Chemical Sciences: History and Sociology

Sholem G 1974 The Messianic Ideology in Judaism and Other

Essays in Jewish Spirituality. Schoken Books, New York
Social Compass 1982 About the theory of charisma, Special
issue, XXIX
Weber M 1947 The Theory of Social and Economic Organization,
1st American edn. Oxford University Press, New York
Weber M 1956 Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. J. C. B. Mohr,
Tu$ bingen, Germany
Weber M 1956\1965 Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. J. C. B. Mohr,
Tu$ bingen, Germany, Vol. I, Chap. V, Sect. 1 [trans. The
Sociology of Religion. Methuen, London]
Weber M 1956\1968 Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. J. C. B. Mohr,
Tu$ bingen, Germany, Vol. I, Chap. III, Sect. 10 [trans.
Eisentstadt S N (ed.) Max Weber on Charisma and Institution
Building. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Weber M 1956\1994 Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft J. C. B. Mohr,
Tu$ bingen, Germany, Vol. I, Chap. III, Sect. 1112a [trans.
Heydebrand W (ed.) Sociological Writings. Continuum, New
York]
Weber M 1958 Politick als Beruf. Duncker and Humbolt, Berlin
Weber M 1985 Wissenschaft als Beruf. In: Weber M (ed.)
Gesammelte AufsaW tze zur Wissenschaftslehre. J. C. B. Mohr,
Tu$ bingen, Germany, pp. 582613
A. Zingerle (ed.) 1993 Carisma. Dinamiche dellorigine e della
quotidianizzazione-Charisma. Dynamiken des ursprungs und
der verallta$ glichung Special issue of Annali di Sociologia
Soziologisches Jahrbuch 9

S. Abbruzzese

Chemical Sciences: History and Sociology

The chemical sciences are concerned with specic
kinds of matter, and their transformations. The
boundaries of chemistry, notably with physics and
biology, are however social constructions varying in
dierent times and places. Chemistry is very ancient,
going back into remote prehistory with cookery, the
preparation of drugs and dyes, the baking of clay into
ceramics, and metal-working. Its evolution into a
science, where theory guides practice, and into a
profession, with formal courses and qualications,
happened in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
(Brock 1992).

1. Ancient Technologies
From very remote times, people have been using
techniques and processes which we would call chemical, involving careful control, as part of a craft or art
passed from father to son, mother to daughter, or
master to apprentice. Indeed the word chemistry is
supposed to come from an ancient Egyptian word
chem meaning earthy: the Arabic denite article Al
was added to yield our alchemy, and dropped to give
chymistry and then by 1700, chemistry. Early
technologies, culminating in triumphs such as the
making of porcelain and Japanese swords, include
features we would regard as magical; but since the

course of chemical reactions depends upon the purity

of components, those involving natural products are
hard to predict and to repeat. Recourse to prayers,
incantations, and curious additives should not amaze
us.

2. Metallurgy, Alchemy, and Pharmacy

Alchemy, with its objective of converting base metals
into gold, which chemist-historians portrayed as
absurd or dishonest, was not unreasonable. Nature
was believed to be perfecting metals within her womb,
and the alchemist was simply speeding up the process.
If everything was composed, as Aristotle believed, of
the four elements Earth, Water, Air, and Fire in
dierent proportions, then changing these ratios
would transform one substance into another, and lead
might become gold. If, alternatively, Democritus and
Epicurus were correct in believing that in appearance
there were colors, smells, and tastes, but in reality
atoms and void; then because lead, gold, and everything is made up of dierent arrangements of these
ultimately similar atoms (or corpuscles), again conversions are possible.
Alchemy began in Egypt and Babylonia, and also in
China: with emphasis both upon making gold (or
maybe something resembling it) using an elixir to
expedite the process, and of prolonging and enhancing
life by giving humans the noble and permanent
qualities of gold. Pharmacy grew out of trial and error,
but in the West the maverick Swiss doctor calling
himself Paracelsus (14931541) brought alchemy into
it. He introduced metallic compounds into previously
herbal medicine, notably for the treatment of the new
disease, syphilis, which was ravaging Europe. He
publicly burnt the books of the great Greek physician,
Galen, and saw chemical study as essential for medicine. His career outraged the medical establishment,
but the powerful and dangerous new remedies proved
irresistible to doctors and patients, and medical
schools became centers for chemistry.

3. The First Chemical Theories

Until the mid-twentieth century, it was believed that
alchemy was abandoned by the rational thinkers of the
Scientic Revolution; especially Robert Boyle (1627
91) and Isaac Newton (16421727). Close examination
of their manuscripts (Principe 1998) shows that both
of them were in fact adepts, copying out and trying
alchemical recipes, and believing that they were well
on the way to a transmutation. But they were also
adherents to the atomic view of matter, seeing hard
and indestructible corpuscles or particles as fundamental. These formed very stable primary mixts, such
as iron, gold, or sulfur, which in turn combined with
each other. Unlike gravity which was universal,
chemical anity was elective: some substances reacted
together, others did not. J. W. Goethe wrote a novel,
1659

Chemical Sciences: History and Sociology

Electi
e Anities (1809) exploring chemical and human bonding; chemists in eighteenth-century
Germany and Sweden (the center of chemical activity)
drew up tables of anity in attempting to predict the
outcome of reactions.
From Germany also came the rst chemical paradigm. G. H. Stahl (16601734) proposed that everything which would burn contained phlogiston (Greek,
ammable): this idea brought order into chemical
understanding, whereas atomic ideas were vague and
untestable. Moreover, in Germany Lorenz Croll in
1778 began the rst chemical journal, Chemische
Annalen, bringing into being a chemical community
there (Hufbauer 1982). His example was followed in
France and England by Antoine Lavoisier and
William Nicholson.

4. La
oisiers Re
olution
Lavoisier (174394) was a wealthy man, prominent in
the privatized tax system of France; his spare time he
devoted to chemistry, in a splendidly equipped laboratory. Becoming a member of the Royal Academy
of Sciences, the small salaried body charged with
scientic research, he resolved to reform the language
and theory of chemistry. As in Carl Linnaeus botany,
names should be international, clear, and free from
changeable theory: while phlogiston should be replaced
as incoherent. Stahl saw phlogiston emitted in burning;
Lavoisier by contrast (in a classic paradigm shift) saw
something absorbed from the air, leading to an
increase in weight. He drew upon the work of Joseph
Priestley (17331804), who had isolated vital or
eminently respirable air in a British tradition of work
on gases. Lavoisier christened this substance oxygen
(Greek, sour) because he believed that it was also
responsible for acidity (generalizing from analyses of
nitric and sulfuric acids). Water was a compound of
oxygen with another gas, hydrogen: such elements
were the basis of chemistry, rather than the hypothetical corpuscles which might concern physicists, or
the Earth, Water, Air, and Fire with which Priestleys
friend Thomas Jeerson (17431826) structured his
book on Virginia. In 1794 Lavoisier was executed as a
tax proteer during Robespierres Reign of Terror,
while the left-wing views of Priestley (who continued
to disagree with him over phlogiston) led to his exile in
Pennsylvania. But their new and exciting chemistry
survived and prospered (Bensaude-Vincent and Abbri
1995, Knight and Kragh 1998).

5. Electricity and Chemistry

In 1799 Alessandro Volta (17451827) showed that
electricity was generated when two metals were dipped
into water; there was no need for any animal tissue, as
Luigi Galvani (173798) had supposed. His paper was
an alarm bell, as Humphry Davy (17781829) put it,
1660

and chemists everywhere repeated and extended the

experiments. But results were confusing until in 1806
Davy did the careful experiments conrming his
intuition that pure water is decomposed electrically
into oxygen and hydrogen only. Just as Newton had
found that gravity was the force behind planetary
motions, so Davy inferred that electricity and chemical
anity were manifestations of one power. In 1807 he
used this insight in isolating the light and reactive
metals potassium and sodium, and (putting Britain
back on the chemical map) went on to demonstrate,
with chlorine, that Lavoisier had been wrong about
acidity.
Davy had been appointed to the newly-founded
Royal Institution in Londons fashionable West End,
where he proved himself a lecturer of enormous
attractiveness, making professing a performance art
(Golinski 1992, Knight 1998). The fees which men and
women paid to join, and hear him, supported a
research laboratory in the basement. Davy became
one of the rst people in Britain to make a living out of
chemical research, which had previously perforce been
a hobby for an aristocrat like Boyle, a minister of
religion like Priestley, or a doctor like Galvani. At the
Royal Institution, Davy trained (in a kind of informal
apprenticeship) his successor, Michael Faraday
(17911867), and the pursuit of Davys insight that
chemical anity was electrical continued there.
With Lavoisier, chemistry had acquired an exact
language, closer to algebra than to the evocative terms
of the alchemists; and it had testable theories, for
example of acidity. It is the science of the secondary
qualities, of colors, smells, and tastes; it promised to be
useful (chlorine for disinfecting and bleaching, for
example, and oxygen for chest complaints); and it
proved popular everywhere. With its connection to
electricity, it became the dynamic fundamental science,
concerned not just with matter but also with force;
there was as yet no unied science of physics. Mechanical explanations seemed shallow; while chemistrys
connections with heat, light, and electricity went deep.

6. A Mature Science
J. J. Berzelius (17791848) in Sweden used the unsystematic Davys insight to create a structure for
chemistry, dualism, based on the idea that every
compound had a positive and a negative part. He also
picked up John Daltons idea that each element was
composed of atoms, identical to each other and
dierent from those of other elements: Berzelius
arranged these in an electrochemical series from
oxygen, the most negative, to potassium. The number
of elements known steadily grew through the century
with improvements in chemical analysis.
Berzelius trained a number of chemists by having
them to stay in his house, where Anna the housekeeper
washed up dishes and asks. But in the 1820s Justus
Liebig (180373) at the University of Giessen launched

Chemical Sciences: History and Sociology

the rst graduate school for turning out a stream of
chemists with Ph.D. degrees (Brock 1997, Morrell
1997). Liebigs success depended upon his having
perfected apparatus for analyzing organic compounds; his students usually did their research on
some natural product, and published it in the journal
which became called Liebigs Annalen after its editor.
They found jobs, particularly in the dye industry (Fox
and Nieto-Galan 1999) and in pharmacy which were
both becoming based in science rather than craft skills;
many went to England, a rich country with a poor
educational system. With the collapse of Napoleons
empire in 1815, the University of Berlin had emerged
dedicated to research and teaching (Wissenschaft und
Bildung), and the various German states began to
compete in their opera houses and universities. They
followed Giessen, building better laboratories and
bidding for star chemists. Schools began teaching
chemistry, textbooks were needed (Lundgren and
Bensaude-Vincent 2000), and academic careers opened
up in a eld now largely separated from medicine.
Universities in Britain and the USA followed the
German model, usually demanding German research
experience from professorial candidates.
In the 1850s chemists could agree about what things
were made of, but not about formulae. Dalton had
supposed that water must have the simplest possible
formula, HO; Davy and others, notably Amadeo
Avogadro (17761856), went for our H O formula
because two volumes of hydrogen combine#with one of
oxygen. An atom of oxygen thus weighed either 8 or 16
times as much as one of hydrogen, and such uncertainties ran through the whole list of elements. In
1860 August Kekule (182996), a pioneer in working
out chemical structures such as that of benzene, called
for an end to this confusion through an international
conference, which met in Karlsruhe. It was poorly
organized, but afterwards chemists came to accept the
reformulation of Avogadros arguments by Stanislao
Cannizzaro (18261910). With agreed atomic weights,
tabular arrangement of the elements became possible;
and the most successful was the Periodic Table of
Dmitri Mendeleev (18341907).
His predictions of the properties of some hitherto
undiscovered elements were startlingly accurate; and
with the table (as he hoped) the student had to
remember fewer brute facts. From its position an
elements properties would be known. It is striking
that so many bright ideas, from Dalton via Cannizzaro
to Mendeleev, came from people on the periphery
rather than in the great scientic centers.

7. The Fragmentation of Chemistry

In death, we rot: for we (and animals and plants) are
then subject to chemical reactions which go dierently
while we are alive. Most people believed in a vital force
which maintained life. It is claimed that Friedrich
Woehler (180082), pupil of Berzelius and friend of

Liebig, destroyed this vitalism when in 1828 he

synthesized urea. In fact the chief interest in this
reaction was that ammonium cyanate and urea turned
out to have the same atomic constitution: their
dierent properties were the result of dierent
arrangements (Brooke 1995). So the story has more to
do with understanding molecular structure; but the
synthesis, and the work of Liebig and his students in
analysis, showed that no gulf separated organic and
inorganic worlds. Nevertheless, by 1848 when
Berzelius died, it was clear that dualism did not t
organic compounds well, and as the chemical community grew it was convenient to separate organic
chemistry, based upon carbon, from the inorganic
branch. The expansion of universities led to new
professorships and laboratories devoted to the specialism of organic chemistry, from which in the twentieth
century emerged biochemistry.
Chemists had relied upon balances, test-tubes,
condensers, blowpipes, and other apparatus dicult
to manipulate. The chemist had to think with his (or
occasionally her) ngers, and was proud of skills in
glassblowing. Chemistry was essentially experimental,
exciting and often dangerous, attractive. Then in 1860
came collaboration between Robert Bunsen, inventor
of the controllable gas burner, and the physicist G. R.
Kirchho, who found that elements heated to a high
temperature have characteristic spectra. Analysis
could be done by physical methods, and this optical
spectroscopy was the rst of what is now an armory of
such techniques which has transformed the appearance of chemical laboratories (Morris and Travis, in
Krige and Pestre 1997, pp. 71540).
About the same time the new science of thermodynamics, based on energy and its transformations,
brought together into classical physics sciences which
had been separate, or had been part of the empire of
chemistry, Davy and Faraday had been pioneers in
what became a new specialism, physical chemistry,
investigating energy changes in reactions, and the
mechanisms, rates, and reversibility of processes. The
leaders here were Wilhelm Ostwald (18531932) and
J. H. Vant Ho (18521911) who launched a journal,
and promoted academic positions and laboratories.
The new profession of chemical engineering was
closely linked to the rise of physical chemistry.
Whereas early in the nineteenth century chemists had
been called in only as consultants or trouble shooters
when something went wrong, by the end of it they were
employed full-time (Bud and Roberts 1984). In industry, intellectual property belongs generally to the
company and not the individual, and is secured by
patents (Travis et al. 1998).

8. The Reduction of Chemistry

The nineteenth century was the heyday of chemistry,
the golden age in which it came to maturity and
seemed fundamental. The chemist and spectroscopist
1661

Chemical Sciences: History and Sociology

William Crookes (18321919) followed Faraday in
studying cathode rays, but J. J. Thomson in 1897
identied them as composed of subatomic corpuscles,
soon named electrons. The subsequent nuclear atomic model of Ernest Rutherford (18711937)for
whom all science was physics or stamp-collecting
and Niels Bohr (18851962) accounted not only for
spectra, but also for the Periodic Table. Chemistry
became a branch of physics (Nye 1996); the properties
of gold could in principle be calculated from data
about protons, neutrons, and electrons, though in
practice the chemistry laboratory is essential. This
meant that chemistry lost its glamor; the chemist was
as ubiquitous as ever, an essential member of the
teams or groups so characteristic of twentieth-century
science, but playing a service role (Knight 1995).
The number of chemists has continued to grow, as
has the number of new substances unknown in nature
which they have synthesized. Davy wrote of the
chemist being a godlike creator, and this creativity is
nowadays celebrated by chemists such as Roald
Homann. The engineer or architect must remember
the law of gravity, but to mourn that architecture has
been reduced to physics would be absurd: like the poet
or the painter, the chemist has to work within
constraints, but that is a feature of lifeindeed making
creativity possible (Homann and Torrance 1993).
Homann, born in Poland, surviving World War II,
escaping to the USA, learning chemistry there, and
doing research which brought him a Nobel Prize,
exemplies another trend. Chemistry reached the West
via Islam. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
it was a European science, with Germany the most
important center by 1900. Papers in German journals,
and research experience in Germany, counted high in
any pecking order; but already the USA was becoming
a major power in science. There in 1916 G. N. Lewis
proposed the electronic theory of chemical combination, much developed by his pupil Linus Pauling.
Since 1945 the USA has been the center of things,
making the English language and publication in US
journals the key to prestige in research. Two world
wars, and Hitlers coming to power between them, are
part of the reason for this; equally important has been
American prosperity, itself dependent on science.
Chemistry has steadily gone West.

chemical societies, their academic and professional

aspects sometimes in tension, were formed and enjoyed prestige (Russell et al. 1977). Although pollution from new chemical industries (as from older
ones like tanning) was palpable and led to legislation,
the expectation was that the chemists would be able to
cure it. It did not happen: Rachel Carsons book The
Silent Spring (1962) alerted the world to the dangers.
So in the late twentieth century, despite successes such
as plastics, and the array of new drugs available for
medicine, chemistry is seen as boring and its applications as threatening. Chemists feel misunderstood
and underappreciated.
Twentieth-century chemistry is dominated not only
by universities in the Giessen tradition, but also by
big-spending international companies with research
laboratories, now turning towards biotechnology
(Galentos and Sturchio, and Kevles, in Krige and
Pestre 1997, pp. 22752, 30118) and by the military.
Research is carried on no longer by a Woehler or a
Crookes, on their own or with an assistant, but by
teams of people possessing various skills. Chemistry
has been taught in an impersonal way, with less handson experiment in a world more conscious of health and
safety.
This is a strange eventful history, which was until
the mid-twentieth century mainly written by participants who looked for progress. They had the advantage of being familiar with chemicals and apparatus; but professional historians of science have
come to look more closely at contexts and careers. The
history which emerges deserves to be known beyond
the world of chemists.
See also: Archaeometry; Behavioral Neuroscience;
Biomedical Sciences and Technology: History and
Sociology; Ceramics in Archaeology; Cognitive
Neuroscience; History of Science; Human Sciences:
History and Sociology; Physical Sciences: History
and Sociology; Research and Development in
Organizations; Scientic Disciplines, History of;
Technological Innovation

Bibliography
9. The Status of Chemistry
Davy and Liebig (Rossiter 1975) wrote famous books
on agricultural chemistry, and in the nineteenth
century chemical fertilizers and pesticides were unequivocally welcomed in a Europe of food shortages.
Lavoisier improved French gunpowder, and later
chemists produced high explosives making possible
engineering achievements and also formidable weapons. All these things were seen as benets. National
1662

Bensaude-Vincent B, Abbri F 1995 La
oisier in European

Context. Science History, Canton, MA
Brock W H 1992 The Fontana History of Chemistry. Fontana,
London
Brock W H 1997 Justus
on Liebig: the Chemical Gatekeeper.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
Brooke J H 1995 Thinking about Matter. Ashgate Variorum,
Aldershot, UK
Bud R, Roberts G K 1984 Science
ersus Practice. Manchester
University Press, Manchester, UK
Fox R, Nieto-Galan A 1999 Natural Dyestus. Science History,
Canton, MA

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e Psychology of

Golinski J 1992 Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and
Enlightenment in Britain, 17601820. Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, UK
Homann R, Torrance V 1993 Chemistry Imagined.
Smithsonian, Washington, DC
Hufbauer K 1982 The Formation of the German Chemical
Community 17201795. California University Press, Berkeley,
CA
Knight D M 1995 Ideas in Chemistry. Athlone, London
Knight D M 1998 Humphry Da
y: Science and Power. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
Knight D M, Kragh H 1998 The Making of the Chemist.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
Krige J, Pestre D 1997 Science in the Twentieth Century.
Harwood, Amsterdam
Lundgren A, Bensaude-Vincent B 2000 Communicating Chemistry: Textbooks and their Audiences, 17891939. Science
History, Canton, MA
Morrell J 1997 Science, Culture and Politics in Britain, 1750
1870. Ashgate Variorum, Aldershot, UK
Nye M J 1996 Before Big Science. Twayne, New York
Principe L 1998 The Aspiring Adept. Princeton University Press,
Princeton, NJ
Rossiter M 1975 The Emergence of Agricultural Science: Justus
Liebig and the Americans, 18401880. Yale University Press,
New Haven, CT
Russell C A, Coley N G, Roberts G K 1977 Chemists by
Profession. Open University Press, Milton Keynes, UK
Travis A S, Schro$ ter H G, Homburg E, Morris P J T 1998
Determinants in the E
olution of the European Chemical
Industry, 19001939. Kluwer, Dordrecht, The Netherlands

D. Knight
Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.
All rights reserved.

Chess Expertise, Cognitive Psychology of

Expertise may be dened as the ability of some
individuals to perform at levels vastly superior to the
majority. For historical and scientic reasons, research
on chess expertise has played a major role in the study
of expertise in general. The rst reason is that chess
itself has a very long history (the modern form of
Western chess goes back to the sixteenth century).
This has made possible an extensive study of the game,
leading to the development of several theories about
the proper way to play by leading players such as
Steinitz, Nimzowitch, and Euwe. Next, the rules of
chess oer a well-specied and constrained environment that is easily formalizable. Chess is also a game
exible enough to allow multiple experimental
manipulations. In addition, the presence of a rating
system (the Elo system) allows one to estimate players
skill quantitatively and precisely. Compared to most
other domains of expertise, this ability to measure skill
is a denite advantage. Contrast this situation with,
for example, the study of experts in physics or
medicine, where researchers have to use very rough
classications such as novice, intermediate, and ex-

pert. Finally, there has been rich cross-fertilization

between psychological research on chess expertise and
research in formal elds like computer science and
mathematics.

1. Chess in the Sciences

1.1 Chess in the Formal Sciences
Unsurprisingly, chess has been a favorite subject of
study in the formal sciences. On several occasions,
chess has been used to explore aspects of game theory;
in a celebrated paper published in 1912, Zermolo
formalized the concept of game tree and introduced
the method of backwards induction with reference to
chess. The game has also been of interest to mathematicians, for example in the eld of combinatorics.
However, most of the research has been made in
articial intelligence and computer science. If one
ignores chess automata, most of which turned out to
be fraudulent, computer chess started in earnest in
1949 with Shannons paper describing a computer
program able to play an entire game, either by full
search to a specied depth or by selective search. Since
that seminal work, researchers have extensively
explored various techniques for improving the
eciency of search algorithms or to make search more
selective (see Newell and Simon 1972, Levy and
Newborn 1991). The crowning achievement of the
quest for ecient search algorithms (the so-called
brute-force approach) was the development of Deep
Blue, the rst computer to beat a world champion in
an ocial match. Deep Blues special-purpose hardware allowed it to consider up to 200 million positions
per second. By contrast, a nice example of the selectivesearch approach is a program written by Pitrat (1977),
which uses heuristics to cut the search tree down to the
same size as humans (about 100 positions). Recently,
computer chess has seen a strong interest in database
theory and in the development and testing of machinelearning algorithms.

1.2 Chess in the Social and Beha
ioral Sciences

Expert behavior in chess has attracted the attention of
various social and behavioral sciences, including
psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and sociology. Questions
such as Does extreme practice of a skill lead to
madness? Why are women weaker than men at
chess?, Can oedipal compulsions lead to creativity?,
and Why is there a high proportion of Jews among
top players? have been asked in these elds, although
the answers oered are often controversial (Dextreit
and Engel 1981, Holding 1985). In addition, chess has
sometimes been used not as an object of study, but as
1663

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences

ISBN: 0-08-043076-7