Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
scientists at work, where they often wore aprons or light overcoats to
protect their suits. As photography improved, candid pictures of scien-
tists at the lab bench became more common by the 1920s, so the wearing
of the lab coat came to be associated with a scientist at work. The other
source of the image came from physicians, who started wearing white
overcoats and aprons in the late nineteenth century and were far more
likely in this period to be pictured in their white overcoats than most
scientists.
12
Morrison's iconographic efforts were shaped by the necessity of cre-
ating an 'American' scientist. In both the text and the images,
Man in a
Chemical World
repeatedly returns to the 'American-ness' of the chemis-
try. In the chapter 'All the Comforts of Home', chemistry was both
American and domestic: “In America, the soft soaps of our ancestors
were made in every home by boiling fat with the lye extracted from the
wood ashes from the hearth” (Morrison 1937, p. 161). In the second
chapter, 'Chemistry in Overalls', Morrison makes clear the distinction
between the European intellectual and the New World researcher while
pointing out that the industry was run by Americans. “These develop-
ments [chemical industry] are characteristically American and fully illus-
trate the ramifications of chemical industry, both as showing the high
type of Yankee ingenuity behind them and as typifying industrial chemi-
cal progress.” (Ibid., p. 30) Nothing foreign in soap, and the chemical in-
dustries were the product of the same Yankee creativity that made heroes
of people like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell.
For Morrison, the American scientist was to be differentiated from his
European counterpart in much the same way as Robert Boyle distin-
guished the gentlemanly chemist from the medieval alchemist. Yet this
had to be done without denigrating Europeans or European science, so it
was done by emphasizing American work in the text and through the im-
ages. The European image of a scientist against which Morrison's por-
trait was drawn came primarily from the style and fashion of the late
nineteenth-century European professorate. A typical European image of
a scientist can be seen in the publicity photograph of Sir William Ramsay
(Figure 2), taken shortly after he was knighted in 1902.
12
For a brief history of the medical lab coat, see Blumhagen 1979.
