The Pocket Laboratory: The Blowpipe in Eighteenth-Century Swedish Chemistry. 2019

Charlotte A Abney Salomon
a Department of History , Yale University , New Haven , CT , USA.

This article examines the role of the blowpipe in the discovery process of the disproportionately large number of new elements found by Swedish chem-ists during the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. While individual chemists abroad used versions of the tool, in Sweden alone its use was ubiquitous across the chemical and mineralogical research community, and its consistently simple handheld design made basic dry chemical analysis quick, cheap, and portable. This shared use of the tool was crucial to the development of the mineral analysis projects that uncovered new substances, first by enabling the adoption of a system defining minerals by their chemical components and mineralogy by chemical analysis, and second by providing a simple and practical method for that analysis that facilitated collaboration across institutions, physical distance, and time.

UI MeSH Term Description Entries

Related Publications

Charlotte A Abney Salomon
March 1974, History of science,
Charlotte A Abney Salomon
March 2002, British journal for the history of science,
Charlotte A Abney Salomon
January 1977, Nordisk medicinhistorisk arsbok,
Charlotte A Abney Salomon
March 1987, Isis; an international review devoted to the history of science and its cultural influences,
Charlotte A Abney Salomon
December 1976, The Journal of physiology,
Copied contents to your clipboard!