Materials in the History of Science and Technology (1700-1850)

In the past two decades, historical studies of the relations between the experimental and observational sciences and the arts and crafts in the early modern period have placed instruments at the forefront of historical inquiry. Such studies, as well as more general accounts of the reconfiguration of learned knowledge and practice during the early modern period, have demonstrated the extent to which the generation of learned natural knowledge crucially depended on instruments understood as resources constructed out of, and working upon, wider society. The project “Materials in Early Modern Science and Technology” shifts attention towards new kinds of material objects: natural raw materials and substances processed in the workshop and laboratory. In the early modern period, metals, salts, acids, dyestuffs, gunpowder, alcoholic beverages, ceramics, glass, soap, animal and vegetable remedies and so on were simultaneously commodities and objects of scientific inquiry. Like clocks, telescopes and balances, these materials bridged the artisanal and the academic worlds. As they were objects shared by artisans and savants, they had many different significances and uses, according to how they were deployed in different practical or epistemic contexts. Traveling from sites of commercial production and consumption to academic institutions, and vice versa, they spurred the generation of both learned and technical knowledge.

For example, vegetable materials extracted from plants, such as gums, resins, and balsams, were commodities of the apothecary trade, often imported from foreign countries. 17th- and 18th-century apothecaries sold these materials as raw materia medica or used them as ingredients in older Galenic compounds and newer chemical remedies. As chemical remedies were products of chemical operations, academic chemists also studied these materials. In 18th-century chemical teaching and experimenting, these materials were explored on the one hand as remedies, with the aim of enhancing their pharmaceutical virtues, and on the other hand as natural bodies that provided information about the composition and economy of plants. Chemists’ analyses of plant materials thus often pursued the dual goal of contributing to learned and artisanal knowledge.

Focusing on materials, the project further moves from institutions and activities that have been unambiguously viewed as typical of “experimental philosophy,” thus as foundational to modern scientific inquiry, towards sites in which the practice of the arts and crafts intersected with many different types of learned culture. This dual shift broadens our notion of material culture by taking materials seriously as the subject of historical knowledge, but also suggests some revisions to the standard historical picture of the emergence of the natural sciences. A viewpoint still powerful within the field of history of science, which situates experimental philosophy and the history of physics at the center of attention, is here replaced by a decentered approach that takes into account a broader range of forms of making and knowing in the early modern period, including natural history, chemistry, pharmacy, and medicine. All of these latter cultures resist a clear categorization under the rubric of experimental philosophy. By analyzing the making, uses and meanings of materials between 1600 and 1800, the project examines how different cultures of natural history, experimental history (historia experimentalis), and experimental philosophy intersected both with artisanal labor and craftsmanship and with everyday practices of commerce and consumption.

1. Book project (Ursula Klein, in collaboration with Wolfgang Lefèvre, Department I):

Shifting Ontologies: Materials in Eighteenth-Century Science (forthcoming, MIT Press)

The book interweaves three historical and philosophical themes: the ontology of materials, modes of classifying materials, and the science of materials from the late 17th century until the early 19th century. In so doing, it presents a novel approach to the history of technological and scientific objects in general, and the history of chemistry in particular.

In the 18th century learned inquiries into materials also took place in many areas such as chemistry, mineralogy, botany, architecture, engineering and pharmacy. Among these areas, chemistry was the only scientific culture during the eighteenth century where materials were studied persistently, comprehensively, and from multiple perspectives. 18th-century chemists treated materials as useful commodities, perceptible objects of nature, and entities carrying imperceptible features. They invested commodities with new meaning when they ordered them according to natural origin, analyzed their invisible components, and explored their affinities in chemical transformations. In so doing, chemists constituted objects of inquiry that reached out to cultures of natural history and experimental philosophy. Chemical substances were multidimensional objects of inquiry that existed at the intersection of arts and crafts and learned inquiry, and amalgamated perceptible and imperceptible, useful and philosophical, technological and scientific, social and natural features. The many faces of 18th-century chemical substances challenge our current understanding of objects in the history of science and the distinction between scientific and quotidian technological objects.

Our main approach to 18th-century chemists' ontology of materials is the scrutiny of modes of identification and classification. Identifying and classifying things are human activities that structure the world, by ordering single things into kinds of things and by establishing relationships between the different kinds. Studies of classifications inform historians of what objects were handled in the past and how the historical actors understood these objects; that is, they lay bare the rough ontological structures of the past.

In the course of the 18th century, chemists' ontology of materials shifted in various ways in keeping with changes in their classificatory practices. Yet well into the 19th century, in large areas of chemistry modes of individuating, identifying and classifying materials followed artisanal and naturalistic points of view. It was not until in the 1830s, with the emergence of the new experimental culture of organic chemistry, that chemists introduced novel ways of drawing boundaries of single substances and of identifying and classifying them. The pure laboratory substances procured in carbon chemistry were embedded in a web of new types of experiments and work on paper with chemical formulae that did not exist outside academic chemistry. As material things, however, these expert substances remained potential commodities - a potential that began to be realized some twenty years later with the rise of the synthetic dye industry.

18th-century chemistry has often been studied as a science of atoms, corpuscles, and Newtonian forces. Instead, our approach depicts the chemistry of that period as a science of materials. The material substances studied by 18th-century chemists were for the most part commodities procured, sold, or tested in apothecary's shops, foundries, assaying laboratories, arsenals, dyeing manufactories, distilleries, coffee shops and so on. Even the few substances that were genuine inventions or discoveries of the academic laboratory were soon transferred to the mundane world, where they found application as remedies and other goods. But chemists also studied substances as natural objects that carry imperceptible features. We argue that chemically processed substances and natural raw materials played such a central role in 18th-century chemistry because they lent themselves to multifarious ways of inquiry: descriptive (in the historia tradition), technological, and philosophical. Our focus on substances allows us to grasp issues traditionally highlighted as characteristic of the science of chemistry - composition, affinities and similar entities akin to the imperceptible objects of experimental philosophy - alongside themes traditionally treated as centerpieces of chemical technology. We thus obtain a larger picture of chemistry from the late 17th century until the early 19th century, outlined with broad strokes but extending from its mundane artisanal practices to experimental and natural histories all the way to conceptual or philosophical inquiry.

Speaking of 18th-century chemistry almost inevitably brings up the theme of the chemical revolution. The Lavoisierian chemical revolution of the last third of the 18th century has certainly been the most debated theme in the history of chemistry. It also spurred controversies in the history and philosophy of science more broadly. If we are right to claim that 18th-century chemical substances were multidimensional objects of inquiry, which invited chemists to switch from perceptible properties and commercial uses to imperceptible features, our approach should also provide new insight into this crucial historical event. This is indeed the case. The two main empirical studies presented in parts II and III of the book - the classification of pure chemical substances in the Méthode de nomenclature chimique of 1787, which has always been regarded as a central achievement of the chemical revolution, as well as chemists' classification of plant materials before and after c. 1790 - challenge the current understanding of the chemical revolution. Seen from our new perspective, Lavoisier and his collaborators reaped the rewards of a century. In so doing, they introduced reforms of concepts, theories, analytical methods, classificatory structure and language. Yet they did not initiate an ontological rupture. Chemists continued to live in largely the same world of objects before and after the Lavoisierian reforms.

A striking result of our research was the discovery of just how diverse 18th-century chemists’ classificatory practices were. 18th-century chemists did not order materials under a single conceptual umbrella or paradigm, and they did not create one comprehensive taxonomic system. Apart from the many different ways of classifying materials in contexts of technological inquiry or “applied chemistry,” we found two main differences in their ways of classifying materials in contexts of conceptual investigations: classification according to chemical composition, and classification according to provenance and perceptible properties. This striking difference in 18th-century chemists' mode of classification of materials informs the organization of the book and its division into two main empirical parts - part II analyzing the domain of materials classified according to chemical composition, and part III studying plant materials classified according to provenance and perceptible properties. A long introductory part I tackles historical and philosophical questions concerning the kinds of materials studied by 18th-century chemists, chemists' collective practices of studying these objects, and the uses of studies of classification for historians and philosophers of science. In a final conclusion we examine the role played by materiality for the existence and maintenance of the major difference in chemists’ order of materials.

2. Workshops and edited book project (Ursula Klein in collaboration with Emma Spary, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge): The Making of Materials: Science and Technology in the Early Modern Period (1500-1800).

The book project, which is based on two workshops, brings together the contributions of fourteen well-known scholars working on different aspects of the relations between sciences and arts in the production of material substances in the early modern period. The materials studied in the volume have one outstanding feature in common: all of them were materials that were applied (produced and consumed) in the everyday world and in the world of the arts and crafts, while at the same time being objects of scientific inquiry.

The relationship between the arts and crafts and the natural sciences has received far more attention for the period after 1800; the generalized effects of scientific intervention in the reform of “technology” have received detailed attention thanks to intense interest in the causes and characteristics of the Industrial Revolution. Yet with some exceptions, this means that the nexus between the sciences, manufacturing and commodification remains comparatively neglected for the period between 1500 and 1800, and unjustly so given the widespread involvement of scientifically trained experts in manufacturing output. Both the science of artisanal experts and the artistic reform agendas of savants are poorly known and often little studied. They fall between the history of science with its traditional focus on theoretical knowledge, and the history of technology with its emphasis on modernity and the “big picture” of industrialization. The volume builds upon a body of work that has gone some way to redress the balance by exploring the rise of an 18th-century consumer society, with the attendant transformations of commerce and production. The involvement of scientific knowledge in artisanal practices, as well as government initiatives to reform the arts and crafts, may also relate to the formation of a literate public for whom scientific knowledge was an indispensable social asset. Contributions to the volume thus bring together the wider world of production, commerce, commodification and everyday life, the relations between government, artisanal and merchant activities, and the microcosm of scientific practice and literary endeavor.

The contributors come from a range of disciplines; they include historians of science and medicine, cultural historians, historians of technology and sociologists of science. Their essays emphasize two principal themes: the importance of the materiality of things, and the interconnections between science, technology and society. Most, perhaps all, of the materials studied in the volume - among them metals, gunpowder, dyestuffs, milk, distilled liqueurs, timber, cosmetics, vegetable remedies - appear as unusually complex “thick things” which challenged the historical actors’ collective skills and routine techniques, procured unforeseen effects, and often resisted expressed goals of production and established schemes of understanding. Gunpowder, for example, though apparently made from the same ingredients mixed together in standard ways, did not always produce the same phenomena. Likewise, the outcome of dyestuff production was uncertain and required ongoing quality control, while plant and animal materials, such as balsams or milk, resisted straightforward identification by 18th-century chemical analysts. Examples like these point to the role played by the materiality of things, and they raise many questions concerning the underdetermination of human labor and actions by (historically situated forms of) the social and conceptual. They also ask for a scrutiny of our application of the terms “arts and crafts” (only later called “technology”), and “natural sciences” in writing the history of the early modern period. Not all early modern practitioners of the arts and crafts dealt equally with materials whose handling demanded extensive skill, care and knowledge; not all materials were equally challenging or recalcitrant. While some artisans and craftspeople, like academic experimenters, developed or implemented forms of planning, quality control, testing, registering of data, chemical analysis and analogous activities, not all did so. Some early modern artisans preserved older standards of skill and routine practices, while others engendered new varieties of learned expertise, or borrowed externally constructed standards of learned practice and conduct to reform their art.

Such an approach entails a greater sensitivity to actors’ boundaries between practice and theory, learned and unlearned knowledge. Early modern learned polemics against unlettered, routine and machine-like artisans operating outside scientific institutions have all too often blinded historians to the relations between social space and forms of epistemological and practical expertise. Further problematizing the issue have been long-standing moral hierarchies among learned elites which privileged public benefit over personal gain, and 19th-century scientistic hierarchies which privileged theory, abstraction and epistemic purity over practice, materiality and the embeddedness of objects in intersecting learned, commercial, and everyday worlds. Such asymmetries continue to color our understandings of the relationship between learning and the arts and crafts, materiality and science even when we are aware that forms of conceptual knowledge and bodily skills in matter transformation were distributed in many different ways among social groups. In the volume we seek to replace the extant polarization between craftsmen and philosophers in the early modern period by a more fine-grained classification of makers and knowers. The studies assembled in the volume address a range of problems. They ask how forms of learned knowledge and bodily skills were involved in the making of materials such as gunpowder, liqueurs, or chemical remedies. They explore the interactions between governments, artisans and academicians in the production of materials, and consider the ways in which the social economy of conceptual knowledge and skills changed between the 16th and 18th centuries. They investigate the relations between the commodification of nature and materials in the 18th century, and the social, material and cognitive networks of scientific and artisanal practices. They show how the scientific expertise and social authority of different makers of materials were mediated by social place, access to print or patronage, wealth, conduct and self-fashioning. By exploring the relations between modes of production and consumption of materials, the essays throw new light on the ways in which changes in production, consumption and commodification affected scientific expertise or social authority over materials.