HLST200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Scurvy, Chemical Revolution, Ingot
UNIT6
PP1. identify and discuss the main currents in science during the Enlightenment.
Ede and Cormack argue that important elements of the Enlightenment were European expansionism and
commercial growth and the intertwining of science and the state. Growing freedom and democracy
allowed natural philosophers to take up radical positions, but scientists were also taking more and more
direction from the state or from business and commercial ventures and thus supporting European
imperialism and exploitation. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, science had become an
important part of the modern state. At a more immediate level, Ede and Cormack argue that there were
two “monumental” concepts at the heart of the Enlightenment. One was the concept of universal human
rights or natural rights, the other was a belief that progress was not only possible but inevitable. Those
concepts drew from Newtonian science; his laws of nature were universal and applied equally to princes
and peasants. Such universal laws, applied to human relations, would effectively undermine authority
derived from tradition, from church and royalty. Note the opening clause of the United States Declaration
of Independence, the document representatives of the Thirteen American Colonies signed on 4 July 1776.
1. identify the most important and influential English and French popularizers of Newton in
the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
In both France and Germany there were strong reactions against Newton and what was seen as his crass
reductionism of everything to a mechanistic world that could only be understood through mathematics.
The Romantic movement of the late eighteenth century was, in many ways, a “moral revolt against
Newtonian physics” (Williams and Steffens 8). The Romantics believed that one could use intuition to
study nature. They also believed that “man” had to live in harmony with nature and not try to rise above
it. One of the most powerful advocates of this approach was Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). On the
opening page of his 1762 treatise, The Social Contract, he wrote: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is
in chains.” Rousseau believed that people (“men” in the eighteenth-century vernacular) were being
chained by the growing commercial society and that men had to throw off the chains and return to a state
of nature and live in harmony with nature (the counter to this came from Thomas Hobbes, who wrote in
Chapter 13 of Leviathan that life in a state of nature was “poor, nasty, brutish, and short”). It is important
to remember that Rousseau studied botany and natural history. In Germany, Johann Wolfgang Goethe
(1749–1832) expressed similar sentiments. Goethe criticized the classification methods of Carolus
Linnaeus as well as Newton’s work on optics. Williams and Steffens point out that to say that Goethe was
wrong and Newton right is to miss the point that Goethe was trying to make.
1. discuss the importance of scientific societies.
As the textbook notes, the growth of new scientific societies, the spread of salon culture, the establishment
of new museum collections, and the increasing number of scientific expeditions helped generate interest
in science and in different types of science. The progress of the Scientific Revolution was uneven and
other fields of study began to catch up to the hard sciences. As you read Chapter Six of the textbook,
assess the connection between geology and biology and the methodology that came out of the Scientific
Revolution. Evaluate the extent to which new fields of study were influenced by the Scientific Revolution
and the extent to which other factors were at work.
1. outline the advances made in the understanding of electricity
Otto von Guericke in the seventeeth century had created a machine that generated an electrical
charge by soinning a ball of sulphur and rubbing it with the hands or a cloth.The initial
research on electricity was qualitative, concentrating n finding electricity,observing its
behaviour, and learning how to manufacture it. Franklin s 1752 kite experiment is the most
famous episods in the hunt for electrical phenomena and has to the status popular mythology.
It is likely that franklin did fly a kite as an experiment to determine wheter lightning was
electricity, but he left no direction. The creation of the leyden 1745 was a major step toward
controlling the mysterious energy, its was not discovered by one person but by three at almost
same moment: Ewald jurgen Kleist(1700-48) in germany and Pieter van
Musschenbroek(1692-1761) and Andreas Cunaeus (1712-88) in Holland. While Kleist was
probably the fisrt to use a jar filled with water to try to collect an electrical charge, its was
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Musschenbroek who described the instrument. Electricity from a static generator was
conducted to the interior through the rod and stored. When the rod touched a conductor, the
electricity was discharged.Frankiln: Theory of the period described electricity as a fluid, which
in effect flowed, into the leyden jar from the electrostatic machine. The jars also helped to
clarify the concept of an electric circuit, and its was from this that another salon demonstration
arose. Such demonstration helped to shift the study of electricity from a qualitative
examination to one based on quantitative ideas, such as the relationship between the area of
coated surface, the amount of charge, and its force.
explain Neptunism and Vulcanism and identify the main proponents of each theory.
Named after the roman gods of the seas and fires. Neptunism was named because its
proponents believed that water was the foundamental agent for the formation of the earth(
sometime called the wernerian theory).Gradually a number of mineralogists began to argue for
some contribution of the inner heat of the earth, sometime called vulcanism. There was only
one dedicated vulcanist, jean etiennes guettard (1715-86),he argued that volcanic forces in the
past had been much stronger than now and widespread enough to account for rock formation,
fossil placement, and igneous rocks.
1. explain Carolus Linnaeus’s contribution to science.
Carolus Linnaeu(Karl Von linne 1707-78), a Swedish botanist, was one of the most successful
systematizer in the eighteen century. He amased a massive botanical collection ( dried, rather
than living, as opposed to the collection of Kew), receiving plants from other collectors all over
the world. Linnaeus developed a classification system, first articulated in systema naturae(
1735), based on increasing specificity:Kingdom, Class, Order,Genus,Species,Variety. In order to
classify specific plants, he used artificial, classification that is he based his system on attributes
that were easily counted and measured probably did not link the species in nature. All
systematizers in the eiteenth century used artificial system but hoped one day to find the
natural basis forconnections amoung species.
1. outline the discoveries and theoretical advances made by Lavoisier.
Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, (born August 26, 1743, Paris, France—died May 8, 1794, Paris), prominent
French chemist and leading figure in the 18th-century chemical revolution who developed an
experimentally based theory of the chemical reactivity of oxygen and coauthored the modern system for
naming chemical substances. Having also served as a leading financier and public administrator before
the French Revolution, he was executed with other financiers during the revolutionary terror. It is
generally accepted that Lavoisier's great accomplishments in chemistry largely stem from his changing the
science from a qualitative to a quantitative one. Lavoisier is most noted for his discovery of the role
oxygen plays in combustion. He recognized and named oxygen (1778) and hydrogen (1783) and opposed
the phlogiston theory. Lavoisier helped construct the metric system, wrote the first extensive list of
elements, and helped to reform chemical nomenclature. He predicted the existence of silicon (1787)[5]
and was also the first to establish that sulfur was an element (1777) rather than a compound.[6] He
discovered that, although matter may change its form or shape, its mass always remains the same.
1. discuss the discoveries made in the study of gases by Joseph Black, Henry Cavendish, and
Joseph Priestley.
Black demonstrated that fixed air would not sustain combustion by pouring the invisible
gas onto a lit candle in a container, thereby putting out the flame. He proved that fixed
proportions of chemicals combined in chemical reactions and fixed air was a component of
atmospheric air, as well as being one of the pases produced when exhalting. By these
demonstrations, he showed that atmospheric air was a mixture of gases and not elemental
as it had been considered I the Aritotelian and many later systems.Cavendish, identified
the properties of inflammation air now called hydrogen in 1766 and distimguished it from
a number of people that it was phlogiston. Around 1784, Cavendish was the fisrt to
demonstrate clearly that water was a compound, undoing another of the Aristotelian
elements.Joseph Priestley(1733-1804) He investigated what would now call nitric oxide,
hydrogen chloride, ammonia, sulphur dixide and oxygen, amoung other. He investigated
the properties of phlogisticated air in water ( seltzer or soda water) as a cure for scurvy. His
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Document Summary
Pp1. identify and discuss the main currents in science during the enlightenment. Ede and cormack argue that important elements of the enlightenment were european expansionism and commercial growth and the intertwining of science and the state. Growing freedom and democracy allowed natural philosophers to take up radical positions, but scientists were also taking more and more direction from the state or from business and commercial ventures and thus supporting european imperialism and exploitation. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, science had become an important part of the modern state. At a more immediate level, ede and cormack argue that there were two monumental concepts at the heart of the enlightenment. In both france and germany there were strong reactions against newton and what was seen as his crass reductionism of everything to a mechanistic world that could only be understood through mathematics. The romantic movement of the late eighteenth century was, in many ways, a moral revolt against.