Early Laboratories c.1600–c.1800 and the Location of Experimental Science

Abstract

Surprisingly little attention has been given hitherto to the definition of the laboratory. A space has to be specially adapted to deserve that title. It would be easy to assume that the two leading experimental sciences, physics and chemistry, have historically depended in a similar way on access to a laboratory. But while chemistry, through its alchemical ancestry with batteries of stills, had many fully fledged laboratories by the seventeenth century, physics was discovering the value of mathematics. Even experimental physics was content to make use of almost any indoor space, if not outdoors, ignoring the possible value of a laboratory. The development of the physics laboratory had to wait until the nineteenth century.

Acknowledgements

I owe a special debt to Pamela H. Smith, who has corresponded with me on the subject of early laboratories. She was kind enough to show me an advance copy of her more detailed study of early laboratories, due to appear in Early Modern Science in the new Cambridge History of Science series. It was clear to me that her scholarship complemented my more general survey, and I was able largely to avoid duplication of material. Her stimulating study of Becher, reinforced by the detailed studies of experimentation in the seventeenth century by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, encouraged me to produce an earlier draft of this paper. I should thank for their comments members of the Oxford History of Science seminar, where I presented a version of this paper: Robert Fox, Jim Bennett, and John North. I must also warmly thank David Knight and anonymous referees for their comments. Finally, thanks are due to Paul, Michael, and Tess for their timely assistance with serious computer problems.

Notes

Peter Shaw, Three Essays on the Universal Chemistry (London, 1731), 16.

J. Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge (Cambridge, 1998), 31–32. Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening. Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Science (Cambridge, 1983), 230.

Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump; Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 1985, 126–28. See also 383.

E.g., ‘Nature always strives after ‘the better’’, Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption, II, chap. 10, edited by Richard McKeon, The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York, 1941), 527.

William Gilbert, De Magnete, London, 1600, trans. Fleury Mottelay (New York, 1958), e.g. 134–35, 166n.

Henri Moissan, ‘Le four électrique et la reproduction du diamant’, Annales du Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, 7 (1895), 207–36.

J.J. Becher, Physicae Subterraneae Libri Duo, Frankfurt, 1667, 2, quoted by Pamela H. Smith, The Business of Alchemy. Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton, NJ, 1994), 207.

E.g. Aristotle said that natural things (even his ‘elements’), but not artificial things, were subject to change. Physics, Book 1. McKeon (note 4), 238.

Filium Labyrinthi, Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon (Ellis and Spedding), edited by John M. Robertson (London, 1905), 207.

Shapin and Shaffer (note 3), 128.

For a recent discussion of the relevance of divine revelation see: W. Newman and L. Principe, Alchemy tried in the fire. Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago, 2002), 197. In the Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae of Heinrich Khunrath, 1605, the frontispiece shows that before the operator goes to his laboratory, he must first pray in the oratory. (Equal space is given to the oratory and the laboratory in the illustration.) For a useful discussion of the apparatus in the laboratory, see Pamela H. Smith (ref. in Acknowledgements)

Shapin and Shaffer (note 3), 319.

David Gooding, ‘History in the laboratory. Can we really tell what went on?’, 63–82 in The Development of the Laboratory: Essays on the Place of Experiment in Industrial Civilization, edited by F. James (Basingstoke, UK, 1989).

C.L.Berthollet, Recherches sur les lois de l'affinité (Paris, 1801).

R. Jagnaux, Histoire de la chimie, 2 vols (Paris, 1891), vol. 2, 331–32.

Owen Hannaway, ‘Laboratory design and the aim of science. Andreas Libavius versus Tycho Brahe’ Isis, 77 (1986), 585–610. The connection lay in the influence of Paracelsus, that there were not only stars in the heavens but ‘stars within’, another version of the macrocosm/microcosm analogy. Tycho even referred to chemistry as ‘terrestrial astronomy’.

Jole Shackelford, ‘Tycho Brahe, Laboratory design, and the aim of science’, Isis, 84 (1993), 211–30. Libavius was also a conservative Lutheran, hostile to Calvinist influence and, possibly, with some jealousy of Tycho's fortune and aristocratic status. See also: J.R. Christianson, On Tycho's Island. Tycho Brahe, Science and Culture in the 16th Century (Cambridge, 2003).

New Atlantis, Bacon (note 9), 727–32.

In large‐scale industrial operations, such as mining, most processes, including smelting, would be carried out in the open air. For the separation of silver from copper and other impurities, Agricola recommended the construction of a building, which he called an officina. Agricola, De re Metallica (1556), trans. H.C. and L.H. Hoover (New York, 1950), Book XI, 491. The term officina (previously used for monastic workshops) seems to have been in common use by sixteenth‐century metallurgists to denote a kind of laboratory.

Bacon, who usually spoke slightingly of alchemy, nevertheless, on one exceptional occasion, suggested that there might be a use for a ‘still house’ containing furnaces. Even here, however, he could not resist a jibe that this would be fit for the discovery of the philosophers stone. This comment, part of Gesta Grayorum (1594) was made by Bacon as a young man as part of a Christmas entertainment at the Inns of Court, quite distinct from his much later serious philosophical works. Bacon, Works, edited by J. Spedding (14 vols, London, 1857–1874), vol. 8, 335.

A particularly fervent advocate of this thesis was Margery Purver, The Royal Society. Concept and Creation (Cambridge, MA, 1967).

In 1661, Abraham Cowley in an impossibly ambitious scheme spoke of building a whole series of adjuncts, including an observatory and laboratories, but in vain. Again, in 1668, Henry Oldenburg spoke of experiments to be carried out in some future laboratory. Yet, he had to admit that the very limited finances of the Society made this impossible. Earlier, Walter Charleton had suggested that ‘Solomon's house’ might find some expression in the College of Physicians, but this too failed to produce a laboratory. The most tangible realization of ‘Solomon's house’ in the late seventeenth century has been claimed for the (first) Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which actually contained a chemistry laboratory, of which the curators are justly proud. Solomon's House in Oxford. New Finds from the first Museum, edited by J.A. Bennett, S.A. Johnston, and A.V. Simcock (Oxford, 2000), 12–14.

The anatomical theatre might be supplemented by the mortuary. There is a report of a member of the Roman nobility around 1600 keeping ‘a special table in his studio’ to carry out dissections on human bodies at home. Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature. Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, CA, 1984), 213.

Steven Shapin, ‘The House of Experiment in seventeenth‐century England’, Isis, 79 (1988), 373–404.

Shapin and Schaffer (note 3), 336.

From the Latin laborare. An alternative name, occasionally used in the seventeenth and even the eighteenth century, was the ‘elaboratory’ (from ‘to elaborate’)—to denote a place where chemical substances were changed, Joseph Duchesne (Quercetanus), The Practise of Chymicall and Hermeticall Physicke, Written in Latin, trans. Thomas Timme, London, 1605, which reflected the Paracelsian tradition. This is mentioned by F.L. Holmes in his article ‘Laboratory, chemical’ in Oxford Companion to the History of Science, edited by John Heilbron (Oxford, 2003), 441–42.

Findlen (note 23), 217.

Svante Lindqvist, ‘Labs.in the woods’, in The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Tore Frängsmyr, J.L. Heilbron and Robin E. Rider (Berkeley, CA, 1990), 291.

Bacon (note 9), Novum Organum, No. LXIV, 271.

Findlen (note 23), 194.

Ernst Homburg, ‘The rise of analytical chemistry and its consequences for the development of the German chemical profession (1780–1860)’, Ambix, 46 (1999), 1–32 (3).

Trésor de la langue française, Paris: Editions du C.R.N.S., 1983. I believe that the mention of Beguin refers to the excessively rare: Jean Lucas de Roy's edition of Jean Beguin's Tyrocinium Chymicum: Les Elémens de chymie (Paris, 1620).

The narrow gothic windows in the Oxford mid‐nineteenth century chemistry laboratory attached to the Natural History Museum were a distinct disadvantage for practical work, M. Crosland, ‘Difficult beginnings in experimental science at Oxford: the gothic chemistry laboratory’, Annals of Science, 60 (2003), 399–421 (416).

One documented case of the results of poor ventilation was that of George Starkey, who fell ill in 1652 in his laboratory when he was working on mercury and antimony preparations. Newman and Principe (note 10), 97.

C. R. Hill, ‘The iconography of the laboratory’, Ambix, 22 (1975), 102–10.

For a detailed study of the contents of the laboratory, it is necessary to see a coloured version of this illustration such as that provided in William R. Newman, ‘Alchemy, assaying and experiment’, 35–54, plate opposite 43 in Frederic L. Holmes and Trevor H. Levere, eds., Instruments and Experimentation in the History of Chemistry (Cambridge, MA, 1999). The balance was an important tool in the assaying of precious metals. See, e.g., Lazarus Ercker, Treatise on Ores and Assaying [1550?], trans. A G. Sisco and C.S. Smith (Chicago, 1951), 11.

Aaron J. Ihde, The Development of Modern Chemistry (New York, 1964), 262.

Smith (note 7).

Ibid., 228 ff.

He had earlier claimed to have discovered perpetual motion and was viewed with some suspicion by the early Royal Society. Ibid., 59–61.

Because of the blatant commercial motivation, the division of labour, and the factory mentality, this scheme has been noted by economic historians as an anticipation of the eighteenth‐century factory system.

Ibid., 10. At one point in his career, he gave himself the title Commisarius (adjudicator), ibid., 76.

‘Wer nicht Latein kan, wird nicht vor Gelehrt gehalten’, Becher.Methodus didactica, 1668, Vorrede, quoted in ibid., 81n.

Shapin (note 24) noted that a seventeenth‐century laboratory always contained a furnace. Early chemistry was sometimes described as philosophia per ignem.

Lawrence Principe, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and his Alchemical Quest (Princeton, NJ, 1998).

Boyle proudly used such a designation in his famous book, The Sceptical Chymist (1661).

E.g. ‘A Second View of Practical Chymistry’, Universal Magazine, December 1747.

Homburg (note 31), 2 comments ‘From the late Middle Ages to the early nineteenth century the chemical laboratory had undergone few changes’.

Newman and Principe (note 11), 96–100.

A.V. Simcock, The Ashmolean Museum and Oxford Science, 1683–1693 (Oxford, 1984), 7.

Ibid.

Information supplied by a referee.

For the Royal Society scientific collection or museum, see Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society (London, 1667), e.g. 75, 251. Also, Findlen (note 23), 400.

Alice Stroup, A Company of Scientists: Botany, Patronage and Community at the Seventeenth‐century Parisian Royal Academy of Sciences (Berkeley, CA, 1990), pp, 39, 82, 292–3, David J. Sturdy, Science and Social Status. The Members of the Académie des Sciences, 1666–1750 (Woodbridge, UK, 1995), 149–51, Guy Meynell, ‘The Académie des Sciences at the rue Vivienne, 1666–1669’, Archives Internationales d'Histoire des Sciences, 44 (1994), 22–37.

C. Salomon‐Bayet, L'Institution de la science et l'expérience du savant (Paris, 1978), 374.

The members of the section were described as ‘méchaniciens’. (When the term ‘Physicien’ was used, it was most commonly applied to the medical profession [physician]). This confirms the position of mechanics as the oldest branch of modern physics. It is the only ancient and enduring branch of physics listed in a recently published history: W.H. Cropper, Great Physicists—The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking (Oxford, 2001). The explicit recognition of ‘physics’ by the Academy had to wait until 1785. M. Crosland, Science under Control. The French Academy of Sciences, 1795–1914 (Cambridge, 1992), 61.

Diderot and D'Alembert, eds., Encyclopédie, Neufchastel, 1751, art.Chymie. See also Christophe Meinel, ‘Theory or practice? The eighteenth‐century debate on the scientific status of chemistry’, Ambix, 30 (1983), 121–32 (124).

M. Crosland, ‘Research schools of chemistry from Lavoisier to Wurtz’, British Journal for the History of Science, 36 (2003), 333–61.

On the importance of the balance in Lavoisier's chemistry, see Bernadette Bensaude‐Vincent, Lavoisier, Mémoires d'une révolution (Paris, 1993), chap. 8, 197 ff. On the importance of apparatus more generally in Lavoisier's chemistry, see Trevor H. Levere, ‘Balance and gasometer in Lavoisier's chemical revolution’, in Lavoisier et la révolution chimique, edited by Michelle Goupil (Paris, 1992), 313–32.

David Knight, Humphry Davy. Science and Power, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1998). Frank James, The Common Purpose of Life: Science and Society at the Royal Institution (Aldershot, UK, 2002).

E.g. Cuvier, Rapport historique sur les progrès des sciences naturelles depuis 1789 (Paris, 1810), 390.

Particularly in organic chemistry.

Salomon‐Bayet (note 54), 374–75.

Crosland (note 33), 510.

The author, therefore, cannot agree with John Heilbron, who criticizes the idea that the earliest laboratories were chemical laboratories and puts in a claim for early cabinets de physique on the continent of Europe. Medical History, 34 (1990), 335. More recently, however, Heilbron in the article ‘Physics’ in Oxford Companion to the History of Science, edited by J. Heilbron (Oxford, 2003), 643–46, states the opposite position, that ‘physics followed chemistry’.

The term ‘la physique’ was used in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries first in the portmanteau Aristotelian sense to mean a study of the natural world. In the eighteenth century, it was used increasingly to mean a study corresponding to early physics, especially in the phrase ‘physique expérimentale’.

Even the new current electricity in the early 1800s (‘galvanism’) was considered by Humphry Davy to be part of chemistry.

M. Crosland, In the Shadow of Lavoisier. The ‘Annales de chimie’ and the establishment of a New Science, B.S.H.S. (Faringdon, UK, 1994), 22–36.

For the latest history of the Cavendish Laboratory, see: Dong‐Won‐Kim, Leadership and Creativity. A History of the Cavendish Laboratory, 1871–1919 (Dordrecht, 2002). See also Simon Schaffer, ‘Physics laboratories and the Victorian country house’, in Making Space for Science. Territorial Themes in the Shaping of Knowledge, edited by Crosbie Smith and Jon Agar (London, 1998), 149–80 and R. Sviedrys, ‘The rise of physical laboratories in Britain’, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 7 (1976), 405–36.

Galileo, Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences (1638), trans. H. Crew (New York, 1914), 178–79. For a discussion of the literature on how many experiments Galileo actually carried out, see e.g. Instruments, Osiris, 9 (1994), 1–3, ed. by A. Van Helden and T.L. Hankins.

Phil. Trans., No. 80, Feb. 19 1671/72, 3075–87. By way of contrast, when Newton wanted to carry out alchemical experiments, he had a makeshift laboratory, a shed next to the Trinity College chapel.

Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems (1632), trans. Stillman Drake (Berkeley, CA, 1962), 170–71, 180, 182–83.

Letter from Pascal to Perier, 1647, in The Physical Treatises of Pascal, trans. Spiers (New York, 1937), 98 ff.

I.B. Cohen, Franklin and Newton (Cambridge, MA, 1966), 486–88. When Cohen refers casually to Franklin's ‘laboratory experiments’, he simply means those carried out indoors.

W.F. Magie, A Source Book of Physics (Cambridge, MA, 1963), 151–61.

Shapin and Schaffer (note 3), 57.

Silvio A. Bedini, ‘The evolution of science museums’, Technology and Culture, 6 (1965), 1–29 (8).

J.L. Heilbron, Electricity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A Study of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley, CA, 1979). See especially 147 ff.

Quoted by F. Cajori, A History of Physics (New York, 1917), 296.

See, e.g. Sigaud de la Fond, Description et usage d'un cabinet de physique expérimentale, 2 vols, Paris, 1775, which consists entirely of a description of physics apparatus. No laboratory is even mentioned. The term la physique was commonly used in France in the eighteenth century, a century before it became usual in Britain to speak of ‘physics’.

A label of some significance.

M. Crosland (ed.), Science in France in the Revolutionary Period described by Thomas Bugge (Cambridge, MA, 1969), 166–68.

Findlen (note 23), 198

Martinus van Marum. Life and Work, ed. by E. Lefebvre and J.G. de Bruin (6 vols, Leyden: H.D. Tjeenk Willink & Zoon, 1969–76), vol. 4, Van Marum's Scientific Instruments in Teyler's Museum, edited by G. l'E. Turner and T.H. Levere.

This distinction between a laboratory and a workshop may not be universally accepted. Thus, Shapin speaks of Boyle's ‘pneumatic laboratory where … the first version of the air pump was constructed’. Shapin (note 23), 380 (my italics).

Sprat (note 45), 71, 121.

Shapin (note 24), 382.

Shapin (note 24), 404.

Sprat (note 45, 74) refers to ‘the work‐houses of Meckanicks’.

Heilbron (note 77), 150, 151.

R. Taton, ed., Enseignement et diffusion des science en France au 18ème siècle (Paris, 1964), 623–28.

There may be a few possible exceptions to this claim, e.g. a remote geomagnetic laboratory. Patricia Fara writes that by the end of the eighteenth century, natural philosophers ‘had built an iron‐free geomagnetic laboratory, equipped with up‐to‐date instruments and research literature in an isolated spot in Sumatra, then owned by the East India Company’. Sympathetic Attractions (Princeton, NJ, 1996), 105. Although this may have been no more than a hut, and an isolated case at that, it might well deserve the title of ‘laboratory’ if it had been specially constructed or adapted for magnetic purposes.

For an illustration of a magnificent cabinet of fossils, see Findlen (note 23), 234.

Description méthodique du cabinet de l'Ecole Royale des Mines (Paris, 1784).

Ibid., 483.

A famous illustration, often reproduced (figure 5), shows a mature Faraday working in what is obviously a chemistry laboratory. There is, however, some electrical apparatus on the floor in the bottom right‐hand corner.

Faraday's study of electromagnetism dates from 1821. See e.g. the letter of Faraday to De La Rive in Correspondence of Michael Faraday, edited by Frank James, vol. 1 (London, 1991), 221–23. By 1831, he had discovered electromagnetic induction.

Of course, Davy had used an electric battery to isolate potassium and sodium (1807), but such electrochemistry was regarded as a part of chemistry. In a letter of 1800, Davy wrote: ‘Galvanism, I have found, by numerous experiments, to be a process purely chemical’. Bence Jones, The Royal Institution (London, 1871), 316.

Crosbie Smith, ‘William Thomson's spiral of credibility’ in Smith and Agar (note 68), 118–46 (130, 132).

See, e.g., Crosbie Smith, The Science of Energy. A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain (London, 1998).

G. Gooday, ‘Precision measurement and the genesis of physics teaching in Victorian Britain’, British Journal for the History of Science, 23 (1990), 25–51.

W.A. Smeaton, ‘The early history of laboratory instruction in chemistry at the Ecole Polytechnique, Paris and elsewhere’, Annals of Science, 10 (1954), 224–33.

J. B. Morrell, ‘The chemist breeders; The research schools of Liebig and Thomson’, Ambix, 19 (1972), 1–46. William H. Brock, Justus von Liebig, the Chemical Gatekeeper (Cambridge, 1997), 45–47. Often, Liebig's claim as an influential teacher is considered secondary to the other major achievement, that he founded an influential research school.