The Making of Materials

Science and Technology in the 17th and 18th centuries

The overall goal of this workshop is to explore the question of how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century savants and craftsmen, or artisans, interacted in the production and exploration of materials – such as dyes, metals, gunpowder, ceramics, glass, food, medicines, chemical laboratory substances – and how this interaction shaped the ways of making and knowing in science and technology.

Participants

Christoph Bartels, Forschungsinstitut für Montangeschichte (Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum), FB Ältere Bergbaugeschichte, Germany
Science and technology in 17th and 18th centuries mining and metal production: The Harz example (abstract)

Ernst Homburg, University of Maastricht, Department of History, Netherlands
Crossing boundaries between the mineral and the vegetable kingdoms: colorists and their materials, 1600–1800 (abstract)

Sarah Jansen, Harvard University, Department of History of Science, USA
Producing Timber (abstract)

Ursula Klein, Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Germany Plant materials in eighteenth-century chemical laboratories (abstract)

Seymour Mauskopf, Duke University, Department of History, USA
Practice and debates regarding the manufacture, testing, and improvement of gunpowder in eighteenth-century France and England (abstract)

Agustí Nieto-Galan, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Departament de Filosofia, Spain
From craftsman tradition to academic theories: The 'science' of natural dyestuffs in the eighteenth century (abstract) 

Barbara Orland, Kompetenzzentrum "Geschichte des Wissens", ETH-Zentrum, Switzerland
Milk - The Stuff of Practical Experiences. A Case Study in Eighteenth-Century Animal Chemistry (abstract) 

Marcus Popplow, Brandenburgische Technische Universität Cottbus, Technikgeschichte, Germany
"To employ each of nature's products in the most favorable way possible." Promoting useful knowledge about natural resources in the German economic Enlightenment (abstract) 

Pamela H. Smith, Pomona College, History Department, USA
Making as knowing: Craft as natural philosophy (abstract)

Emma C. Spary, Wilburton, United Kingdom
Distilling learning: Liqueurs and the luxury marketplace in eighteenth-century Paris (abstract)

Science and technology in 17th and 18th centuries mining and metal production: The Harz example

Abstract
Since prehistoric times mining and metal production are often large-scale operations. During the 17th and 18th centuries modern scientific and technical methods and tools were not at least developed in the framework of this production branch. Its protagonists urgently needed insight into (and reliable knowledge of) natural processes in the fields of Mineralogy, Geology, Chemistry and Physics as well as the development of powerful motors and technical networks to master the problems of winning minerals in rapidly deepening shafts, of haulage, drainage, ore processing and smelting.

The Harz-mountains were characterized by a bundle of natural conditions most favourable to an early, intense and most successful application of science-based networks. Thus the region rapidly developed to become an experimental field for science and technology attracting as well international scholars as generating expertise and experts of international influence. Till 1800 the mining and metal production in the Harz region and the related branches of science and technology, developed since 1775 at the mining academy at Clausthal/ Harz, gained international reputation and world-wide influence.
 
 
 

Crossing boundaries between the mineral and the vegetable kingdoms: colorists and their materials,
1600–1800

Abstract
During the 17th and 18th centuries calico printing went through several radical changes. Before the 1670s, inorganic materials such as paints and printing inks, similar to those used in book printing, were the most common colouring matters used in European textile printing. With the introduction of Indian textile printing techniques, from the 1670s onwards, vegetable dyes such as indigo and madder entered the calico printshops. In the course of the 18th century this shift from the mineral to the vegetable kingdom was reversed again. First, there were mordants such as alum and iron oxides, which were used in combination with the vegetable dyes. Later, potent redox agents, such as copperas and orpiment, were introduced, as were strong acids, alkalis and bleaching agents. To be used properly, these new materials demanded skils in analytical chemistry, that went beyond the knowledge of their natural histories.

In this paper, I will focus on these changes in the material base of calico printing. A central issue will be the analysis of the concepts used by the colourists (i.e. the colour-makers/chemists in calico printworks) in relation to these material changes, esp. with respect the mineral or vegetable nature of the substances involved.
 

Producing Timber

Abstract
In the German countries of the 18th century foresters and cameralist administrators joined forces to increase the production of timber. A new bureaucracy as well as a new science emerged, forestry science. Core of this science was the taxation of forests, a set of procedures to take stock and to calculate expected future growth, as well as the new concept of 'sustainability'. The paper will explore interactions of scientific and non-scientific practices of timber production, the embeddedness of these practices in social and economic contexts including the artisanal uses of different kinds of wood, and the significance of this knowledge beyond the field of forestry.
 

Plant materials in eighteenth-century chemical laboratories

Abstract
In the eighteenth century materials extracted from plants in chemical laboratories were hybrid, artisanal and scientific, objects. Academic chemists, chemical entrepreneurs, and apothecaries procured plant materials – such as resins, gums, fat and essential oils, salts and sugar, alcoholic spirits – for a variety of reasons: For studying the composition of plants; for extending and refining "historical" knowledge about plant materials; for improving the production of commodities. Based on historical analyses of eighteenth-century plant-chemical experiments, the material culture of chemical laboratories, and the careers of chemists and apothecaries, I will argue in the paper that eighteenth-century French and German plant chemistry was an early form of technoscience.
 

Practice and debates regarding the manufacture, testing, and improvement of gunpowder in eighteenth-century France and England

Abstract
During the second half of the eighteenth century, the craft of gunpowder making came increasingly under the scrutiny of scientifically-trained government managers and overseers in France and England. This was the result of government responses to the crises in supply of good gunpowder in the almost continuous warfare that started with the Seven Years' War in 1756. Yet gunpowder is, in the pungent phrase of Ken Alder, a "thick thing," a material recalcitrant to easy rational improvement. Just about every aspect of gunpowder fabrication, testing, and improvement was contested by powder makers and scientific mentors.

In this paper, I shall discuss the practices and debates concerning the making and testing of gunpowder, and concerning would-be improvements in these procedures. I shall focus particularly on the activities of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier in France, and William Congreve in England.
 

From craftsman tradition to academic theories: The 'science' of natural dyestuffs in the eighteenth century

Abstract
As I tried to analyse in my book Colouring Textiles (2001), dyeing practices in workshops and manufactures did not fit within the framework of the eighteenth-century theories of matter, but they were more than a simple blind reproduction of old craftsman routines. Projects to standardize the art of dyeing were intended to introduce new criteria, which would avoid the unsatisfactory traditional workshop tests such as the odour of the vat, the odour and the colour of the foam, and the visual aspect of the vat during the day and at night. As a result, quality control tests, isolation of colouring matters, oft-repeated experiments, and classification of swatches, acted as genuine strategies to rationalize the art, as a particular "science" of natural dyestuffs.

In my paper I will try to describe the way in which prestigious French academic chemists such us Du Fay, Hellot, Macquer, Berthollet, tried to standardize and later introduce the new practices in the workshops, and the kind of responses they obtained. It is worth mentioning Du Fay's reappraisal of the regulations of bon teint (fast colours) and petit teint (fugitive colours) – established at the end of the seventeenth century by the Minister Colbert–, Jean Hellot's débouillis, Macquer's analytical procedures for vegetable dyestuffs, and Berthollet's Elements de l'art de la teinture (1791). On the other side, we know that some voices from the workshop culture reacted in a very critical way. This was, for example, the case of Homassel, the chef d'atelier at the Manufacture royale des Gobelins in the 1780s. He was in favour of Colbert's regulations and Hellot's quality tests, but rejected Berthollet's new theories of dyeing.

Using the former examples, I shall discuss how this new "science" of natural dyestuffs in the eighteenth century plays an important role in our understanding of the different perceptions of scientific practices in craftsman and academic cultures. It provides new evidences to see that the process of transfer of knowledge between the two groups often do not follow a simple pattern of passive reception.
 

Milk - The Stuff of Practical Experiences. A Case Study in Eighteenth-Century Animal Chemistry

Abstract
The theme of my paper is analyses of milk, some of which are already documented for the late seventeenth century, but many more of which are documented for the second half of the eighteenth. Chemists of the period analyzed this natural material and treated it with a wide range of reagents, but they regarded it much as nonchemists did. Their starting point was they saw milk as an "animal" bodily fluid, whose composition they understood in accordance with direct experience - meaning that milk was composed of whey, butter, and cheese. Identifying butter and cheese as fundamental building blocks of milk was based on a concept of substance that has completely vanished today. In the eighteenth century, substances occuring in nature possessed what Gaston Bachelard has called a substantial quality, making it difficult to imagine that something that one could make from a substance such as milk was not already present in the substance to begin with. One could attempt to make a body soluble, to refine it, or to transform it, in the service of utility; one could, as in the case of butter or cheese, attempt to accelerate or direct a substance's inherent powers; but the material identity of the substance remained the same.

Thus a whole set of formulations related to practice framed the operations that chemists undertook with milk. Experimental methods intended to make better known the substance-specific properties of the milk of various animals and of women were also multifarious. Particularly interesting in that regard is that chemists did not explain the substantial quality of milk (and its fundamental building blocks) in terms of the components that they had come across by analysis. Similarly to physicians, they explained observed phenomena on the basis of the received understanding of complex processes of interconversion of fluids within the body. Physiological knowledge about digestion and the uptake of nourishment in the body constituted the explanatory framework that chemists employed in their efforts to understand milk's nature.
 

"To employ each of nature's products in the most favorable way possible." Promoting useful knowledge about natural resources in the German economic Enlightenment

Abstract
In the second half of the eighteenth century, efforts to intensify the exploitation of natural resources were raised to a level hitherto unknown. On the domestic front, this implied the optimal use of each and every product of the flora and fauna that might serve as food or raw materials in the various crafts. In this context, a particular ideal of "useful knowledge" was propagated, with heightened attention to scientific standards and practical experience alike.

Focusing on the situation in the German territories, this contribution analyzes such efforts fostered by economic and patriotic societies and disseminated in a rapidly growing journal culture. Special attention is paid to the different forms of knowledge involved in this process, with its ultimate goal of securing the well-being ("Glückseligkeit") of both individual and the state.
 

Making as knowing: Craft as natural philosophy

Abstract
Drawing on examples from artisanal practices in painting, goldsmithing, potting, and mining, this paper will demonstrate that making constituted knowing for some early modern artisans and savants. Indeed, much natural inquiry was carried out in artisans' workshops, a phenomenon attested to by scholars who flocked to workshops in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This paper aims to show the intersections between craft practices and natural enquiry, and it will argue more generally that some attitudes to nature were shared across a very broad spectrum of society.
 

Distilling learning: Liqueurs and the luxury marketplace in eighteenth-century Paris

Abstract
The market for composed liqueurs reached a high point in 1760s Paris, when they were advertised as products which demonstrated the advance of modern knowledge in tandem with the connoisseurial skills of the distiller. Behind advertisers' appeals to a polite literate clientele lay a sharp dispute over commercial terrains and methods of production. Distillation and liqueur-making were processes permitted to members of several rival guilds. Corporate and commercial rivalries fuelled controversies over techniques of production and evaluation of liqueurs, and defined the nature of proper knowledge about distillation, as well as how and by whom (or what) it could be produced. In such disputes the literate public continued to be the principal audience for innovative claims about the relations between commerce, production, knowledge and technologies.