Old Timey Chemistry Tables, Alchemical and All

I'd seen Janet's notice a few days or a week or whatever it was ago of The New York Times's notice of a book about the history and philosophy of chemistry. As Janet commented, it's just not every day you get studies about chemical history in the NYT. It's probably only maybe one or two days, ever.

Oddly enough, they'd also had coverage last summer of a conference at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia on alchemy (yes, that CHF, whose motto remains, for reasons still unexplained: "we hate hipsters"). As it happens, I've written about chemistry tables as visual representations (here, if you have access to Configurations and Project Muse journals) -- another art/science commingling in keeping with the World's Fair's ethos -- and since I like 'em, I offer a copy of the very first chemistry table, circa 1718.

The table, which Geoffroy, working at the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris, produced as part of a workshop chemical culture, was one the chemists mixing and manipulating their medically/pharmaceutically related substances would use as a tool -- the table was a tool, on par with other bench craft tools -- to help them understand how much affinity the substances had for one another. Called a "Table des Rapports" or Affinity table, it describes the "rapports" between substances -- the higher up on the chart it was, the more closely it would combine with the header substance. If it was near the bottom of the table, you didn't stand much of a chance of getting the stuff to come together.

The table, then, with its alchemical iconography, bridges the subjects of the only two NYT articles ever to appear on studies of chemical history.

Now, for the 100.3% of you out there who aren't up on recent advances in the history of chemistry, alchemy studies are indeed fascinating and quite well done. "Chymistry," some call it. Newton's alchemical interests, which comprised the bulk of his work, were suppressed in historical literature for a few centuries for fear that associating his name with alchemy would undermine his integrity as a "scientist." (Check out Newton's Dark Secrets, from PBS, and, specifically, this interview; oh, and this "interactive" manuscript. Wow.) But his alchemical research was consistent with the early modern research that we know as natural philosophy. So, rather than hiding his alchemy in the closet when company comes over, scholars over the past few decades have been able to bring it on out, and to say to the guests that Newton was doing fine. Reconceptualize the alchemy instead of demoting Newton, that is, and it all works out.

So, though the NYT piece about this CHF conference isn't accessible on-line (it begins: "Historians of science are taking a new and lively interest in alchemy, the often mystical investigation into the hidden mysteries of nature that reached its heyday in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and has been an embarrassment to modern scientists ever since."), it does talk about the alchemists in their own context, and it does, as the CHF thingy it was reporting on does, help explain the growth of knowledge in an early modern world. Lawrence Principe, William Newman, and probably three or five others are the names you want to google for that.

(Aha, and I'm surprised to see that Wikipedia is got stuff on Geoffroy as well.)