Michael Combrune, Peter Shaw and Commercial Chemistry: the Boerhaavian Chemical Origins of Brewing Thermometry

Abstract

Recent work by David P. Miller indicates how the chemical activity of a much-studied figure, James Watt, has been obscured by the retrospective assigning of heat studies in general to physics. This paper applies a similar analysis to the work of Michael Combrune, a philosophically inclined brewer of the mid-eighteenth century; remembered chiefly within the brewing profession as a pioneering thermometrist, Combrune understood the thermometer as the central diagnostic tool in a chemically derived system of management that is now largely forgotten. In the course of retrieving this scheme, I display its origins in the chemistry of Herman Boerhaave as mediated by his unauthorised translator Peter Shaw, Combrune's intellectual patron, whose association with the gentlemanly representatives of artisanal trades derived from his concern to establish "commercial chemistry." I next demonstrate Combrune's considerable conceptual independence and forcefully reductive quantitative agenda, and finally outline three reasons why later practitioners abandoned his scheme: the displacement of its supporting authorities, the affording of independence to users, and the acceptance of its practical outcomes as simple givens — all circumstances that might befall a "mainstream" as easily as a "marginal" theory.