System of Chemistry

T. Thomson, A System of Chemistry, 4, 65, from 5th London edition, Abraham Small, Philadelphia (1818). 

In his preface to the 1830 edition of the System of Chemistry, Thomas Thomson wrote that a new chair should be setup in every university for someone "to explain the principles of heat, light, electricity, and magnetism" so that "this important branch of science" would be adequately treated. In France, he commented, "physique" designated this branch of study.94 In France, Dumas told his students at the College de France that it is to "physics" that chemistry must leave the problem of particles and forces, while chemistry moves along its own different path.95... 

Nor, while flirting with the Scylla of naive empiricism, have practitioners of chemistry escaped the Charybdis of naive realism. Dalton s atomism was in fact unrelentingly and naively realist. His illustrative plates in the New System of Chemistry (1808) are claimed there to exhibit "the mode of combination of some of the more simple cases" of ultimate particles forming bigger ones. At midcentury, Williamson, Dalton s compatriot, received some notoriety for his defense of realism, albeit a more sophisticated variety, particularly in a London Chemical Society debate in 1869.6... 

Regarding the reward system of chemistry, one Cohort III interviewee said Good work gets funded and published. A Cohort IV agrees ... 

Murray, John, A System of Chemistry, William Creech, Edinburgh, 1812,... 

John Dalton, 1766—1844. English Quaker chemist. Teacher of mathematics and physics at New College, Manchester. In his New System of Chemistry he showed how his atomic theory can be used to explain the laws which govern chemical combination. He also made careful meteorological observations and described color-blindness (daltonism). See also ref. (32). 

How then is the chemistry of the EncyclopMie to be summarized The work is, after all, an encyclopedia, a collection of topical information and not intended to present a system of chemistry or of anything else. Hence most of the articles are descriptive accounts of observational facts. Guedon makes the case for its Rouellean character. ... 

Perhaps because of this focus on actual practice, chemists did not write much directly on the question of continuity and discontinuity. Among those who did, the most prominent in the eighteenth century was Pierre-Joseph Macquer, who attempted a system of chemistry based on a set of rules of affinity (see Chapter Eight). His third rule, which Duncan says he inherited from Stahl, reads Substances that unite together lose some of their separate properties and the compounds resulting from their union partake of the properties of the substances which serve as their principles. 

Prior to the publication of the New System of Chemical Philosophy in 1808, Daltons considerable reputation was based on his fundamental work on the behavior of gases. His atomic theory had received some publicity by Thomas Thomson in the third edition of his popular introductory text, A System of Chemistry, in 1807. Thomson gives what he calls a short sketch in a section devoted to the affinity of gases. Like Dalton, he presents the theory synthetically, using Daltons symbols to construct and represent the compound atoms. Probably because the theory is introduced in the context of gases, Thomson always refers to the density of the atoms rather than... 

It is a pleasant irony of history that Berthollet was influential in making Daltons views known in France, through arranging for the translation of the third edition of Thomsons System of Chemistry in 1809, and the sixth edition of William Henry s Elements of Experimental Chemistry in 1812. 

Thomson, Thomas. A System of Chemistry. 2nd ed. 4 vols. Edinburgh, 1804. 

H. Davy, Elements of Agricultural Chemistry, London, 241, 1813 J. Dalton, A New System of Chemical Philosophy, London, 2. 230, 1810 H. Mollier, Der Dampfdruck von wassrigen Ammoniaklosungen, Berlin, 1909 T. Thomson, A System of Chemistry, Edinburgh, 2. 7, 1810 ... 

When Mendeleev published his periodic table for the first time, there were 63 elements. After his death, the number of elements had increased to 86. This quick increase was the result of the periodic table, the most important systemization of chemistry. Although Mendeleev did not discover any new elements, the element with the atomic number 101 discovered by a committee of American scientists led by G.T Seaborg in 1955, was named mendelevium (Md) in honor of Dmitri Mendeleev. 

Thomson, T. (1807). A System of Chemistry, Edinburgh. See also Istoriya agrikul tury (1940). Izd. Akad. Nauk SSSR. 

The systemization of chemistry was also well underway, propelled in large part by Mendeleev s development of the Periodic Table in 1869. Two postulates and an enormous number of careful experimental measurements played a crucial role in this work ... 

One other important point about Boyles attack on element theory is that he did think it was important for chemists to pursue their analyses as far as possible, so as to break the substances down into the simplest constituents that could be reached in the laboratory. A century later, Boyles simplest products of analysis were to become the building blocks of a new system of chemistry. 

First, Lavoisier made the chemistry of salts central to his new system of chemistry, but he did not include only those salts formed with mineral acids. He lists a large number of what we would call organic acids and describes their combinations with salifiable bases, that is, salt formation. The names of many of the acids that he lists are familiar today, including acetic acid, benzoic acid, lactic acid, and oxalic acid, which form acetates, benzoates, and so on. He did not erect a border between these compounds and mineral acids and salts they were part of a unified chemistry. 

Thomson, Thomas. A New System of Chemistry. Printed for Thomas Dobson, Philadelphia. 1800. 

Caloric occupied a special place in Lavoisier s system of chemistry because of its role in determining chemical constitution. All bodies in nature could assume the states of solid, liquid, and gas, depending on the proportion which takes place between the attractive force inherent in their particles, and the repulsive power of the heat acting upon these. The cause of heat or caloric was likely to be a real and material substance. It was the repulsive cause, whatever that may be, which separates the particles of matter from each other. The balance of the attractive force between the particles of a body and the repulsive force... 

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