Technikatörténeti szemle 19. (1992)

KÖNYVISMERTETÉS - Papers of the First „MINERALKONTOR” International Conference on the History of Chemistry and Chemical Industry (Veszprém, 12-16 August, 1991)

WILLIAM A. SMEATON* THE EFFECT OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION ON CHEMISTRY AND THE CHEMICAL INDUSTRY The revolution in chemistry towards which A. L. Lavoisier had been working for twenty years reached its climax in February 1789, when he published his list of elements and a full account of his antiphlogistic theory in the Traité élémentaire de chimie. Three months later, in April 1789, the first issue of Annales de Chimie appeared, a monthly journal in which supporters of the new theory were encouraged to publish their research. Lavoisier was one of the eight editors, and the others included L. B. Guyton de Morveau, A. F. Fourcroy and C. L. Berthohet, the first chemists who had accepted his theory after 1785 and had collaborated with Lavoisier in 1787 in revising chemical nomenclature so that the name of a substance was related to its composition according to the new theory. Lavoisier's Traité was not the only book to give publicity to the new theory. Fourcroy adopted it exclusively in the third edition of his Élémens d'histoire naturelle et de chimie (Paris, 1789), as did Guyton de Morveau in Part 2 of his Encyclopédie méthodique, chimie (Paris, 1789). Fourcroy also taught the theory to large audiences who attended his lectures at the Jardin du Roi and other institutions in Paris, and in Dijon, the capital of the province of Burgundy, it was included in Guyton de Morveau's public course of chemistry. Ah these antiphlogistic chemists benefited to some extent from the financial support given to science by the government of the ancien régime. As members of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Lavoisier, Fourcroy and Berthohet received annual payments, these were not enough to live on, but provided useful additions to their other incomes, Lavoisier was a wealthy man who bought his own chemicals and apparatus, some of which was very expensive, and paid his research assistants, but his work was mainly done in the laboratory of the Arsenal, a government institution. At the Jardin du Roi, also a public institution, Fourcroy received a modest salary and had the use of the laboratory. Guyton de Morveau's position was different, for he received no payment as a member of the Dijon Academy and his research was done at his own expense in his private laboratory, but his lectures were delivered in the premises of the Academy and the provincial government of Burgundy provided the funds needed for the apparatus and chemicals used in his lecture demonstrations and for the wages of a laboratory assistant. It was not only pure chemistry, as we now call it, that benefited from government support. Berthohet received a large salary as technical adviser to-the *3, Banff House, Glenmore Road, London NW3 4 DG