Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
the wealthy intelligentsia who heard Michael Faraday at the Royal Insti-
tution in the nineteenth. The problem is that these are a critical group,
with interests and preconceptions, looking perhaps for a good story
rather than sober science.
Then there are children. School science is difficult and dogmatic
(Thomas Kuhn [1963] thought necessarily so) and chemistry is not very
excitingly taught in these days of 'health and safety' legislation. Such
manual skills as boring corks, bending glass, and handling concentrated
acids, the experience of smelling and tasting (on purpose or by accident)
unpleasant gases and fluids, and making flashes and bangs are denied to
children today. So ways are needed to arouse enthusiasm and direct curi-
osity, so that some will become chemists, hands-on people, and others
sympathetic, hands-off adults.
The interested but unsophisticated are another group, reading news-
papers that avoid long words and long sentences, and who may pick up
the personal rather than the abstract. They should not be despised as unfit
to learn about so arcane a science as chemistry, which can and has been
made accessible through obituaries and biographies, and the writings of
great communicators, like Justus Liebig in his
Familiar Letters.
And fi-
nally there are the taxpayers and the consumers, who pay one way or an-
other for chemistry; and are thus essential for its future.
3.
What Used to Happen?
So to the next question: what happened in the past? In the nineteenth
century, chemistry was in the useful category of 'entertaining knowl-
edge'. Public lectures attracted big audiences, Antoine Fourcroy in Paris
and Humphry Davy in London being notable - they made professing a
performance art, competing with metropolitan theatres and concert halls
(Knight 2002). There were black markets in tickets and one-way traffic
arrangements to ease congestion. Chemistry could appeal to body, mind,
and spirit (Knight 2004): an experimental science, it was a craft or 'art'
that required manual skills (Faraday's only formal book was
Chemical
Manipulation,
1827), an exciting body of knowledge in the throes of
theoretical upset, and momentous in its promise to cast light on matter
and mind, elective affinities (Goethe 1971, Richards 2002), God and
