"One of the most influential chemistry books of the nineteenth century"

March 5, 2022 9:10 PM

Jane Marcet, Conversations on Chemistry [vol. 2], "Caroline: Well, now that we understand the nature of the action of the Voltaic battery, I long to hear an account of the discoveries to which it has given rise. Mrs. B.: You must restrain your impatience, my dear." G.J. Leigh, "The Changing Content of Conversations on Chemistry as a Snapshot of the Development of Chemical Science" [PDF]: "published ... in 1806 ... a tutor Mrs. B and two students, Emily and Caroline, also convey a picture of the political and social atmosphere of that period. Conversations is not a dry text." Letters on writing it & US reception [PDFs]. Marcet's later intro texts on botany and ~physics (or getting there). Others' intro texts: Botany in a Series of Familiar Letters by Priscilla Wakefield and A Compendious System of Astronomy and a text on ~physics (etc.) by Margaret Bryan (boardgame consultant; see also [PDF]).
posted by Wobbuffet (2 comments total)

I was amazed how extensive the list of metals is in the first link dated 1817.

I was also amazed at the quality of the writing and much moreso at the sophisticated quality of the reasoning deployed to reach plausible conclusions from a combination of first principles and a relative dearth of experimental results, some of them apparently quite recent. It was like trying to follow demonstrations in plane geometry. I got lost and had to retrace my steps several times in the discussion of "caloric".

I think it would be amusing to assign a few paragraphs to high school students near the end of their first year of chemistry and ask them to explain exactly how they were wrong in light of what we know now. The discussion of an invisible heat region at one end of a spread of sunlight put through a prism, and a color destroying chemical composition enhancing invisible region at the other is so suggestive of our modern view of light with a small visible section embedded in a much larger spectrum that I kept expecting one of the students to propose it.
posted by jamjam at 2:53 AM on March 6, 2022 [6 favorites]

The discussion of an invisible heat region at one end of a spread of sunlight put through a prism, and a color destroying chemical composition enhancing invisible region at the other is so suggestive of our modern view of light with a small visible section embedded in a much larger spectrum that I kept expecting one of the students to propose it.


Quite! I don't mean this dismissively, but it turns out that even small conceptual leaps aren't obvious until they are, and insight is cheap when you have hindsight!

If you like this, you'll love Classic Kit – A History of Chemistry in around 170 Objects by Professor Andrea Sella, to see how inventive people were before the arrival of quantum mechanics, spectrometers, digital and even analog electronics.....(a couple of these articles are free, then registration required for chemistry world)
posted by lalochezia at 4:05 AM on March 6, 2022 [4 favorites]