April 1, 1897.] 



KNOWLEDGE. 



85 



ON THE PROGRESS OF CHEMISTRY AND 



THE CHEMICAL ARTS DURING THE 



QUEEN'S REIGN/= 



By Professor Thorpe, LL.D., F.E.S. 



CHE^IISTRY as an art has been practised from time 

 immemorial, and a great variety of what are, strictly 

 speaking, chemical products, such as metals, salts, 

 acids, dyes, pigments, were made long before the 

 Christian era. Chemistry as a science, however, 

 is barely a century old. It is based upon the Atomic Theory, 

 and the idea of explaining chemical phenomena by means 

 of the conception of atoms, foreshadowed by Newton, and 

 more clearly adumbrated by his followers Kiel, Hartley, 

 Marzucchi, and Higgins, was first definitely stated by John 

 Dalton during the first decade of this century. The whole 

 course of modern chemistry , however complex and many-sided 

 it may seem, is really one vast elaboration of the Atomic 

 Theory. As Liebig has said : " All our ideas are so inter- 

 woven with Dalton's theory that we cannot carry ourselves 

 back to the times in which that theory did not exist." 

 And yet this fundamental hypothesis, as understood by 

 chemists, had barely come of age when the Queen came 

 to the throne ; it was not much older at the time than she 

 herself. The illustrious philosopher who first gave pre- 

 cision to this idea was still living, but stricken down at the 

 time by the paralytic attack, the beginning of the brain 

 disintegration which seven years later ended in his death. 

 Sir Humphry Davy — a younger man than Dalton — 

 the pioneer In the then recently-discovered field of electro- 

 chemistry, and which to-day is yielding such splendid 

 fruit, had been dead only about eight years, as were 

 Wollaston and Thomas Young. All three, in fact, died at 

 about the same period, and all from affections of the brain. 

 At the Royal Institution he who has been styled the 

 greatest of Davy's discoveries reigned in Davy's stead. 

 Michael Faraday of revered memorj- — blacksmith's son, 

 newspaper boy, bookbinder's apprentice, and Fullerian 

 Professor of Chemistry — was then in his forty-fifth year, 

 in the full maturity of his intellectual power, and near the 

 meridian of his scientific glory. All his more important 

 work in chemistry — his discovery of benzene, his researches 

 on the liquefaction of the gases — had been accomplished, 

 and he was almost wholly engaged upon those great problems 

 of electrical science which have made the extraordinary 

 development of applied electricity, as we see it to-day m elec- 

 trolytic decomposition, in the electric light, and in the appli- 

 cation of electricity as a source of power, alone possible. 

 The Queen, in fact, may be said to have witnessed the birth 

 of this marvellous application of natural energy, to have 

 lived with it through its vigorous youth, and to have seen 



* From an address delivered at the East London Teelinical 

 Cijllege, People's Palace, on the occasion of the distribution of science 

 certificates, February 8th, 1S97. With additions. 



the promise of a fruition so vast that no man can set bounds 

 to it. Think of the simple experiments out of which hag 

 grown the mighty machinery of modern industrial electricity! 

 Try to realize the difference between Faraday's simple 

 home-made apparatus — his small copper discs, his bits of 

 soft iron wound with wire insulated with calico and twine 

 — and the mighty dynamos which are converting the 

 energy of a " harnessed" Niagara into heat and light and 

 chemical action, and supplying power to a continent ! And 

 all this within the span of a single reign — within the 

 compass of a couple of generations. This astonishing 

 movement is what historians will ever recognize as the 

 characteristic feature of the Victorian era. It has wholly 

 changed the economic and social condition, not only of our 

 people, but of every country which has had the intelligence 

 and the wisdom to participate in it, or the sagacity to 

 avail itself of its fruits. It has reacted not only upon 

 industry, but on every department of intellectual effort. 

 It has changed, although hardly with a commensurate 

 rapidity — for there is no class so conservative as that of 

 the schoolmaster — the face of our educational system. To 

 judge what the change has been, let us try to realize how 

 chemistry was taught in this country in 1837. As a part 

 of school education it was practically unknown, although 

 children whose parents had the good fortune to be in- 

 fluenced by the teaching of such far-sighted men as Mr. 

 Edgeworth, had their curiosity stimulated and fed by 

 occasional lectures on science. As regards the older 

 universities, at Oxford there was Dr. Daubeny, an amiable 

 and accomplished gentleman, who was a professor of botany 

 to chemists, and a professor of chemistry to botanists ; at 

 Cambridge, there was Prof. Cumming, who lectured on 

 chemistry, but interested himself mainly in electricity. At 

 neither place was there anything in the nature of a labora- 

 tory which the student could attend. If the enterprising 

 undergraduate desired to familiarize himself with the facts of 

 chemistry by practical experiment, or sought to try and 

 work out an idea which might have occurred to him, he had 

 to pursue his inquiries in his own rooms and with such 

 apparatus as his means or his opportunities could com- 

 mand, to the imminent risk of his furniture and to the 

 dismay and disgust of his bedmaker. It was under such 

 conditions that the late Sir John Ilerschel discovered the 

 solvent action on silver salts unacted upon by light of 

 what the photographers know as " hypo " (sodium thio- 

 sulphate), and thereby made photography possible. 



In Scotland , Dr. Hope — whose name carries us back to the 

 days of phlogiston— still enjoyed at Edinburgh the fame as 

 a lecturer which he shared with Davy at the Royal Insti- 

 tution ; but no tuition in practical chemistry, as a part of 

 university training, was ever thought of. ^Matters at 

 Glasgow were a little better, and Thomas Thomson would 

 occasionally extend a brusque hospitality to the student 

 who aspired to the art and mystery of mineral analysis, 

 but no systematic instruction was ever attempted. The 

 youth with no knowledge of manipulative work, and with 

 scarcely an acquaintance with the forms even of chemical 

 apparatus, was regarded as a sort of laborant, and might 

 be set, at the very outset, to struggle with a zeolite, or 

 to grapple with an atomic weight determination, as best he 

 might. This circumstance probably serves to explain the 

 character of much of the analytical work which is connected 

 with Thomson's name, and which, happily enough, has 

 passed into oblivion. 



In London there was the promise of better things. 

 Thomas Graham — who had already made his memorable 

 discovery of the law of gaseous diffusion whilst Professor 

 of Chemistry at Anderson's College in Glasgow, where 

 he had established a school of practical chemistry, and 



