Chemistry and Publishing

The autumn meeting of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry was held on 26 October 2006 in the Science Museum Lecture Theatre. This half-day meeting examined various aspects of chemistry and the written word from early modern times to the present.

The first paper entitled “'Arcana publicata vilescunt': Early Modern Chymistry and the Publication of Secrets” was given by Dr Peter Forshaw of Birkbeck College, University of London. In his paper, Dr Forshaw put forward a different perspective on the early beginnings of alchemical printing. He began with the few incunabular publications following the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century and then moved on to the gradual appearance of medieval and early modern works in the early sixteenth century. He subsequently examined the growth of Paracelsian literature in the later sixteenth century and showed how anti-Paracelsian texts helped to promote the Paracelsian cause. Although at first sight there appeared to be an abundance of publications, by looking at the subject headings in the published records of the Frankfurt Book Fair between 1564 and 1600, the fluctuating status of alchemical publications was demonstrated. For example, it was not until 1572 that a category “Medici et Chemici Libri” (Medical and Chemical Books) appeared in these catalogues. Subsequently the term “chemici” reappeared and disappeared until 1594 when the category “Libri cum Medici, tum Chemici” became a permanent presence in the catalogue. Dr Forshaw then discussed the popularity of emblematic texts in the seventeenth century and stressed how their contents contain much of interest for anyone researching the early history of chemistry.

The words from the title of the paper “Arcana publicata vilescunt” – (mysteries or secrets published are made profane) provided the focus for the remainder of the paper. This phrase is found on the title page of the first edition of the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (1616), an alchemical allegory by the early Rosicrucian and later Silesian father, Johann Valentin Andreae. This is a rather paradoxical message to find on the title page of a book, alchemical or otherwise, as the sentiment expressed is surely antithetical to printing as the public dissemination of knowledge. Both the Chemical Wedding’s author and its editor, Johann Friedrich Jung, were familiar with the work of another published alchemist with similar qualms about “breaking the seal of hermetic silence”, the German Christian-Cabalist, Divine Magus and Physico-Chemist, Heinrich Khunrath (1560-1605) and it is most likely that they found this phrase in one of his works on matter theory, On Primordial Chaos. In both the Chemical Wedding and On Primordial Chaos, there is a tension between the secretiveness of alchemical transmission, where arcane were passed from master to disciple, and the desire to promote the subject, disseminate knowledge, or at least present the appearance of possessing knowledge. This latter aspect was significant as individuals sought to assert the originality or primacy of their own insights to a wider audience, not only of fellow practitioners but also presumably to potential clients and patrons.

Professor David Knight of the University of Durham then spoke about “Publishing Chemistry in the Regency”. In the advertisement to the first volume of Annals of Philosophy (1813), Thomas Thomson remarked that some readers in the course of the year had “complained that too great a proportion of papers [had] been devoted to chemistry”. The claim on the journal’s title-page was indeed that it was devoted to chemistry, mineralogy, mechanics, natural history, agriculture and the arts – so it might seem that the grumblers had a point. However, Thomson’s retort was “that, like all other journals of the present day, our Annals must contain a greater proportion of Chemistry, which is making rapid progress, than of those sciences which are in a great measure stationary”.

In his paper, Professor Knight, looked at Annals as a vehicle for chemistry, and compared it with the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions and the Royal Institution’s Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature and the Arts; taking the Regency to be a bit longer than its actual decade of the 1810s. This was a time when the offprint began to be a feature of scientific communication, and various early examples were circulated amongst the audience. It was also a time of major transition in publishing, as we find in William St Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Copyright law was relaxed, and, as decades of world war came to an end in 1815, paper and printing became cheaper, and books ceased to be luxury items. As cased bindings, lithography, woodcuts, clichés and stereotyping began to come in, such developments all made science more accessible through the medium of publication. The paper concluded with a few remarks about the journal Thomson edited with his nephew Robert twenty years later, Records of General Science. In all, the paper provided an idea of how this progressive science of chemistry and news of its development at home and abroad was put across to the public in the days before specialist journals appeared. Although these had already begun in France with the Annales de Chimie in Lavoisier’s time, in more-backward Britain they came later.

The third paper “Chemical News in the Chemical News: Publishing, Property and Secrecy in Late-Nineteenth-Century Chemistry” was given by Dr Jim Mussell, also of Birkbeck College, University of London. Chemical News was a long-running, relatively cheap publication which described itself on its frontispiece as “a journal of practical chemistry in all its applications to Pharmacy, Arts, and Manufactures”. This sub-title was actually retained from the journal’s predecessor, the Chemical Gazette, when it was launched in 1859 by William Crookes. From these beginnings, Chemical News ran weekly until it folded in 1932. While such longevity is not unique amongst nineteenth-century science periodicals, it was certainly not usual. As a result, Chemical News, even at a relatively modest 12 pages for much of its run, constitutes a major archive not only for those interested in chemistry, but also for those interested in the history of scientific publishing itself. In his research, Dr Mussell’s interest is in the periodical as an object and especially in the ways in which the mobility of these objects allows them to participate in various cultural formations. By focussing on Chemical News at the level of genre, Dr Mussell explored how a relatively cheap, scientific weekly participated in the wider marketplace. Like all periodicals, Chemical News is defined by its periodicity: as a weekly, it was well-positioned to capitalize on breaking events, circulating them quickly to a diffuse audience. Through using this periodicity, Dr Mussell then explored exactly what Chemical News thought was chemical news.

In the nineteenth century the proceedings of scientific societies tended to be published monthly, a periodicity that reflects the relatively stable status of this often peer-reviewed content. However, in order to capture the dynamism of scientific practice, whether in the form of emergent ideas, products, and inventions, or indeed the unsettled process of their debate, a more rapid periodicity is required. It is no coincidence that many of the most successful scientific weeklies such as English Mechanic, Chemist and Druggist, Electrical Review, Mechanics’ Magazine all had vibrant correspondence columns, and some were entirely based around reader contributions. It is also no coincidence that many of them are trade journals, as weekly periodicity allows them to match the working week – connecting both with the weekly wages of some of their readers, and the closing prices of the markets. Although when Chemical News was launched there were fewer weeklies than towards the end of the century, Dr Mussell suggested that the principles that link form and time remained the same and the eventual adoption of weekly publication by titles such as the Chemist and Druggist, Photographic Journal, and Pharmaceutical Journal reflected broader cultural trends. As technologies of production and distribution increased, both the amount of scientific material available and the facilities for its dissemination also increased. As the century got faster, in other words, so too did the news.

The final paper “RSC Journals Publishing: a view from the 21st Century” was given by Dr Richard Kidd, Manager of Editorial Production Systems at the Royal Society of Chemistry. Dr Kidd has been with the RSC for 18 years, working on
a variety of publishing products and projects such as the RSC journals archive. In this project over 3 tons of published material was digitised, a quantity of 250GB, and two-thirds of this material was owned by the Royal Society of Chemistry. The newest journal included was Soft Matter and Molecular BioSystems, which began in 2005. The oldest journal to be digitised was Memoirs and Proceedings of the Chemical Society, which was first published in 1841. Having digitised all of the Memoirs and its successor titles, Dr Kidd remarked how the publication was surprisingly consistent in its format. One article which did prove a challenge was “Observations on the Circular Polarisation of Light by Transmission through Fluids” by H. B. Leeson, which was published in the second volume of Memoirs and Proceedings of the Chemical Society. This article was accompanied by a dial of two moveable discs of paper held together with a split pin, to assist readers with replicating the experiments. Incorporating the movement entailed in this dial required animating the digitised version of the insert. When, in the third volume of Memoirs, another Leeson article included yet another dial, even greater difficulties were encountered as this insert required animation in three-dimensions. Fortunately for the digitizers, this was the final article of this sort that Leeson published.

Dr Kidd proceeded by highlighting some of the more interesting and unusual items which appeared in the journals published by the institutions which later became part of the Royal Society of Chemistry. When reporting on its fiftieth anniversary in 1891, the Chemical Society published both the seating plan for its Jubilee Dinner, which was attended by the Queen, and also the menu card. Those attending the dinner were rewarded with an extravagant menu which included oysters and an impressive wine selection. During the Second World War, the Faraday Society published the contents of a cable from the Soviet Scientists Anti-Fascist Committee, which protested against the Nazi atrocities and praised recent victories by the Red Army. Meanwhile, the importance of understanding developments in Russian chemistry for UK practitioners was highlighted by the Journal of the Royal Institute of Chemistry in 1963 when it published a series of articles teaching useful chemical terms in Russian to its readers. By providing an enjoyable tour through of the contents of many of the journals included in the RSC journal archive, Dr Kidd highlighted not only the changes in the science of chemistry since 1841 but also the changes in the nature of publishing, while drawing further attention to a resource which is of immense use to both chemists and historians of chemistry.

Anna Simmons