ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Chemical Revolution in American Chemistry Textbooks of the Early 19th Century

• In Event: Dissent, Translation, and Appropriation in Chemical Textbooks, 1760-1881

English Abstract

The Chemical Revolution had traditionally been portrayed as fait accompli by the turn of the 19th Century. This paper challenges that portrayal by looking at how the Lavoisier’s “antiphlogistic” chemistry was presented in American textbooks, c. 1807-20. By the 1790s knowledge of the new chemistry was common among chemists in the U.S., but the early 19th-century brought an increasing skepticism of the new French chemistry as the critiques of Joseph Priestley, Humphry Davy and Thomas Thomson became more widely known. Remarkably, this skepticism was ingrained into textbooks published in the United States during this time. In this paper, I will look at two examples: James Woodhouse’s 1807 edition of William Nicholson’s translation of Jean-Antoine Chaptal’s Elemens de chimie and James Cutbush’s Philosophy of Experimental Chemistry (1813). Both of these works presented the French chemistry as the most current chemical system, but also provided substantive critiques by pointing out its inconsistencies, mistakes, and weaknesses. Thus, American chemistry students were exposed to the new chemistry but simultaneously learned its flaws and limitations.

Author

• john C Powers, Virginia Commonwealth University