history of chemistry essay

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Chemistry: How it all started

Chemistry began the moment our ancestors became human.

By Michal Meyer

In the very early 1700s the Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, August the Strong, locked an alchemist in his laboratory and told him to make gold. The young alchemist, Johann Friedrich Böttger, failed in his royally-appointed task. Instead he helped create a substance far more beautiful and useful than gold – porcelain.  And in a happy fairy-tale ending, the king was pleased. For this was no longer a feudal world, but a growing commodity-driven society, and until that time porcelain had to be imported at great expense from a technologically more advanced China to feed a growing European appetite for beauty and luxury. Wealth flowed to the king, for the new Meissen porcelain soon proved popular and a grateful king made Böttger, originally a pharmacist’s apprentice, a baron. 

One more story, this one beginning in the gutter: Around 1669 Hamburg resident Hennig Brandt believed he might have discovered the fabled Philosopher’s Stone, which could turn lead into gold and open up the secrets of the cosmos. An ex-soldier with experience in making glass, Brandt began with old urine and boiled it up and heated the residue until glowing vapours – white phosphorous reacting with oxygen – filled his glassware. Within a few years, Brandt sold his secret and soon phosphorous was well enough known that the secretive alchemist Isaac Newton could begin a recipe for it with the instructions, “Take of urine one barrel.” (Though I do wonder where one could easily procure a barrel of urine).  From urine to art – another transformation –the moment of discovery was immortalized in the eighteenth century in a painting by Joseph Wright of Derby, and recorded again as a mezzotint by William Pether in 1775 as “The Discovery of Phosphorous.”  In this work, the alchemist kneels in awe before the glowing wonder in his alchemical laboratory. Many years later, in 1943, in another transformation, Brandt’s city burned when thousands of pounds of phosphorous fell in the form of bombs.

Homo chemicus

We turn clay into porcelain, urine into phosphorous, phosphorous into bombs, flour into bread, grapes into wine, minerals into pigments. There is almost no limit to the ways in which we transmute matter. Biological anthropologist, Richard Wrangham (United Kingdom), believes that it is cooking that made us human -- by making more energy available to feed our growing brains. If that is so, chemistry began the moment our ancestors became human. Homo chemicus–to be human is to transform matter. And the material transformations we –being human –make will reflect the best and the worst of us.  

We cannot go back to that first chemical moment when raw food turned into cooked food, but we can go back to prehistoric humans and their desire for beauty. Philippe Walter, of the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France, studies chemical processes and substances in the ancient and prehistoric world. While he says these prehistoric peoples did not have an understanding of how or why processes worked, they still produced practical chemists who could mix natural ingredients to produce pigments – whether to adorn themselves or the walls of caves.  Four thousand years ago the ancient Egyptians, says Walter, synthesized new chemicals to treat eye diseases. Their lead-based cosmetics – think Cleopatra and her kohl eyeliner [see box] – stimulated the wearer’s immune system in an early health and beauty regimen.

In Hellenistic Egypt, the refining of metals was known as chemia. With the rise of early Islamic civilization, Muslim scholars translated many Greek texts, including ones on chemia, which they called al-kimia. How matter changed, how to purify substances, how to colour metals, all came under al-kimia. A side benefit of this new fascination was the refinement in practical knowledge such as distillation and crystallization, still important skills in twenty first century labs. On a more theoretical level, Muslim scholars built on earlier Greek understandings of matter – the four elements of air, earth, fire, and water – and its behaviour, including the transmutation of one metal into another. Al-kimia arrived in Europe in the twelfth century, along with some knowledge of al-iksir(elixir, which became known as the Philosopher’s Stone).

Unsurprisingly, alchemy ran into the same kinds of problems that still occasionally plague medicine – hucksters hawking miracle cures and charlatans, etc. Even less surprising, this caught the attention of both rulers and the legal profession, if for different reasons. Later, in England, it became illegal to succeed in turning lead into gold, for this was considered as debasing the currency.

Some claimed that, since human manipulation of matter was essentially inferior to what nature does, naturally (an early version of the still running natural versus artificial debate – check back next century for an update) human attempts at transmuting metals were doomed. Despite such criticisms, there were those who believed that human art was powerful enough to transform the world. But these were discussions for the elites at universities. And matter in all its manifestations was on the move through all social strata. We don’t know who first created kohl or a clay pot, who first tanned leather or brewed beer, and we don’t know the names of the medieval artisans who mixed sand, wood ash, and metal salts to create the great stained-glass windows of medieval cathedrals. But these people all transformed matter and our lives.

By the early modern period, the status of painters, goldsmiths and artisans with an intimate association with matter, was on the rise. Science, long associated with understanding rather than doing, and with elites rather than common folk, was now turning to the practical makers of things for knowledge and power.  Such an approach, where matter was central, found its expression in Sir Francis Bacon’s 1620 manifesto Novum Organum, and the origins of modern science. Doing – poking, prodding, changing the material world – would now be allied with understanding, and our world of art, science, and the everyday, would never be the same. Robert Boyle (Ireland), of Boyle’s Law fame – which connects the pressure, volume and temperature of a gas – epitomized this new experimental approach.  An inheritor of the alchemical tradition, (almost by definition, alchemists were experimentalists and careful measurers) and an aspiring alchemist, Boyle is considered a founding figure of modern chemistry, in the 17th century.

A colourful science

Many chemists believe chemistry became a proper science in the eighteenth century. The investigation of air by Antoine Lavoisier (France), the discovery of oxygen by Joseph Priestly (England), and the new scientific language of chemistry, all played a part. But chemistry, or at least its results, could not be confined to the world of scientific research. The craze for hot-air and hydrogen ballooning in the late eighteenth century and the ballooning-related fashions in clothes, playing cards, and ceramics were only part of the story. Priestley’s invention of carbonated water, as the poor man’s alternative to the sickly rich drinking the waters at expensive spas, continued chemistry’s association with health that had begun with alchemy. On the other hand, the Victorian craze for green  coloured (courtesy of arsenic) wallpaper helped create what might be the worlds’ first recognized (and reported as such) environmental hazard.

In 1856, an eighteen-year old Englishman, William Henry Perkin, tried to turn coal tar into the malaria-preventative quinine (a material transformation worthy of an alchemist). Like Böttger, he failed, and in his failure he launched a colour revolution and inadvertently helped found the German dye and pharmaceutical industry. Perkin had created mauve, the first of the synthetic aniline dyes that brightened the world from the 1860s. Queen Victoria, before her black phase, wore the new chemistry and started a fashion for that shade of purple.  A rapidly industrializing Germany adopted the colourful anilines and made them its own, incidentally creating the first strong link between chemistry as a modern science and industry. A German physician, Gerhard Domagk, working for I.G. Farben, found, in 1932, that a modified red dye killed bacteria and so the first true antibiotics, the sulfa drugs, came into use. The link between fashion and medicine remained, for the skin of patients sometimes turned red, an indication that the drug was working.

ry lie in fashion, but the same industry that began with the world’s brightest colours went on to produce Zyklon B – the poison gas of choice in the Nazis’ extermination plans. World War II is known as the physicists’ war for the development of the atomic bomb, but every war has been a chemist’s war from the time humans learned to smelt metal. Just before World War II, Lise Meitner (an Austrian-born, later Swedish physicist) showed that the alchemists were right -- we can transmute one metal into another, in this case via nuclear reaction, and, by the end of the war, uranium 238 was transmuted into plutonium.

The hallmarks of the old alchemists, the grandiose goals and sometimes secrecy, continue today in our chemical quests – the creation of synthetic life, a cure for aging. At the same time, every time you boil an egg you change the very nature of matter, in this case the shape of the proteins in the egg.

The rise of modern science and its growing prestige, especially the professionalization of science in the nineteenth century, pushed out the non experts. We’ve lost that sense of chemistry as the art and science of the everyday, and of ordinary people. But we can get it back. Recently, as part of the Chemical Heritage Foundation’s museum programme, I asked a glass artist to give a talk and presentation of her work. She was a little nervous at first, saying she had never studied chemistry and didn’t know anything about it. But after speaking about what she did -- her tools, the furnace, how she pulled molten glass about, the metals she added, what happened to the glass at different temperatures – she turned to me in surprise and said, “I am a practical chemist.”

Near the beginning of this essay I wrote:  “To be human is to transform matter.”  I’d like to end it with a variation. To transform matter is to be.

About the authors

Michal Meyer was born in Israel. She has worked as a meteorologist in New Zealand and Fiji and a journalist in Israel. She has a Ph.D. in the history of science and has worked for the Chemical Heritage Foundation since September 2009. She is the editor in chief of Chemical Heritage Magazine.

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• Table Of Contents

What is chemistry?

Chemistry is the branch of science that deals with the properties, composition, and structure of elements and compounds , how they can change, and the energy that is released or absorbed when they change.

How are chemistry and biology related?

Chemistry is the study of substances—that is, elements and compounds —while biology is the study of living things. However, these two branches of science meet in the discipline of biochemistry , which studies the substances in living things and how they change within an organism.

chemistry , the science that deals with the properties, composition , and structure of substances (defined as elements and compounds), the transformations they undergo, and the energy that is released or absorbed during these processes. Every substance, whether naturally occurring or artificially produced, consists of one or more of the hundred-odd species of atoms that have been identified as elements. Although these atoms, in turn, are composed of more elementary particles, they are the basic building blocks of chemical substances; there is no quantity of oxygen , mercury , or gold , for example, smaller than an atom of that substance. Chemistry, therefore, is concerned not with the subatomic domain but with the properties of atoms and the laws governing their combinations and how the knowledge of these properties can be used to achieve specific purposes.

The great challenge in chemistry is the development of a coherent explanation of the complex behaviour of materials, why they appear as they do, what gives them their enduring properties, and how interactions among different substances can bring about the formation of new substances and the destruction of old ones. From the earliest attempts to understand the material world in rational terms, chemists have struggled to develop theories of matter that satisfactorily explain both permanence and change. The ordered assembly of indestructible atoms into small and large molecules , or extended networks of intermingled atoms, is generally accepted as the basis of permanence, while the reorganization of atoms or molecules into different arrangements lies behind theories of change. Thus chemistry involves the study of the atomic composition and structural architecture of substances, as well as the varied interactions among substances that can lead to sudden, often violent reactions.

Chemistry also is concerned with the utilization of natural substances and the creation of artificial ones. Cooking , fermentation , glass making, and metallurgy are all chemical processes that date from the beginnings of civilization. Today, vinyl, Teflon, liquid crystals, semiconductors , and superconductors represent the fruits of chemical technology. The 20th century saw dramatic advances in the comprehension of the marvelous and complex chemistry of living organisms, and a molecular interpretation of health and disease holds great promise. Modern chemistry, aided by increasingly sophisticated instruments, studies materials as small as single atoms and as large and complex as DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), which contains millions of atoms. New substances can even be designed to bear desired characteristics and then synthesized. The rate at which chemical knowledge continues to accumulate is remarkable. Over time more than 8,000,000 different chemical substances, both natural and artificial, have been characterized and produced. The number was less than 500,000 as recently as 1965.

Intimately interconnected with the intellectual challenges of chemistry are those associated with industry. In the mid-19th century the German chemist Justus von Liebig commented that the wealth of a nation could be gauged by the amount of sulfuric acid it produced. This acid, essential to many manufacturing processes, remains today the leading chemical product of industrialized countries. As Liebig recognized, a country that produces large amounts of sulfuric acid is one with a strong chemical industry and a strong economy as a whole. The production, distribution, and utilization of a wide range of chemical products is common to all highly developed nations. In fact, one can say that the “iron age” of civilization is being replaced by a “polymer age,” for in some countries the total volume of polymers now produced exceeds that of iron .

The scope of chemistry

The days are long past when one person could hope to have a detailed knowledge of all areas of chemistry. Those pursuing their interests into specific areas of chemistry communicate with others who share the same interests. Over time a group of chemists with specialized research interests become the founding members of an area of specialization. The areas of specialization that emerged early in the history of chemistry, such as organic, inorganic, physical , analytical , and industrial chemistry, along with biochemistry , remain of greatest general interest. There has been, however, much growth in the areas of polymer, environmental, and medicinal chemistry during the 20th century. Moreover, new specialities continue to appear, as, for example, pesticide, forensic , and computer chemistry.

chemistry: History of Chemistry

• History of Chemistry

The earliest practical knowledge of chemistry was concerned with metallurgy , pottery, and dyes; these crafts were developed with considerable skill, but with no understanding of the principles involved, as early as 3500 b.c. in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The basic ideas of element and compound were first formulated by the Greek philosophers during the period from 500 to 300 b.c. Opinion varied, but it was generally believed that four elements (fire, air, water, and earth) combined to form all things. Aristotle's definition of a simple body as “one into which other bodies can be decomposed and which itself is not capable of being divided” is close to the modern definition of element.

About the beginning of the Christian era in Alexandria, the ancient Egyptian industrial arts and Greek philosophical speculations were fused into a new science. The beginnings of chemistry, or alchemy , as it was first known, are mingled with occultism and magic. Interests of the period were the transmutation of base metals into gold, the imitation of precious gems, and the search for the elixir of life, thought to grant immortality. Muslim conquests in the 7th cent. a.d. diffused the remains of Hellenistic civilization to the Arab world. The first chemical treatises to become well known in Europe were Latin translations of Arabic works, made in Spain c. a.d. 1100; hence it is often erroneously supposed that chemistry originated among the Arabs. Alchemy developed extensively during the Middle Ages, cultivated largely by itinerant scholars who wandered over Europe looking for patrons.

Sections in this article:

• Introduction
• Organic Chemistry and the Modern Era
• Impact of the Atomic Theory
• Evolution of Modern Chemistry
• Branches of Chemistry
• Bibliography

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2024, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

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The History of Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction

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From the earliest exploration of natural materials and their transformations to today’s materials science, chemistry has always been the central discipline that underpins both the physical and biological sciences, as well as technology. The History of Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction traces the unique appeal of this fundamental science throughout history. Covering alchemy, early-modern chemistry, pneumatic chemistry, and Lavoisier’s reinterpretation of chemical change, the rise of organic and physical chemistry, and the transforming power of synthesis, it explores the extraordinary and often puzzling transformations of natural and artificial materials, as well as the men and women who experimented, speculated, and explained matter and change.

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The History of Chemistry in Chemical Education

• John C. Powers

Virginia Commonwealth University

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The role of history in science education has recently garnered wider interest owing to the heightened importance the Next Generation Science Standards (2012) has placed on conveying to students an understanding of the “nature of science.” This essay strives to set this development in historical context by examining the changing role of the history of chemistry in chemical education over the last century. It focuses on two specific episodes: Edgar Fahs Smith’s history of chemistry course at the University of Pennsylvania and James Bryant Conant’s ultimately unsuccessful program at Harvard for general science education. The essay then compares these two episodes to the current emphasis on teaching the “nature of science” to students, arguing that using history to teach the “nature of science” distorts history in a manner that undermines the professional values of historians and suggesting that collaboration between historians and science educators is possible only when the professional interests of both are preserved.

The debate surrounding the role of the history of science in science education has been ongoing for more than a century. Its current iteration is fueled in part by the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), the product of a consortium of twenty-six states, the National Research Council, the National Science Teachers Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 1 A key idea in the NGSS is to teach science students the “nature of science,” sometimes expanded to “history and the nature of science,” terms that refer to aspects of how science works: its methods, its practices, its dealings with uncertainty and bias, the characteristics of scientists, and how scientific knowledge is developed and accepted by society. 2 This essay will examine some of the uses of the history of science, particularly the history of chemistry, in science education over the twentieth century and, in doing so, suggest why using history to convey the science educator’s “nature of science” is problematic from the perspective of a historian. I focus on a few episodes that illustrate the shift from a time when scientists wrote their own history to promote science in society and create a professional identity to one where science educators proposed to use history to teach the methods, practices, and values of science. I begin with the historical work of Edgar Fahs Smith at the beginning of the twentieth century, show how James Bryant Conant’s plan for general science education challenged Smith’s program for history of chemistry, and conclude with thoughts about the role of historians in current science education.

Edgar Fahs Smith (1854–1928) was the most visible advocate of teaching history of chemistry to chemistry students in the early twentieth century. He spent the majority of his career as a professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, where he conducted research on electrochemistry and became an administrator, serving as Vice Provost (1894–1911) and eventually Provost (1911–1920). However, his “hobby”—and, in his later career, his passion—was the history of chemistry. Smith was a prolific book and artifact collector; his collection became the foundation for the Edgar Fahs Smith Collection at the University of Pennsylvania library. 3 He also conducted his own research into the history of chemistry, focusing primarily on the history of American chemistry, a field he thought had been neglected in earlier, Eurocentric histories. From 1914 through 1920 he published six books on the history of American chemistry, as well as dozens of articles. He also participated in founding the History of Science Society, serving on the Organizing Committee (1924–1926), as Vice President (1927), and finally as President (1928) of the Society. 4

Smith deemed the history of chemistry an essential part of a chemistry student’s education. Beginning in 1896 and continuing for much of his career, he famously taught a one-hour weekly lecture on the history of chemistry for Penn chemistry students. As Smith outlined it in a 1925 paper published in the Journal of Chemical Education , his presentation reflected the “great men and events” style of history popular at the time, focusing on famous individuals and their accomplishments. He would augment his lectures by showing lantern slides and displaying artifacts—portraits, letters, books, pieces of equipment—to maintain the students’ interest. One may wonder what the students were supposed to learn from Smith’s historical lectures. Surprisingly, he did not emphasize the methods or theories of chemistry but, rather, what his fellow chemist and historian Charles A. Browne called the “culture and humanistic values of chemistry.” Smith contended that this focus allowed students to understand the dignity, struggles, and meaning of chemistry and “acquire reverence for [chemists as] profound thinkers and experimentalists.” 5

In effect, Smith’s course conveyed to his students a professional identity and held up role models to follow in their careers. As Arnold Thackray has pointed out, in the early twentieth century scientists who enumerated the successes and achievements of their forebears strove to promote the role of science in society as a legitimate profession and an instrument of progress. Following along these lines, Smith’s historical work aimed at constructing an American chemical heritage that was on par with that posited by European chemists. For most of the nineteenth century, American chemists traveled to Europe to receive elite training. Smith himself had studied in Göttingen in the 1870s with Fredrich Wöhler. 6 By the early twentieth century, however, there were many opportunities for advanced training and for pursuing advanced research in the United States—notably in Smith’s own department at Penn. What was lacking was an acknowledged American chemistry tradition. Smith strove to provide this in his own historical work, and he encouraged like-minded colleagues through the founding of the History Division of the American Chemical Society, which he sponsored as President of the ACS in 1921. Between 1925 and 1927, about half of the historical papers published in the Journal of Chemical Education , which was the publication outlet for the History Division, addressed American topics. In a 1932 ACS symposium in honor of Smith, Lyman Newell summarized the aim and significance of Smith’s historical program, which “stressed the importance of bringing American Chemistry to the attention of an interested but uninformed public in Europe as well as in the United States.” 7 Within the classroom, Smith saw his course as providing students with a professional identity by presenting historical, and especially American, chemists overcoming adversity, displaying moral courage, and participating in the global chemical community. The role of history in the chemistry curriculum was to legitimize American chemists and institutions by integrating them into the wider historical narrative.

Within fifteen years after the ACS symposium to honor Smith, James Bryant Conant (1893–1978), the President of Harvard University, crafted a program to use the history of science to teach basic scientific reasoning and the “scientific viewpoint” to nonscience students. Conant was an extremely productive researcher in chemistry at Harvard until 1933, when he became President of the university, a position he held until 1953. In 1940 he joined the National Defense Research Council, and his wartime experiences with government, military, and business leaders shaped his understanding of postwar science. Whereas Smith used history to create a positive identity for American chemistry, by the late 1940s science had established itself as an important force in the modern world. Conant saw the continuation of wartime levels of governmental funding after the war, especially for military purposes, as a threat to democratic freedoms. In such a world, the common (educated) person would need to know how to unpack scientific claims and comprehend science policy in order to defend democratic society against a potentially autocratic scientific elite. 8 Conant’s program for general science education aimed to give students the tools to do this.

Conant built his program around the history of science, but he himself had ambiguous feelings about the history of science as a field. When he began his program, called the natural sciences curriculum, in 1947, four of the five courses deployed the history of science in some way. 9 Conant’s own course, titled “The Growth of Experimental Science,” progressed through historical case studies, which he and his associate instructors eventually published as the Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science (1957). Conant expected students in his course to obtain an “understanding of science,” by which he meant a familiarity with the “tactics and strategies of science,” which scientists used as they worked to solve particular problems. 10 The ultimate aim was not to teach scientific method—Conant did not believe that there was a single scientific method—but, rather, to convey a more foundational structure of scientific practice, in which scientists drew from the conceptual schemes of their day, made deductions from those schemes, and tested those deductions in various ways. This process, which he claimed was present in all forms of modern science, both spoke to the fundamental unity of all legitimate sciences and led to progress in science and society. 11 In his quest to reveal this unchanging scientific viewpoint, however, Conant had no interest in promoting history or historical teaching for its own sake. He stated that the main reason he utilized examples from the history of science was that he felt that older case studies would be less technical than those from current science and, therefore, more accessible for nonscience students. 12 In adapting history for this purpose, Conant’s methods were largely ahistorical. His goal—to present scientific reasoning as clearly as possible—meant that he had no interest in addressing the complexities and nuances of history and historical interpretation. Ideally, the case studies in the natural sciences program would extract from historical sources what were, in Conant’s view, examples of the unchanging principles of scientific practice and reasoning, without complicating matters too much.

In the ensuing decades, the emergence of professional historians of science led to tensions within both the chemistry and history of science communities regarding the appropriateness of history in chemical education. Conant was unable to maintain widespread support for his program. Initially, chemistry teachers were divided on Conant’s natural sciences curriculum, and his method of historical case studies ignited an ongoing debate regarding the proper use of history in the chemistry curriculum, whether or not history conveyed the priorities of general science education, and how well history captured the “nature of science.” In addition, several of the instructors in the natural sciences curriculum, such as I. B. Cohen, Duane Roller, Gerald Holton, and Thomas Kuhn, eventually rebelled in one form or another against Conant’s program and went on to become professional historians of science and science studies scholars. 13 By the 1960s and 1970s these and other historians had begun to write histories that portrayed scientists in ways that undermined the rational and ethical standards of behavior that science teachers wished to convey to their students. This situation prompted the historian Stephen Brush’s provocative question that titled his infamous 1974 article: “Should the History of Science Be Rated X?” In a 1975 article published in the Journal of Chemical Education , the chemist Harold Goldwhite agreed with Brush and acknowledged the divergent professional aims of chemistry teaching and the history of chemistry. Chemists, he argued, wanted to inculcate their students with examples of good scientific conduct, open-mindedness, and clear reasoning, even as the careful study of the history of chemistry often revealed the opposite. As Goldwhite summarized: “when faced with a challenge to accepted ideas, chemists are as close-minded as any group with vested interests.” 14 In the end, he suggested that chemistry teachers should stick to chemistry and leave the history of chemistry to specialists in history courses.

Recently, interest in the role of history in science education has resurfaced owing to the creation of the Next Generation Science Standards, with its emphasis on students’ understanding of the Nature of Science (NOS). The history of science offered up in this context, however, is one that is tailored to serve the curricular needs of science educators. For example, in a 2015 article in the Journal of Chemical Education , Kristin Olsson, a high school educator, and two science faculty members from Colorado State University, Meena Balgopal and Nancy Levinger, proposed a continuing education course on “the history of chemical discoveries” for chemistry instructors. The authors suggest that training chemistry teachers in the history of chemistry, which they can then integrate into their classes, will help students understand how chemical knowledge is made—that is, “how chemistry theories are created and revised”—thereby “reinforcing NOS.” While Olsson and her collaborators acknowledge, in a way that Conant did not, that the Nature of Science is not fixed historically and may not be applicable to earlier historical periods, they still assume that modern science is shaped by a stable NOS. Thus in their course the history of chemistry becomes the history of the formation of the Nature of Science, designed to fulfill the curricular needs of the new science standards. 15

So where does this leave the work of historians of science in chemical education? The history of science written by historians, and by scientists who wish to engage in historical work for its own sake, embodies the professional values and standards of practice of other (general) historians and science studies scholars. By contrast, science educators, within the context of the “history and nature of science,” propose a history of science that is meant to do important pedagogical work for science education by conveying standards of practice, providing examples of ethical behavior, and modeling the role of science in society. This kind of history, however, does not reflect the values and practices of professional historians but, rather, seeks to convey idealized norms of practice for science. In the end, historians would classify the kind of history of science that science educators would most like to see in a science classroom as “whig history”: accounts tailored to justify modern beliefs and practices. 16

What this very brief history of chemical education suggests is that history of science can inform science education only when the goals of historians and the goals of scientists align. In Edgar Fahs Smith’s day, such alignment was present, because chemists like Smith wrote and taught their own history for professional reasons. The use of history in chemistry teaching became problematic later because science educators ignored the professional goals and values of historians and vice versa . This does not mean, however, that history has no role to play in science education. Some historians have suggested that history could help legitimize the role of science in society or, following in the footsteps of Smith, enhance the professional identity or credibility of science. Graeme Gooday and his coauthors have argued, for example, that the history of science could be useful in biology teaching to address challenges to scientific authority such as those posed by intelligent design. 17 As several of the essays in this Focus section show, collaborations between historians and scientists are possible when both parties are committed to examining complex problems or challenges for science in such a way that all professional interests are honored, such as in unpacking scientific racism or gender roles, examining the role of religion in science, or understanding science in different local contexts. 18 There is much room for collaboration, but not at the expense of elevating one profession’s goals over those of the other.

I would like to thank the participants at the April 2017 Southern History of Science and Technology (SoHOST) Conference at Vanderbilt University and the audience and presenters in the “Science Education and the History of Science” session at the Twenty-fifth International Congress for the History of Science and Technology, held in Rio de Janeiro in July 2017, for their comments on an earlier version of this essay. I also thank Karen Rader for her comments on this essay and an anonymous Isis referee for useful feedback.

John C. Powers is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Virginia Commonwealth University. He researches the history of chemistry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a focus on chemical pedagogy and instruments. He is the author of Inventing Chemistry: Herman Boerhaave and the Reform of the Chemical Arts (Chicago, 2012). Department of History, Virginia Commonwealth University, Box 242001, Richmond, Virginia 23284, USA; [email protected] .

1 Erik Robelen, “Who Is Writing the Next Generation Science Standards?” Education Week , 14 May 2012, http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2012/05/who_is_writing_the_next_genera.html ; and National Research Council, A Framework for K–12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas (Washington, D.C.: National Academies, 2012). On the NGSS see http://nextgenscience.org .

2 See, e.g., Michael P. Clough, “History and Nature of Science in Science Education,” in Science Education: An International Course Companion , ed. Keith S. Taber and Ben Akpan (Rotterdam: Sense, 2017), pp. 39–51.

3 On Smith see C. A. Browne, “Edgar Fahs Smith,” Journal of Chemical Education , 1928, 5 :656–663; Browne, “Edgar Fahs Smith, 1854–1928,” Isis , 1928, 11 :375–384; Walter T. Taggart, “Edgar Fahs Smith,” J. Chem. Educ. , 1932, 9 :613–619; and Marston T. Bogert, “Edgar Fahs Smith—Chemist,” Science , 1929, 69 :557–565. On his collection see Eva V. Armstrong, The Story of the Edgar Fahs Smith Memorial Collection in the History of Chemistry (Philadelphia: Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 1937). See also the University of Pennsylvania library webpage: https://www.library.upenn.edu/collections/special-notable/groups/edgar-fahs-smith-memorial-collection .

4 Edgar Fahs Smith, “Observations on Teaching the History of Chemistry,” J. Chem. Educ. , 1925, 2: 533–555, esp. p. 546; Herbart S. Klickstein, “Edgar Fahs Smith—His Contributions to the History of Chemistry,” Chymia , 1959, 5 :11–30; and Arnold Thackray, “The Pre-History of an Academic Discipline: The Study of the History of Science in the United States, 1891–1941,” Minerva , 1980, 18 :448–473, esp. pp. 459–460 (on Smith’s role in the HSS).

5 Smith, “Observations on Teaching the History of Chemistry,” pp. 543, 545; and C. A. Browne, “The Past and Future of the History of Chemistry Division,” J. Chem. Educ. , 1937, 14 :503–515, on p. 515.

6 Thackray, “Pre-History of an Academic Discipline” (cit. n. 4), pp. 457–459. On Smith’s education see Browne, “Edgar Fahs Smith” (cit. n. 3).

7 Lyman Newell, “Historical Sketch of the Division of History of Chemistry, American Chemical Society,” J. Chem. Educ. , 1932, 9: 667–669, on p. 668. On the founding of the HIST Division see ibid. ; and Browne, “Past and Future of the History of Chemistry Division” (cit. n. 5), pp. 505–507. On the presence of American topics in the Journal of Chemical Education see John N. Swan, “Decennial Meeting, Division of Chemical Education, American Chemical Society,” J. Chem. Educ. , 1932, 9 :670–676; and H. M. Leicester, “History of Chemistry,” Industrial and Engineering Chemistry , 1951, 43 :1053–1056, esp. p. 1055.

8 Christopher Hamlin, “The Pedagogical Roots of the History of Science: Revisiting the Vision of James Bryant Conant,” Isis , 2016, 107 :282–308, esp. pp. 294–295. On Conant’s career and wartime work see Paul D. Bartlett, James Bryant Conant, 1893–1978: A Biographical Memoir (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1983); and Irvin Stewart, Organizing Scientific Research for War: The Administrative History of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948).

9 Hamlin, “Pedagogical Roots of the History of Science,” pp. 284–285; on the natural sciences curriculum see pp. 286–289.

10 James Bryant Conant, ed., Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science , Vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1957), pp. vii–viii. On Conant’s notion of an “understanding of science” see Conant, On Understanding Science: An Historical Approach (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1948).

11 Conant, ed., Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science , pp. x–xii. See also Hamlin, “Pedagogical Roots of the History of Science” (cit. n. 8), pp. 293–295; and Leonard Nash, “An Historical Approach to the Teaching of Science,” J. Chem. Educ. , 1951, 28 :146–151, esp. pp. 146–147. On Conant and the unity of science see Gerald Holton, “What Historians of Science and Science Educators Can Do for One Another,” Science and Education , 2003, 12 :603–616, esp. pp. 609–610.

12 Conant, ed., Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science , p. vii.

13 A sampling of the contributions to these debates includes articles by college and high school teachers: William Hered, “Chemistry Teaching for General Education,” J. Chem. Educ. , 1953, 30 :626–627; Leslie S. Forster, “General Education and General Chemistry,” ibid. , 1955, 32 :206–208; George P. Klubertanz, “The Nature of Science and the Teaching of High-School Chemistry,” ibid. , pp. 248–252; and Bernard Jaffe, “Using History of Chemistry in Our Teaching,” ibid. , pp. 183–185. On the natural sciences curriculum instructors who went on to become professional historians of science and science studies scholars see Hamlin, “Pedagogical Roots of the History of Science” (cit. n. 8), pp. 286–289.

14 Stephen G. Brush, “Should the History of Science Be Rated X?” Science , 1974, 183 :1164–1172, on p. 1164; and Harold Goldwhite, “Clio and Chemistry: A Divorce Has Been Arranged,” J. Chem. Educ. , 1975, 52 :645–649, on p. 647.

15 Kristin A. Olsson, Meena M. Balgopal, and Nancy E. Levinger, “How Did We Get Here? Teaching Chemistry with a Historical Perspective,” J. Chem. Educ. , 2015, 92 :1773–1776, on p. 1774. Regarding the treatment of the history of chemistry see, e.g., the supplementary materials for their article, where they provide guiding questions for discussion: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ed5005239 . Note that not all education scholars agree with the monolithic characterization of the Nature of Science. See, e.g., John L. Rudolph, “Reconsidering the ‘Nature of Science’ as a Curriculum Component,” Journal of Curriculum Studies , 2000, 32: 403–419.

16 See Brush, “Should the History of Science Be Rated X?” (cit. n. 14), pp. 1169–1170; and the recent exchange between the physicist Steven Weinberg and the immunologist and historian Arthur Silverstein: Steven Weinberg, “Eye on the Present—The Whig History of Science,” New York Review of Books , 17 Dec. 2015, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/12/17/eye-present-whig-history-science/ ; and Arthur M. Silverstein, “The Whig History of Science: An Exchange,” ibid. , 25 Feb. 2016, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/02/25/the-whig-history-of-science-an-exchange/ .

17 Graeme Gooday, John M. Lynch, Kenneth G. Wilson, and Constance K. Barsky, “Does Science Education Need the History of Science?” Isis , 2008, 99 :322–330.

18 See the essays by Vivien Hamilton and Daniel Stoebel, Frederica Bowcutt and Tamara Caulkins, and the Dean College group in this Focus section.

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History of Chemistry

• Chemical Atomism ( 123 )
• Chemical Bonding ( 30 )
• Chemical Explanation ( 82 )
• Chemical Synthesis ( 15 )
• Chemical Elements and Substances ( 138 )
• Realism in Chemistry ( 59 )
• Chemical Instrumentation ( 14 )
• Inorganic Chemistry ( 8 )
• Interlevel Relations in Chemistry ( 44 )
• Structure in Chemistry ( 31 )
• The Periodic Table ( 227 )
• Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics ( 1,263 )
• Quantum Chemistry ( 84 )
• Organic Chemistry ( 77 )
• Philosophy of Chemistry, Misc ( 1,034 )

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History of Chemistry

Between 1901 and 2020, the Nobel Prize has been 112 times to 186 Laureates in chemistry history. Some of the winners of this price include Jennifer Doudna, Emmanuelle Charpentier, and Stanley Whittingham. Frances Arnold, Jacobus Henricus Van etc. In this paper, I will focus on Frances Arnold, who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2018 for pioneering the use of directed evolution to develop enzymes with improved novel function.

Frances Arnold is an American chemical engineer and Nobel Prize Laureate born on July 25, 1956. At the California Institute of Technology, she is the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Biochemistry and Bioengineering. In 1978, she received a Nobel Prize for founding the usage of directed evolution to engineer enzymes. She grew up in the neighbourhoods of Shadyside and Squirrel Hill and graduated from Taylor Allderdice high school. In 1979, she graduated from the University of Princeton with a mechanical and aerospace degree focused on solar energy research. After graduating from Princeton University, she worked for Colorado’s solar energy Research Institute and then later joined California University in Berkeley, where she acquired a PH.D. degree in Chemical engineering in 1985. Her interest in biochemistry grew so much after attaining her degree. Since then, she has worked with various companies like Gevo, Inc. Company, Santa Fe Institute, National Academy of sciences and Entertainment exchange. In 2019, Frances Arnold was named to the board of Alphabet Inc., making her the third female of the Google parent company director.

The research that won Arnold a Nobel Prize in chemistry’s history was on Enzymes’ directed evolution. Between 1980 and 1990, the study that applied enzymes to catalyze chemical reactions was hard as the usual methodology required identifying the initial principles of modifying an enzyme. Arnold came in and decided to use the method of evolution. She changed the enzyme subtilisin E, which breaks down the protein casein to make it function in the solvent dimethylformamide as an alternative of a cell’s watery surroundings. She introduced various arbitrary mutations into the genetic code of bacteria that created subtilisin E. She presented her mutated enzymes into a setting that had both casein and DMF. Wrublewski (2019) explains that Arnold chose the new enzyme to break down casein in DMF and presented arbitrary mutations into that enzyme. She finally come up with a mutated subtilisin E after three such generations that were many times better at breaking down casein in DMF than the original. Together with her co-workers, Arnold protracted the procedure of directed enzyme evolution to modify enzymes for reactions that no enzyme had catalyzed earlier. They were similarly able to evolve enzymes to create elements with bonds that hardly happen in biology (Fahlman, 2018).

The Nobel Prizes’ main aim is to reward people who have made significant steps towards bringing a positive change in the world. For a person like Frances Arnold to be considered the winner of the Nobel Prize, there is a followed procedure. The Norwegian Nobel Committee has the role of selecting qualifying candidates and choosing the Nobel Peace Prize Laureates (Partington, 2016). The candidates eligible for the Peace Prize are those nominated by qualified individuals. Invitation letters are first sent out to persons qualified to select like the university chancellors, leaders of research institutes etc. They are given a deadline for submission, which is not later than February 1 every year. The committee evaluates the work of the candidates and develops a shorter list. The shortlist is reviewed by permanent advisors and those hired because of their knowledge about some candidates. The Nobel committee chooses the Nobel Peace Prize Laureates through a common vote, whose names are then mentioned. Lastly, the Nobel Laureates receive their prices during the Price Award Ceremony that occurs on December 10th. The prize contains the Nobel Medal and Diploma, and a certificate is ratifying the aggregate of the award.

There are various Nobel Prize winners in the history of Chemistry. However, I decided to write about Frances Arnold because she is among the few women who have worked so hard to change the world positively. She is the third woman to receive a Nobel Prize in the history of chemistry. Throughout her work, she displayed an independence trait by coming up with creative solutions to problems and her questions. She is also a good role model who inspires scientists’ next generation to keep working hard despite the challenges faced.

This assignment has given me a better and broader understanding of chemistry’s history. I have learned the various challenges researchers faced and how they applied different chemistry techniques to solve them. There various things that can be done differently to improve the future of chemistry even better. For instance, more research should be conducted to provide solutions to multiple problems in chemistry (Fahlman, 2018). The basis of awarding the Nobel Prize should be made tighter in chemistry to make researchers work extra hard to come up with many important inventions that can positively change the world.

Fahlman, B. D. (2018). What is “materials chemistry”?. In  Materials chemistry  (pp. 1-21). Springer, Dordrecht.

Partington, J. R. (2016).  History of Chemistry . Macmillan International Higher Education.

Wrublewski, D. T. (2019). Analysis for Science Librarians of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: Directed Evolution of Enzymes and Phage Display of Peptides and Antibodies.  Science & Technology Libraries ,  38 (1), 51-69.

Zeymer, C. (2019). Directed Evolution of Selective Enzymes: Catalysts for Organic Chemistry and Biotechnology. By Manfred T. Reetz.  ChemBioChem ,  20 (3), 415-416.

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