Robison, John

To the question, what is the cause of a chemical reaction Lavoisier s answer was descriptive and concrete, not geometric and abstract. Lavoisier did not rule out the possibility of an abstract and geometric chemical philosophy in the future but thought it was premature at the time. An avid investigator of the chemistry of organisms as well as of mineral substances, Lavoisier for the present shared the view of his contemporary, the British natural philosopher John Robison, that the phenomena of fermentation, nutrition, secretion, and crystallization are not susceptible to simple mechanical reasoning. 

John Robison, quoted in Nier, "The Emergence of Physics in Nineteenth-Century Britain," 88. 

D r. Rutherford served as professor of botany at the University of Edinburgh from 1786 to 1819, and was thus contemporary with Joseph Black, Charles Hope, and John Robison. He invented an ingenious maximum and minimum thermometer which is described in many modem textbooks of physics. The tragic circumstances surrounding his sudden death were described by Sir Walter in numerous letters to members of his family. 

Since Max Speter (27,41) mentioned that John Mayow in his Trac-tatus Quinque anticipated Lavoisier (28) in die belief that all acids contain oxygen, it is interesting to know that Dr. Rudierford also made the same error. A note by John Robison in his edition of Black s Lectures on the Elements of Chemistry reads as follows ... 

Joseph Black, Lectures on the Elements of Chemistry, edited by John Robison, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1803), vol. i, 342-343. 

As we have already seen, in the 1790s, narratives of Watt s steam engine improvements were produced in connection with the patent trials of that decade in which Boulton Watt confronted legally people whom they regarded as pirates of their engines. John Robison s testimony in Boulton Watt v. Horn-blower and Maberley was his first venture into describing Watt s route to the separate condenser. In the course of his testimony Robison emphasized the philosophical nature of Watt s approach, saying that all became science in his hands . 

By a simple experiment, Watt found what was the real bulk of water converted into steam and from his friend Dr. Black he learned what was the heat absorbed and rendered latent by the conversion of water into steam, which the Doctor then publicly taught, and had done for some years. Experiments had been made long before by Dr. Cullen, Mr. John Robison, and others, in public classes, which proved that water, when placed in an exhausted receiver, boiled, and was converted into steam at the heat of 70° or 80° of Fahrenheit s thermometer...34... 

After Black s death in 1799, his family raised the issue of the publication of his famous lectures. At first there was some confusion about who would undertake this task. Adam Ferguson, Black s obituarist for the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, was willing to produce a straightforward transcript of Black s lectures. John Robison was also approached and declared himself available, though he believed that Watt was the ideal man to do it.49 He put it to... 

As we have seen a number of times already, in his articles on Steam and the Steam Engine in the 1797, third, edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Watt s close friend John Robison wrote about steam in terms that were still significantly faithful to the original ideas with which Black and Watt had worked. Reading those articles is to see an earlier cosmology preserved as if in amber. Robison depicted steam as a compound of water with latent heat. Writing about a steam bubble formed in boiling water, he stated ... 

For Watt s description of the indicator see Robison, System of Mechanical Philosophy, vol. 2, pp. 156-7. On Farey and the indicator R. B. Prosser, Birmingham Inventors and Inventions (Birmingham The Journal Printing Works, New Street, 1881), p. 36 John Farey in Report of the Select Committee on the Law Relative to Patentsfor Inventions, 1829, p. 138 A. P. Woolrich, John Farey and his Treatise on the Steam Engine (1827) , History of Technology, 22 (2000), pp. 63-106. 

Black s Elements, used Absorbent and Alkaline Earth synonymously (see 2 23). It is not clear whether this was a recalibration added by the book s editor, John Robison. Student notes tend to use the term Absorbent however, these notebooks were often compilations and it is sometimes hard to tell exactly when they were written down. Black usually lectured on absorbents in lectures (circa) 60 to 70. For comparison, see Henry Beaufy (transcriber), Manuscript Copy of Lectures in Chemistry Given by Joseph Black, Professor of Medicine and Chemistry, Edinburgh University, 1766-1799 [c 1771-1775], Volume IV, Aberdeen University Library Special Collections MS 38185. 

That a conscious association between the rise of modern science and the dissolution of traditional society extended into the eighteenth century is evident in conservative reaction to the Enlightenment and the Chemical Revolution. Thus the arch-reactionary John Robison linked Lavoisier s chemistry, the metric system and the Revolutionary calendar to the obliteration of the past inherent in the unrestrained advocacy of rational analysis . More perspicaciously, Edmund Burke excoriated Enlightenment chemistry in the following terms ... 

J. R. R. Christie, Joseph Black and John Robison , in A. D. Simpson (ed.), Joseph Black 1728-1799 A Commemorative Symposium (Edinburgh Royal Scottish Museum, 1982), pp. 47-52, p. 51. 

H. Guerlac, Joseph Black s Work on Heat , in Joseph Black, 1728-1799. A Commemorative Symposium, ed. A. D. C. Simpson, p. 17, Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh, 1982, citing Joseph Black, Lectures on the Elements of Chemistry, ed. John Robison, Edinburgh, 1803, v. 1, pp. 157-8. Since it... 

John Robison found about 1787 that silver nitrate is less blackened by sunlight passed through a bottle of nitric acid than by direct sunlight, and this was confirmed by C. W. G. Kastner. Richter recognised that in Scheele s experiment on the decomposition of nitric acid (see Vol. Ill, p. 226), the light must be absorbed (verschlucket). 

John Robison (Boghall, nr. Glasgow, 1739-Edinburgh, 30 January 1805), professor of natural philosophy in Edinburgh and a friend of Watt from his youth, added some polemical notes criticising the French chemists, who, he thought, had not given Black sufficient credit for work on chemistry and heat. 

---