The next seminar in the Oxford History of Chemistry series
will be held this Thursday (11 March) from 3pm to 5pm
in the History Faculty, Old Boys' High School, George Street.
All are welcome.

"Mastering Nature? Chemistry in History"

Catherine Jackson (UCL):
"Chemistry as the defining science: training and discipline in
19th-century chemical laboratories"

Erik Langlinay(EHSS, Paris):
"Scales and spaces of the chemical industry in France, 1890-1930"

Convenors: Pietro Corsi, John Christie, Robert Fox,
Muriel Le Roux, John Perkins, Viviane Quirke

University of Oxford, Oxford Brookes University,
Maison Française d’Oxford, and the Society
for the History of Alchemy & Chemistry



Notes:

Catherine Jackson has PhDs in organic chemistry and the history of
chemistry, the latter awarded in 2009 for her work on the origins of
synthetic organic chemistry in nineteenth-century Germany. She is
particularly interested in experimental practices, the laboratory
environment and the training of chemists, partly because of her own
background in chemistry but also as a consequence of her experience of
working in industry and as a teacher of chemistry.

The laboratory revolution has proved a useful landmark in
nineteenth-century physics but historians of chemistry have found it
much harder to determine when, or indeed whether, such a revolution took
place in chemistry during the second half of the nineteenth century.
This talk provides a new account of the construction of increasingly
sophisticated, purpose-built, institutional chemical laboratories from
the 1860s onwards, focusing on the role of pedagogy and practice in
shaping the laboratory space.


Erik Langlinay studied politics (Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris)
and history (agrégé d’histoire). He is currently preparing a Ph.D. at
the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris on "The French
chemical industry and World War I (1914-1928)" under the direction of P.
Fridenson.

This communication will explore the connexions between the scales of
chemical businesses as defined by classical historiography and a study
of plants and chemical firms at different geographical scales during the
period 1880-1930. During this Second Industrial Revolution the French
chemical industry is marked by the discovery of new products –
dyestuffs, synthetic ammonia – and a huge hike in production. Does the
French chemical industry respond to the classical model of "scale and
scope" or is France taking an original path? How much of this growth is
due to original discoveries made in laboratories? What is the influence
of Germany and the First World War and its aftermath?