Vitreous Virtuosity: Chemical Glassblowing and the Material Culture of 19th-Century Chemistry

Time: 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.

Place: 6th Floor Conference Room, Chemical Heritage Foundation

Information: 215-873-8289 or bbl@chemheritage.org

Chemists and alchemists have chosen since ancient times to work in glass because of its transparency and chemical inertia, and because it could be shaped “in the flame of a proper lamp.” Those qualities were certainly important to Justus Liebig’s innovative apparatus for organic analysis—the Kaliapparat—but both Liebig’s original apparatus and its variants also exemplify two previously ignored vitreous virtues: innovation and standardization. I argue that recognizing and capitalizing on these properties of glassware provided 19th-century chemists and glassblowers with powerful means by which they transformed the material culture of chemistry.

Catherine Jackson was originally trained as a research chemist in biological organic chemistry and spent many years working in industry and as a teacher of chemistry before learning that science can and does have a history! But when she made the decision to study that history, she was disappointed to find her own discipline sorely underrepresented in the history of science. That is why, between 2004 and 2009, she researched and wrote a second Ph.D. dissertation on the development of organic chemistry during the 19th century—and it is what has brought her to CHF, where she plans to finish the manuscript of a book based on that work