French Chemistry

22 November 2001, Conference Room of the Science Museum and Imperial College Library

The Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry held a meeting on 22 November 2001 in the Conference Room of the Science Museum and Imperial College Library entitled "French Chemistry". The meeting was held to honour the memory of Dr W.A. Smeaton, a former Chairman of the Society, who died earlier in the year.

The meeting opened with the personal appreciation of Bill Smeaton that was given by Professor Robert Siegfried when the Dexter Award of the American Chemical Society was posthumously awarded to Bill in August. Professor Siegfried was unable to come to London to give the appreciation to the memorial meeting, so it was presented by the current Chairman of the Society, Professor W.H. Brock. Siegfried recounted some of the occasions on which he had met Bill, and described how enjoyable and fruitful he had found these encounters.

The first paper, "The Lavoisier 'School' and the Society of Arcueil" was given by Professor Maurice Crosland. Professor Crosland opened by remarking that it seemed appropriate to commemorate Bill Smeaton by speaking about French chemistry in the late 18th century and the early 19th century. Bill's scholarly publications explored the life and work of Lavoisier and he wrote a book on Fourcroy, but most of his research was directed towards another of Lavoisier's collaborators, Guyton de Morveau. The combination of these names gives rise to the question of whether there was a Lavoisier 'school', a term used by Fourcroy in his little-known éloge of his former colleague. Certainly it is worth looking at Lavoisier's associates, several of whose help he formally acknowledged. The question was raised as to why Lavoisier was so successful in founding a new chemistry. Part of the answer must lie in the help and support he received from various colleagues. Yet probably the first real school of chemistry is to be found in the Society of Arcueil, which met just outside Paris under the rule of Napoleon and under the patronage of Berthollet, who provided scarce laboratory facilities for a group of talented young men including Gay-Lussac, Thenard and Dulong. Under the new French system of higher education in science the research schools of J.B. Dumas and Adolphe Wurtz made important contributions to chemical education and have been studied by Leo Klosterman and Ana Carneiro respectively at the University of Kent at Canterbury. This has helped to provide a French dimension to what is traditionally regarded as the most famous research school of the 19th century, that of Justus Liebig at Giessen.

John Perkins gave a paper entitled "Chemistry in France, 1750-1800: Perspectives from the Provinces". Most historians have perceived chemistry in eighteenth-century France as an exclusively Parisian practice. This was not so. Between 1750 and 1789 chemistry courses, mainly intended for a public audience, were set up in some 30 provincial French towns. They are the most visible manifestation of the growing public deployment of chemical expertise, not only in education, instruction and enlightenment, but also in various branches of industrial production, in commerce and agriculture, in public health, urban administration and justice. During these decades a new domain of scientific practice, chemistry, was created in the major cities and towns of the French provinces. Its creation was bound up with the development of urban cultural institutions, with the striking growth of a new cultural market, the need for new forms of expert knowledge in response to changing demands on urban governance, and with new industrial and commercial opportunities. But it also owed much to the private initiative of a number of chemical practitioners. Its creation was inseparable from the attempts of a number of apothecaries and physicians to build careers outside medicine and pharmacy. In making their public lives they made their private enthusiasms into a public science. By 1789 chemistry was a feature of the cultural landscapes of many provincial cities, evidence for a wider and more dynamic French chemical community than historians have hitherto suspected. Exploring this emergent chemical domain in the provinces and the processes through which it was constructed can throw new light on larger questions: the relationship between Paris and the provinces; between science and the Enlightenment; the shape and dynamics of the Chemical Revolution in France; between science and the state at the end of the Ancien Regime and during the Revolution; and the role of chemical knowledge and practice in technological change.

Dr Bob Ward paid tribute to Bill Smeaton's qualities as a teacher and gave an account of the seminar group on the history of chemistry that met regularly in London for almost 40 years. He then delivered a paper on "P.-J. Pelletier's Development of Vegetable Chemistry". Towards the end of the eighteenth century it was realised that the most promising chemical method of investigating vegetable matter was to find what might be extracted from it with a range of solvents. Pharmacists played an important role in this, notably those associated with the School of Pharmacy in Paris. Nevertheless, a key discovery was made in Germany by Sertürner in 1817. He established that a crystalline substance obtainable from opium (which he named Morphium) was actually a base, the first example of what came to be known as alkaloids. In Paris Pelletier was already engaged in the analysis of medicinal plants, conducting his experiments with great care and subjecting the products to biological assay. Stimulated by the discovery of a vegetable base he rapidly isolated several others in collaboration with Caventou, including Quinine from Cinchona bark in 1820. In the form of its sulphate Quinine rapidly established itself in medical practice. During the year 1826 a total of 90,000 ounces were manufactured to meet the demand and this may be regarded as the start of the modern pharmaceutical industry. The proliferation of new alkaloids meant that they were not easy to distinguish from each other. This was a particular concern of Pelletier, who in the course of his work made increasing use of quantitative data to discriminate between substances, which contributed to the development of organic chemistry. Discussion arising from the paper focused on the issue of what is the basis on which one may claim to identify a new chemical substance. There is much scope for the historical study of how such claims have been made (and continue to be made) in different experimental contexts.

The meeting concluded with a paper by Dr Frank Greenaway entitled "A personal encounter with French chemistry: the 1950 French Scientific Instrument Exhibition at the Science Museum". Dr Greenaway remarked that 1950 was the year in which Bill Smeaton began his own connection with the French science of a much earlier period. The exhibition was initiated by some French instrument manufacturers who had close connections with the leading French scientific institutions. Using contacts with British scientists who had worked in France, as well as diplomatic channels, they obtained agreement for the Science Museum to house an exhibition of modern instruments and to provide necessary services. Frank Greenaway, then an Assistant Keeper in the Chemistry Department of the Museum, was charged with overall liaison. The paper referred incidentally to many housekeeping problems, such as Customs and Excise clearance, and, on the technical side, the provision of power supplies. Many persons, now characters in the history of science of the past century, appear in the archives of the Exhibition as attending various related formal and social events. Of 190 exhibits about one in ten had a clear connection with chemistry, while many could obviously be used in chemical studies. Nearly half were contributed by the leading French research organisations: the long-established CNRS, the more recent ONERA, and the then young Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique. The other half were contributed by individual firms, some showing evidence of close collaboration with French Government organisations. Older connections can be noticed. One of the French organisers, exhibiting apparatus for testing explosives, is revealed as having worked during the War in the Ministry of Home Security. Scrutiny of the catalogue throws up many other small details that might repay further examination. Greenaway's own recollection of the Exhibition is of the enjoyment of his first hands-on work in the physical evidence of the history of modern science and of the thrill of having his first contact, through letter of thanks, with a Nobel prize winner, Frédéric Joliot-Curie.

John Hudson