Instruments and Experimentation in the History of Chemistry

From the days of the alchemists through the creation of the modern laboratory, chemistry has been defined by its instruments and experimental techniques.

Historians, however, have tended to focus on the course of chemical theory rather than on the tools and experiments that drove the theory.

This volume moves chemical instruments and experiments into the foreground of historical concern, in line with the emphasis on practice that characterizes current work on other fields of science and engineering.

The principal themes are: change and stability, precision, the construction and transformation of apparatus, the dissemination of instruments, and the bridging of disciplines through instruments.The essays are divided into three chronological sections: the Practice of Alchemy (reviewing the material and iconographic evidence as well as the written record and the issue of reproducibility of alchemic experiments), from Hales to the Chemical Revolution (discussing significant 17th- and 18th-century innovations as well as smaller innovations that cumulatively extended the reach and improved the quality of chemical experimentation), and the 19th and Early 20th Centuries (discussing the increasingly important role of innovative apparatus as chemistry grew into the first large-scale modern scientific discipline).