IF 0.5 3区哲学

Ambix Pub Date : 2022-11-01 Epub Date: 2022-10-17 DOI: 10.1080/00026980.2022.2133806

Sarah N Hijmans

{"title":"The Tantalum Metals (1801-1866): Nineteenth-Century Analytical Chemistry and the Identification of Chemical Elements.","authors":"Sarah N Hijmans","doi":"10.1080/00026980.2022.2133806","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00026980.2022.2133806","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the identification of chemical elements using mineral analysis, focusing on the controversy surrounding the \"tantalum metals\" between 1801 and 1866. Of these metals, only tantalum and niobium are still recognised as elements today; the discovery claims of columbium, pelopium, ilmenium and dianium were all retracted or refuted. Despite the theoretical and institutional changes that chemistry underwent during this time, the debates on the tantalum metals point towards a continuity in the identification of metals. For most of the nineteenth century, chemists continued to use the same types of analytical procedures as their mid-eighteenth-century predecessors. These analytical methods enabled the identification of metals based on the chemical behaviour of their compounds, without requiring their isolation in the form of simple substances (that is, as metals). Accordingly, the central questions in all of the debates on the tantalum metals were the correct identification of the properties of compounds and the elimination of impurities, rather than the simplicity of the new metals. The story of the tantalum metals therefore illustrates the fact that, despite the definition of chemical elements as simple substances, the discovery of new (metallic) elements only rarely coincided with the isolation of new simple substances.","PeriodicalId":50963,"journal":{"name":"Ambix","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"33516837","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

150 Years of the Periodic Table: A Commemorative Symposium 元素周期表诞生150周年纪念研讨会

IF 0.5 3区哲学

Ambix Pub Date : 2022-10-31 DOI: 10.1080/00026980.2022.2137978

Guillermo Restrepo

引用次数: 0

150 Years of the Periodic Table: A Commemorative Symposium 元素周期表诞生150周年纪念研讨会

IF 0.5 3区哲学

Ambix Pub Date : 2022-10-31 DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-67910-1

Guillermo Restrepo

引用次数: 3

Biographical Histories of Chemistry 化学传记史

IF 0.5 3区哲学

Ambix Pub Date : 2022-08-26 DOI: 10.1080/00026980.2022.2112850

H. Kragh

{"title":"Biographical Histories of Chemistry","authors":"H. Kragh","doi":"10.1080/00026980.2022.2112850","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00026980.2022.2112850","url":null,"abstract":"As Mary Jo Nye noted in an essay in the first issue of Bulletin for the History of Chemistry, the genre of biography maintains a great appeal among general readers, working chemists, and scholars of the academic community. The two books under review belong to this broad and increasingly popular genre of biography of chemists and they are both published by the Springer company. However, otherwise they are quite different and for this reason they will be dealt with separately. Some Forgotten Chemists is a slim volume sold by Springer at an unreasonably high price as part of the series Perspectives on the History of Chemistry, edited by Seth Rasmussen. It consists of seventeen chapters, sixteen of which describe the life and career of a chemist who is claimed to be forgotten or is little known today (one of the chapters is a summary account of “Women Pioneers” in general). The author is Brian Halton, a British-New Zealand chemist who, from 1968 to his death in 2019, worked at the Victoria University of Wellington, where he wrote a series of articles on little-remembered yet significant chemists in the local journal Chemistry in New Zealand. These biographical articles have now been collected into a book format. Somewhat unimaginatively, they appear in alphabetical order, starting with Carl Friedrich Accum and ending with William John Young. In this way each chapter is self-contained, much like in biographical dictionaries such as the authoritative multi-volumeDictionary of Scientific Biography or, to mention a less ambitious example from the history of chemistry, the Lexikon bedeutender Chemiker published in 1989. The obvious disadvantage of this kind of fragmented structure is that the book loses coherence and a common context. It is not possible to compare the separate chapters, nor is that the purpose of dictionary-like publications of this type.","PeriodicalId":50963,"journal":{"name":"Ambix","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48111090","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Making Physicians: Tradition, Teaching, and Trials at Leiden University, 1575–1639 培养医生:莱顿大学的传统、教学和试验，1575-1639

IF 0.5 3区哲学

Ambix Pub Date : 2022-08-17 DOI: 10.1080/00026980.2022.2107318

Anisia Iacob

{"title":"Making Physicians: Tradition, Teaching, and Trials at Leiden University, 1575–1639","authors":"Anisia Iacob","doi":"10.1080/00026980.2022.2107318","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00026980.2022.2107318","url":null,"abstract":"as well as his later rebellion against an academic career in Ghent, which he found stultifying, preferring to try his luck in America, with long absence from, and consequent negative impact on, his marriage to Céline Swarts. Mercellis dispels some myths, notably that Baekeland earned $750,000 by selling his invention of Velox photographic paper in 1899 to Eastman Kodak. In actuality, he shared this sum with two partners, Leonard Jacobi and Albert Hahn, making only $215,000 from the deal, which was nonetheless sufficient to set him up as an independent researcher. When he later referred to this period in his life and the sale of his interests in the Nepera Chemical Company, Baekeland failed to mention any partners, only using the pronoun “I” in his presentations, consequently gaining all the reputational benefit. Somewhat of an academic elitist, he nonetheless valued the practical approach rather than the theoretical, rejecting those in an academic “ivory tower” (p. 54). Baekeland made money in business but was careful to avoid mention of this when talking in academic circles, where he often focused on theoretical rather than practical approaches, postulating theories about the structure of his phenolic resins, which were later proven to be very much off the mark. He promoted industrial chemistry as “a service to society” (p. 183), regarding science and technology as superior in social and cultural value to literature and art, an opinion which did not endear him to some of his peers and provoked debate. However, as an entrepreneur of his time, he benefited from the increasing popularity of science and technology in the contemporary zeitgeist. The book is enriched by the use of a range of primary archives, notably sources in Ghent, Belgium, and better-known records in the United States. This research will be invaluable to historians of technology and the history of science.","PeriodicalId":50963,"journal":{"name":"Ambix","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48252427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

"Men Don't Like to Work Under a Woman": Female Chemists in the Photographic Manufacturing Industry, ca. 1918-1950. “男人不喜欢在女人手下工作”:摄影制造业的女化学家，约1918-1950。

IF 0.5 3区哲学

Ambix Pub Date : 2022-08-01 Epub Date: 2022-07-18 DOI: 10.1080/00026980.2022.2097980

Joris Mercelis

{"title":"\"Men Don't Like to Work Under a Woman\": Female Chemists in the Photographic Manufacturing Industry, ca. 1918-1950.","authors":"Joris Mercelis","doi":"10.1080/00026980.2022.2097980","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00026980.2022.2097980","url":null,"abstract":"Around the start of the 1920s, the situation of female chemists in the photographic manufacturing industry was literally and figuratively explosive, for their record in conducting hazardous organic syntheses made the research director of the largest photographic firm conclude that chemistry was not an appropriate field for women. About two decades later, by contrast, the photographic industry had developed into one of a relatively small number of industries where female chemists had obtained recognition and promotions not only as librarians, patent professionals, and chemical analysts but also as experimental and theoretical investigators in research and development laboratories. This article suggests that to make sense of this turnabout, it is crucial to carefully examine the position of women chemists in corporate organisational structures and hierarchies, including the possible unintended consequences of segregating women into separate scientific labs and/or teams. This study's findings also point to the value of using scientific groups and labs as units of analysis in historical research on women scientists in industry, an approach that could be extended to other cases and might help stimulate more dialogue between historians of corporate science and R&D on one hand and historians of women and gender in science on the other.","PeriodicalId":50963,"journal":{"name":"Ambix","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"40515405","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 1

Enabling Circumstances: Women Chemical Engineers at the Norwegian Institute of Technology, 1910-1943. 有利环境:1910-1943年挪威理工学院的女化学工程师。

IF 0.5 3区哲学

Ambix Pub Date : 2022-08-01 Epub Date: 2022-07-21 DOI: 10.1080/00026980.2022.2098897

Annette Lykknes

引用次数: 0

Patriotic Women: Chemistry and Gender in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish World. 爱国女性:18世纪西班牙世界的化学与性别。

IF 0.5 3区哲学

Ambix Pub Date : 2022-08-01 DOI: 10.1080/00026980.2022.2097492

Elena Serrano

引用次数: 0

Becoming Visible. Marie-Anne Paulze-Lavoisier and the Campaign for the "New Chemistry" (1770s-1790s). 变得可见。玛丽-安妮·保兹-拉瓦锡和“新化学”运动(1770 -1790年)。