johnston, Secret, appendix 2, pp.11-14 (see note 57).

63 Papillons Turkey red process was published in the Edinburgh Evening Courant on 1
December 1803.
64 Anderson and Jones, Correspondence, vol. 2, p.1151 (see note 21). Letter, Hamilton to Black,
14 January 1792.
65 Ibid., vol. 2, p.1152. Draft letter, Black to Hamilton, n.d.
66 Ibid., vol. 2, p.1467: Minutes taken at the opening of the Repositories of the late Dr.
Joseph Black [] Bond by Robert Grahame of Gartmore esq & other partners of the Cul-
creuch Company for 500 St in favor of the said Dr Black dated 2d. Decr. & 8 Dec. 1795.
67 Some papers are in Glasgow University Library Special Collections, MS Gen 1717.

roles of the two men appear distinct; Geddes attended two sessions of Blacks
chemistry class, paying his three guineas per session, like everybody else.
Hopes sparse research interests were different from Blacks: he was the son
of John Hope, holder of the chair of botany at Edinburgh, and a few of his pub-
lished papers dealt with plant chemistry. There was quite a substantial section
on inks and dyeing in his chemistry course, the evidence for this being found
in the notes from which he lectured. He started the latter subject of his course
by stating: The Art of Dyeing is one of the most interesting of the Chemical
Arts It comprehends the methods of applying & fixing durably colouring
matter on animal & vegetable fibre, so as to communicate on the endless vari-
ety of beautiful Tints [...]. Every process is in fact chemical one & often very
intricate. He then offered definitional discussions of dyeing in general and
topical dyeing, further explaining that:
If no Chemical Attraction be exerted between the fibre of the stuff & the
colouring matter, this matter having been soluble & actually dessolved in
the water of the vat, continues soluble in the same menstruum conse-
quently when the dyed stuff is treated with water the colouring matter is
compleatly carried off & the stuff again becomes colourless.68
Following this introduction to the subject, Hope continued with a section on

fixing coloring agents with mordants solutions of alum or tin salts. He then
treated indigo: Dr Roxburgh of Calcutta teaches [...] leaves of Nerium Tincto
rum, or diffr. Species of Indigofera are mixed with cold water in a boiler wc. Is
heated slowly to 150 & then the clear water is strained off Dr Roxburgh has
proved that the production of the Blue substce or Indigo is owing to the absorp-
tion of Oxyg by the Green base.69 In 1809, Hope felt that, as usual, he was
running behind with his course and he decided not to discuss lichens and cud-
bear.70 He did go on to teach a substantial section on how patterns are printed
on to calico.
68 Edinburgh University Library Research Collections, MS Gen 268-277, envelope 9, Astrin-

gents/Colouring Matter.
69 William Roxburgh (1751-1851), a Scots surgeon working in Calcutta, had been taught by
Thomas Charles Hopes father, John Hope; he experimented with sources of indigo for
dyes from 1790, see Alexander Dalrymple, Oriental Repertory, 2 vols. (London: G. Biggs,
1793-1797), vol. 2 (London, 1793), 39-44; Roxburghs full paper was published 18 years later:
William Roxburgh, Account of a new Species of Nerium, Transactions of the Society []
for the Encouragement of Arts 28 (1811): 251-307.
70 Cudbear is a natural red-purple dye, extracted from lichens. Its production was patented
in 1758 by George and Cuthbert Gordon, and from 1764 it was manufactured in Leith,

350 Anderson
Glasgow academics, including Andrew Ure when he was professor of natu-

ral philosophy at the Andersonian Institution, were also interested in dyes
from a chemical point of view. Relevant to the Scottish dye industry is Ures
1824 translation of Berthollets Elements de lArt de Teinture. Acknowledging
that it had previously been translated and published by Hamilton, Ures excuse
for another edition was that Berthollet had added to his original work.71 There
must be doubts about this claim. Berthollets second edition appeared in 1804,
Ures translation was published in 1824. It seems very likely that the translation
was a vehicle for publishing the considerable research into dyes which Ure was
carrying out. There are, in fact, 138 pages of notes which are pure Ure. Passages
from Elements of the Art of Dyeing indicate that he considered that laboratory
experiments were necessary if dyeing were to improve; the manufacturing arts
would only improve if they were guided by science. In the Introduction to his
1824 book, he wrote:
The Arts can make but limited progress, when they are directed merely
by a blind practice. Thus, they have remained for several centuries in
nearly the same state in China and in India. But if artisans be guided by
the knowledge of those properties which have been investigated by phys-
ics, and its complement, chemistry, there is no boundary to the perfection
which they may reach. How many advantages has that nation, so power-
ful by its industry, derived from Watt, Wedgwood, Henry, and some other
philosophers. In this respect a happy revolution has been affected among
ourselves. Our manufacturers are no longer intrusted to ignorant work-
men. In the greater part of them are found to be enlightened individuals,
well informed philosophers, to whom indeed we must have recourse, if
we wish to excite the progress of the useful arts, and remove the obstacles
which stand in their way.72
It becomes apparent from Ures remarks at the end of volume two, that he was
conducting his own experiments on dyes, not just translating Berthollets text.
For example, when considering the relation between chemical change and
color in indigo, he wrote:
though not very successfully. See Cuthbert Gordon, Memorial of Mr. Cuthbert Gordon,
Relative to the Discovery and Use of Cudbear, and Other Dying Wares (London: s.n., 1784).
71 C.L. and A.B. Berthollet, Elements of the Art of Dyeing [] Translated from the French []
With Notes [] by Andrew Ure, 2 vols. (London: Thomas Tegg, 1824), vol. 2, xxiv.
72 Ibid., vol. 2, p.1.

While engaged in these experiments, I discovered that if the action of

sulphuric acid upon indigo be stopped at a certain point, a new sub-
stance, altogether different from cerulin, is produced, formed at the
instant that indigo changes from yellow to blue by the action of sulphuric
acid.73
Concerning alternative chemical substances to alum as mordants, he indicated

clearly that he had been conducting tests of his own: Although all researches
hitherto made have been ineffected [sic] to find a substitute for alum, we have
nevertheless made trial of a great number of substances with wool.74 The on-
going nature of his experimental work to create a particular color is clearly
understood by this statement: We propose to determine the chemical nature
of the combination formed upon wool by cochineal, tartar, and a solution of
tin, and to make known the result of our enquiries upon the colour of scarlet.75
As if to emphasise his hands-on activity, the 1841 edition of Elements of the Art
of Dyeing, published seventeen years later, has as its subtitle: A New Edition,
Revised and Corrected by an Experienced Practical Dyer and Calico Printer.
A number of others were making knowledgeable contributions to dyeing
in or near Glasgow, one being Walter Crum (1796-1867), who bridged the aca-
demic and industrial worlds.76 He attended Glasgow University, studying under
Thomas Thomson. His university career culminated in a paper published in
Annals of Philosophy of 1823 on the subject Indigo.77 This contains a good deal
of detail about his laboratory experiments and refined analytical technique.
Thereafter he joined his family calico printing business at Thornliebank, now
73 Ibid., vol. 2, p.372.

74 Ibid., vol. 2, p.324.
75 Ibid., vol. 2, p.326.
76 Anon., Obituary Notices of Fellows Deceased, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London
16 (1868): viii-x (The intimate knowledge that Mr Crum thus acquired combined with his
general scientific attainments, enabled him to introduce many useful improvements into
his own business and increase the excellence of its manufactures.). For details of Crums
interest in the theory of dyeing, see Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Agust Nieto-
Galan, Theories of Dyeing: A view on the long-standing controversy through the works of
Jean-Francois Persoz, Natural Dyestuffs and Industrial Chemistry in England, 1750-1880,
eds. Robert Fox and Agust Nieto-Galan (Canton: Science History Publications, 1999),
3-24.
77 Walter Crum, Experiments and Observations on Indigo, and on certain Substances
which are produced from it by means of Sulphuric Acid, Annals of Philosophy (February
1823): 81-100.

352 Anderson
a Glasgow suburb. But he continued to have scholarly urges and he published

various papers pertinent to dyeing, Between 1830 and 1861 he regularly offered
papers to the Philosophical Society of Glasgow. In 1844 he was appointed a
Fellow of the Royal Society of London. In that same year, he proposed a theo-
retical interpretation of the interaction between cotton fibers and natural
dyes, which brought him into contention with the French color chemist, Jean-
Franois Persoz (1805-68), who held an alternative theory.78 Though primarily
a manufacturer, Crum maintained scientific contact with Thomas Thomson,
Michael Faraday, Jean-Baptiste Dumas, Alexander von Humboldt and Justus
von Liebig. As mentioned above, it is indeed difficult to categorize his position,
whether as an academic or an industrialist.
Conclusion
There are large gaps in our knowledge of the contribution made by academic
chemists to the Scottish industrial world, in the case here, of dyeing in Scotland
in the pre-synthetic dyestuffs era. It is indisputable, however, that academe
made a distinctive contribution. In this particular case, and probably others as
well, it is not unreasonable to challenge the theses of Rupp, Bowden and
Matthias, but equally to question the extent to which Kleins technoscience
label is applicable, in determining the degree of separation or interlacing of
the roles of academic chemist and industrial practitioner. Joseph Black, in one
of his lectures, made a most telling statement about his personal attitude to
their relationships, which veers the argument somewhat more towards Kleins
view than that of Matthias et al.
I call every man a Philosopher who invents anything new or improves any
business in which he is employed even the Farmer who considers the
nature of different soils or makes improvements on the ploughs he uses,
I must call a Philosopher, though perhaps you can call him a Rustic one.
Nor am I inclined to give much credit to those men who shut up their
Closets in study and retirement have obtained the appellation of Learned
Philosophers they in general puzzle more than they illustrate, they are
78 Walter Crum, On the Manner In which Cotton Unites with Colouring Matter, Philosoph-
ical Magazine 24 (1844): 241-46; Bensaude-Vincent and Nieto-Galan, Theories, pp.8-14
(see note 76).

wrapt in a veil of Systems and of Theories and seldom make improve-

ments or discoveries of Use to Mankind.79
79 Quoted in Margaret C. Jacob and Larry Stewart, Practical Matter: Newtons science in the
service of industry and empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 116-7; This
quotation comes from lecture notes taken by Lowell Edgworth, who probably attended
the 1795-96 final course given by Black, with Hopes assistance.

354 Anderson

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Lissa Roberts and Simon Werrett, 2018|doi 10.1163/9789004325562_001

For use by the Author only | 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV

Cultural Dynamics of Science

Lissa Roberts (Science, Technology and Policy Studies (STePS), University of

Miruna Achim (Universidad Autnoma MetropolitanaCuajimalpa,

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cds

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Cover illustration: The Dissolution, or The Alchymist producing an Aetherial Representation.

For use by the Author only | 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV

Introduction: A More Intimate Acquaintance1

1 Household Oeconomy and Chemical Inquiry35

2 The Case of Coal57

4 Spreading the Revolution: Guytons Fumigating Machine in Spain.

6 Relations between the State and the Chemical Industry in France,

For use by the Author only | 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV

7 Between Industry and the Environment: Chemical Governance in

8 Renegotiating Debt: Chemical Governance and Money in the Early

9 How to Govern Chemical Courses. The Case of the Paris cole de

10 Teaching Chemistry in the French Revolution: Pedagogy, Materials

11 The Subversive Humphry Davy: Aristocracy and Establishing

12 Wholesale Pharmaceutical Manufacturing in London, c.1760 c.1840:

13 Chemical Glasgow and its Entrepreneurs, 1760-1860311

14 Relations between Industry and Academe in Scotland, and the Case of

Bibliography of Secondary Sources 355

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For use by the Author only | 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV

Finally, I want to acknowledge what an enormous pleasure it has been to

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3.1 Anon., Trade Card of Scanegatty, Machine Inventor and Demonstrator of

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6.1 Request for a privilege: decision-making route181

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Bernadette Bensaude Vincent

Jos Ramn Bertomeu-Snchez

John R.R. Christie

Joppe van Driel

For use by the Author only | 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV

Frank A.J.L. James

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finishing a monograph that examines the historical relationship between

For use by the Author only | 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV

Introduction: A More Intimate Acquaintance

Power, transformation, promise, subjugation: terms that might easily be

Lissa Roberts and Simon Werrett, 2018|doi 10.1163/9789004325562_002

For use by the Author only | 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV

For use by the Author only | 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV

joined (finally) by chemistry in a second industrial revolution during the final

For use by the Author only | 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV

of chemistry are increasingly interested in the materials and material objects

Materials and Material Objects

Given the centrality of materials and material objects to chemistry, attending

For use by the Author only | 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV

increasingly engaging with materials qua materials. Historians of early modern

For use by the Author only | 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV

For use by the Author only | 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV

For use by the Author only | 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV

masse.21 The ranks of chemical practitioners, often trained in newly auto-