Synthesis and Analysis Quantified

By synthetic quantification, I mean a recipe that states the amount of each ingredient in numbers and the relative proportion needed to produce a substance with specified properties. In analytical quantification, the chemist determines the proportions among the constituent parts of a given compound substance. Synthetic quantification had a long tradition in pharmaceuticals, mineralogy, and metallurgy, as in the production of different kinds of brass.^[12] Analytic quantification scarcely existed before the middle of the 18th century.

Synthetic quantification did not demand exact balances. The figures given in recipes were only approximate: ingredients did not come pure and the recipes were the result of trial and error. A chemist tried one part of A and one of B, then two of A and one of B, and so forth, and then, by comparing the different products, chose the better recipe. A case in point is Johann Heinrich Pott, whose Chymische Untersuchungen of 1754 included extensive "Tabellen von denen Würckungen der verschiedenen Mischungen derer Erden." The tables recorded Pott's attempts to obtain a certain iron product able to withstand high heat. He mixed ingredients in various proportions,^[13] but the abundance of expressions like "about 4 parts to 1," "a little more was added," "a greater part," "most of it," in his tables suggest that we should not ascribe much weight to the numbers offered. Pott and his contemporaries resorted to these imprecisions because they lacked standards for measurements and uniform scales and weights.^[14] Compounding this lack was a plethora of impurities, which could cause successive weighings to give very different results even if carried out in exactly the same way. This last problem particularly afficted the medical branch of applied chemistry, pharmacy.^[15]

In pharmacies balances played much the same roles as in metallurgy and assaying.^[16] A pharmacist sold substances by weight, as indicated by the prominent position of the balance on the shop counter, and compounded drugs by weight according to the recipes in the pharmacopoeias. As in the case of the assayer, however, the pharmacist's method of measuring was independent of theory. The role of chemistry in the business was confined to qualitative aspects and in practice influenced the making of very few pharmaceuticals.

As practitioners of an art, apothecaries were trained by apprenticeship.^[17] The theory of their business was reserved for philosophical chemists who hobnobbed with savants. Carl Wilhelm Scheele confined his chemical work to his spare time, and Torbern Bergman explicitly reserved the theoretical part of pharmacy for the chemist.^[18] In all this pharmacy resembled metallurgy. Many metallurgists in Germany had either practiced as or trained under an apothecary.^[19] However, commercial demands on pharmacy did not lead, as in mining, to an increased use of analytical quantification. Synthesis, not analysis, was important for the apothecary; whose financial well-being did not depend on successful analysis. Nor was quantitative analysis important in medicine: with the techniques then available, it would have been impossible to subject the concerns of physicians to quantitative analysis.^[20]

The increasing use of analytical quantification in assaying during the 18th century was a consequence of the expanding number of known ores and minerals. In Sweden, for example, where mining

products were the backbone of the economy, discovering new sources of ores took high priority, especially after the failure of the Falun Copper Mine at the beginning of the century. This failure prompted search for substitutes that might have the same economical importance as copper.^[21]

In this process chemistry played a central part. Laboratories were built close to the different mines, in places like Ädelfors, Falun, and the little-known Skisshyttan, where Axel Fredrik Cronstedt organized a small chemical research center. The nature and activities of these relatively unknown laboratories need to be examined. They proved equal to their task; they helped solve the problems raised by mining and the iron industry—for example, how carbon influenced the quality of steel.^[22]

The significance of chemistry for metallurgy was further emphasized by the fact that the government Board of Mines employed a laboratory worker from the late 1630s, and regularly operated a Laboratorium chymicum from the 1680s.^[23] The main task of the laboratory was to prepare pharmaceuticals for the mining industry. From the beginning of the 18th century, it concentrated increasingly on mineral analysis, assaying, and mineralogy. In keeping with its original assignment, the first directors of the laboratory were physicians; but in 1718, when Georg Brandt became its director, the responsibility of running it was transferred to a mineralogist.

In German-speaking central Europe, interest in chemistry likewise grew with the economic importance of mining. Many German chemists, like Becher and Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi, also occupy distinguished places in the history of German economic thought.^[24]

When the French government wanted information on mining from the rest of Europe, they sent out a mining engineer with a thorough training in chemistry, Gabriel Jars.^[25]

Jars' appointment symbolized an important development in our history. Around 1700, empirical knowledge was sufficient to permit miners to decide the value of well-known minerals: a trained eye could sort samples by sight. But traditional knowledge was inadequate to manage the many new minerals discovered during the 18th century. Assayers found themselves in need of chemical knowledge. Only chemists armed with the methods of analytic quantification could answer the question, "How much iron does this ore contain, and how much of it can be made available?" In his Anfangsgründe der Probierkunst (1746), Johann Cramer declared that the assayer must be able to decide the composition of different substances "[i]n order to know what and how much of a [constituent] might be found in the substance under study, or could profitably be obtained from it."^[26]

The growing need for analytical quantification raised the balance to a more prominent position in the assayer's workplace, the forerunner of the chemical laboratory. When Cramer described his laboratory, or "Arbeitsstätte," in 1746, ovens and cupels were still the most important instruments, but balances also received attention; Cramer claimed that his newest balance could give "the weight of the smallest body exactly." Still, weight is not everything, and Cramer acknowledged that even the most sensitive balance had to be supplemented by needles and touchstones in order to determine the composition of important substances.^[27]

From mineralogy, analytical quantification spread into other fields of chemistry, including wet analysis. Mineral water was a favorite subject of study, even though its constituents were not intended for individual sale. Analysis facilitated subsequent synthetic quantification of naturally occurring mineral waters deemed to be especially valuable.^[28] Another sort of wet analysis, titrimetry, also became more important during the second half of the 18th century. Here, too, commercial concerns were at work, since analysis helped in determining the purity of sulfuric acid, among other substances.^[29]

Toward the end of the century analytical quantification seeped into ordinary textbooks of chemistry. Bergman's edition of H.T. Scheffer's lectures, Chemiske föreläsningar (Uppsala, 1775), is an instructive example. The material Bergman added almost doubled the size of the original, published thirty years before. In Bergman's additions, the composition of chemical substances is given in the form "100 parts of A contains x parts of B, y parts of C," and so on;^[30] no such formulas appeared in Scheffer's original text.

By Bergman's time it was common for chemists to describe composition quantitatively.^[31] Formulas did not necessarily afford great precision, however. Analytical quantification was a more difficult assignment than synthetic quantification; the same analytical procedure could yield very different results even when applied twice by the same chemist to the same substance. Insensitivity of the balances and, more importantly, difficulty in procuring and identifying pure substances, contributed to the variations. Early analytical quantifica-

tion thus represented a new use of numbers—whatever their exactness—but did not at first assist in the development of chemical theory.

Constant interaction between chemistry and mineralogy would change the situation. Analytical quantification led to important changes in mineralogical classification systems. Up to the middle of the century, these classifications remained a species of natural history—relatively simple and qualitative, based on the external characteristics of minerals. The more substances mineralogists needed to classify, however, the greater the difficulties they experienced in relying only on external characteristics.^[32] Classification by internal characteristics—that is, by chemical composition—offered an attractive alternative or supplement. The shift from classification on the basis of external physical properties to that based on internal, chemical composition began around 1750. Cronstedt's system of 1758 is an early example.^[33] He denied the value of description from external factors and plumped for one based on chemical composition. His program gave chemistry a new role as a describer of mineralogical species. Although Cronstedt did not use numbers to express chemical composition in numbers, the growing importance of analytical quantification made it just a matter of time before others did so as a natural part of chemical description.

The determination of composition by weight consequently was not inspired primarily by attempts to formulate a classificatory system, but by the need to describe individual species more accurately. The balance and analytical quantification contributed to improved description, but only within a basically qualitative scheme of classification.

(The order in a system of mineralogical classification, for example, continued to depend on the qualitative properties of the substances to be classified.) It was only with Joseph Louis Proust's system of definite proportions in the 1790s that improved descriptions were incorporated into a quantitative classificatory scheme. Proust arrived at his basic concepts while working as a chemist and mineralogist for the Spanish Government.^[34] The research that inspired the theory of definite proportions, which immediately found its way into the mineralogical classification systems and gave a forceful impetus to the change from qualitative to quantitative description, concerned economically important oxides of iron.

Mineralogy thus began to transform itself from a technical art into a science. In it chemistry played important roles, providing both the overall qualitative pattern for classification and exact, quantitative descriptions of mineral species. This dual role finds a parallel in the tension between practice (economic interest) and theory (scientific interest) in the development of mineralogical classifications. Economic interest argued for a system based on monetary value; chemists preferred a system based on composition. Bergman even tried to amalgamate the two systems into one.^[35]

Bergman envisioned a scientific mineralogical system whose classes were determined by the most dominant ingredient of the mineral where dominance was defined quantitatively. Value can also be quantified, however, and it was therefore both possible and advantageous in practice to include in one class all minerals containing gold and silver regardless of their content of noble metal.^[36] Similarly, any mineral that derived its economic or metallurgical properties from one particular component might be placed in the class of that component, not in the class of the quantitatively dominant component.

Every systematizer used both qualitative and quantitative methods in the laboratory. The blowpipe, for example, never ceased to be an important tool for the mineralogist. According to Berzelius, miner-

alogical classification approached "mathematical certainty" thanks to the theory of chemical proportions.^[37] But he also insisted that the constituents of a compound must be found "in their nature as well as in their quantity." He combined the results of his undisputed mastery with the blowpipe with a consistent application of numbers. The game can also be played on pharmaceuticals. Berzelius was the first to do so systematically.^[38]