The ‘Instrumental’ Reality of Phlogiston

[N]	Metals	Common Sulphur	Vegetables and Animals
[A]	metallic sulphur	bituminous sulphur	vegetable sulphur or inflammable oil
[P]	The sulphur principle or the matter of light

Middle salt =	alkali +	acid spirit
		= pure acid +	sulphur
			= matter of light + a principle

Figure 1: Geoffroy’s Table des rapports (from Geoffroy 1718).

Geoffroy included the ‘oily or sulphur principle’ in the fourth column of his table and soon identified it with ‘phlogiston’ in discussing a chemical puzzle earlier proposed by Stahl: "When one has saturated & crystallized vitriolic acid with salt of tartar, find a means of separating this acid from the fixed salt in a moment of time & in the palm of a hand." (Geoffroy 1720) This seemed a rather difficult puzzle, Geoffroy mused, since salt of tartar was the strongest alkali and should have ‘the most intimate rapport’ with vitriolic acid, which was the strongest acid. It was quite unlikely that any other acid or alkali could break up their union, as Stahl himself had acknowledged in his Traite de Zymotechnia or De formentatione. By carefully sorting through Stahl’s works, Geoffroy answered that the only substance that could displace salt of tartar from its union with vitriolic acid was the "oily principle, or as M. Stahl calls it, the phlogistic principle, the inflammable principle, or the principle of inflammability" (ibid.). He devised a couple of processes to prove the involvement of this principle (Kim 2003, pp. 146-151). In one of these processes, Geoffroy melted vitriolated tartar (salt of tartar saturated by vitriolic acid) on a crucible with some inflammable matter to produce a reddish matter similar to hepar sulphuris (a mixture of salt of tartar and sulphur). By dissolving this mixture in a sufficient quantity of water, filtering it, and pouring it over some distilled vinegar or other weak acid spirit, he obtained sulphur.

	vitriolated tartar	+	inflammable matter
	(vitriolic acid + salt of tartar)		(the oily principle + … )
		acid
→	hepar sulphuris	→	(salt of tartar + acid) + sulphur
	(salt of tartar + sulphur)

Geoffroy interpreted that in this operation the oily principle contained in the inflammable matter, rarefied and put in motion by the element of fire, insinuated itself between the two salts that made up vitriolated tartar. Since it had more rapport with vitriolic acid than with the alkali salt, it united with the former quite tightly and consequently detached itself from the latter. The ‘compound’ of common mineral sulphur resulted from the union of the oily principle and vitriolic acid. The salt of tartar, abandoning vitriolic acid, remained united with this new sulphur in the form of hepar sulphuris. To facilitate their separation, one had to pour some acid for which the alkali salt had a much more considerable rapport.

Geoffroy identified his ‘oily or sulphurous principle’ with Stahl’s ‘phlogiston’ or ‘principle of inflammability’, by following every minute detail of concrete operations that supposedly involved phlogiston. In the above operation, ‘the oily principle’ referred to a substance contained in inflammable matters such as wood or charcoal that had the strongest affinity with vitriolic acid. Common or mineral sulphur was a ‘compound’ of this principle and vitriolic acid, which accounted for its inflammability. In his earlier experiments on metals with the burning glass, Geoffroy’s oily principle was the ‘sulphur principle’ that regenerated metallic calces. Although he could not isolate it in concrete form, he could attribute a distinct chemical identity to this substance because it retained its peculiar property of inflammability and its affinity for vitriolic acid throughout various transformations. By identifying the ‘sulphur principle’ in metallic chemistry with Stahl’s ‘phlogiston’ in the chemistry of salts, Geoffroy broadened the operational terrain of the ‘sulphur principle’ or phlogiston. Furthermore, by including it in the Table des rapports, he provided phlogiston with a theoretical identity that would outlast its operational identity. As the affinity table expanded and provided more places for phlogiston in the chemistry of salts (Demachy 1781), its place in chemical theory became more secure even as new questions began to be raised about its operational identity as the principle of inflammability, metallicity, and color.
 
 

4. The Thermometric Conception of Fire

In the early decades of the eighteenth century, French academicians stabilized the ‘sulphur principle’ as ‘phlogiston’ by various operational/instrumental practices, a theoretical representation, and a corpuscular ontology. This complex of loosely coordinated identities attached to phlogiston faced a serious challenge when Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738), a popular teacher of chemistry and medicine, introduced a unified ontology of fire based on thermometric measurements. He utilized his scholarly training and inclination as a methodical reader to survey a broad range of literature and to construct a ‘true’ natural philosophy or experimental philosophy in the Boylean fashion. In trying to craft a didactic discourse of chemistry that would appeal to a more learned audience, he emphasized the intelligibility and the philosophical coherence of chemical theory. He sought to transform the ‘art’ of chemistry into an ‘academic science’ by employing the philosophical method of induction – to obtain ‘true knowledge’ through the ‘laborious’ process of proceeding from ‘particular experiments’ to ‘general rules’ (Boerhaave 1735, p. vii, ix) – which would allow him to present "the most perfect knowledge of chemistry" that utilized "all the labours of the chemists, which they call Processes". For this purpose, chemical ‘theory’ had to consist of the ‘general propositions’ deduced from "common undoubted chemical experiments" and common physical properties or the demonstrated ‘truths’ of physics, mechanics, hydrostatics and hydraulics (ibid., pp. 2-3). In other words, chemistry needed a shared instrumental basis with experimental physics to become a ‘science’.

Chemistry’s ambiguous status as an art/science allowed Boerhaave to articulate a distinct epistemological use for its material practice. Chemistry "very justly deserves the name of an art" (ibid. p. 78), he argued, because it was a manipulative practice that utilized a set of ‘instruments’ to produce desired changes. Chemistry had six principal ‘instruments’ – fire, water, air, earth, the solvents, and the "common furniture of the Elaboratory" – which helped chemists to execute their ‘operations’. This instrumental practice indispensable to the ‘art’ of chemistry nevertheless made it particularly useful to natural philosophy because it created "new Phenomena" that "could have never been found out in the common order of nature". In contrast to the limited, accidental observations of Nature-as-is, chemistry cultivated instrumental or "physical Observations" that enriched the material foundation of natural philosophy. Boerhaave’s project of experimental philosophy is remarkably close to Lelas’ understanding of ‘experimentation’ – "to investigate nature by putting it on trial, by forcing it to behave in a new, induced way so that hidden properties not visible in its ‘natural’ spontaneous behaviour may be discovered" (Lelas 1993, p. 430).

The first therefore, and indeed the principal part of this Science [Natural Philosophy], consists in collecting together all those Phaenomena of Bodies, which our senses are able to discover; and then reducing them into a Natural History. Now there are two different ways of coming at these Observations: The first, when we regard the appearances of things only as they happen indifferently to all in the common course of nature without any design in the human mind towards their production; and this is not of so great service to the Art, as in this case it is chance only that discovers to us certain properties, which happened to be produced at those particular times: The other, when we designedly apply different Bodies to one another that we are well acquainted with, purely with a view to observe the new Phaenomena that will arise from them. And this now, is of vastly more service to the Philosopher than the former: For, to mention no other reason, there are an infinite number of properties of Bodies, and those too very efficacious ones, that could never have been found out in the common order of nature, but then only discover themselves, when the Artist with his Fire in particular, comes to examine them, either jointly or separately, on purpose to know what will be the result. And, indeed, Chemistry is almost the only Art, that seems suited to cultivate this second, and most valuable method of making physical Observations. [Boerhaave 1735, pp. 50-51]

The nature of fire commanded particular interest because it was the chief medium of chemical change and "the very instrument that Nature herself generally makes use of in the Operations it performs upon material beings" (ibid.). In other words, fire was the most pervasive and efficacious natural instrument chemists commanded to probe the inner secrets of nature. By employing this instrument of Nature, chemists could resolve compound bodies into their simple parts and combine them together again, thereby "discovering how it may exactly imitate the natural and common Phaenomena" (ibid.). It thus "truly explains, and exhibits to us the instruments by which nature so efficaciously operates; and thus pries into her most secret methods of working, and very often prudently directs and improves them to its own advantage" (ibid.). In the Traité du feu, therefore, Boerhaave advised ‘utmost caution’ in investigating the nature of fire so as not to create an erroneous foundation for natural philosophy.

It is necessary, therefore, if we would keep clear of mistakes, to act with the utmost caution in our searches after a thing whose nature is so hidden and mysterious. And for this reason we must absolutely disengage our selves from all mere speculations, nor give into any precarious hypothesis, how plausibly soever contrived, unless we would run headlong into confusion, and uncertainties: For if at setting out we lay a wrong foundation, the errors that arise hence will diffuse themselves through all the branches of natural philosophy; since in all the production of natural effects, Fire, as I observed before, has always far the greatest share. [Ibid., p. 79]

From the "most faithful, and diligent inquiries" of fire, Boerhaave could discern only one effect "which is always, and everywhere the same, perfectly inseparable from it, and constantly invariable in every kind of Object". He regarded the "expansion of Bodies by Fire […] effected in a Glass hermetically sealed" as a "true, certain, individual, and proper mark of Fire" (ibid., p. 85). In other words, Boerhaave identified the expansive property of heat, measured by the thermometer, as the true indicator of fire.[8] Although he mentioned five categories of phenomena attributed to fire (heat, light, color, expansion/rarefaction, and burning/melting), his concept of fire drew largely on the instrumental practice of thermometry, judging from the extensive list of experiments he included to illustrate the concept of fire: expansion by heat, contraction by cold, thermometric properties of various fluids, the notion of absolute cold, heat radiation, and so on.

Boerhaave then sought to match this thermometric conception of heat with the chemical notion of fire through a careful reflection on the composition of bodies. In his scheme, fire was not the first ‘element’ that constituted all natural bodies, but the most important ‘instrument’ that produced desired alterations in bodies. Musing upon the expansion and eventual melting of a metal by heat, for example, he asked whether fire could "so attenuate and divide such a Body, that those corpuscles which are thus fluid, are in reality the very Elements of the Bodies, so long as they continue in this state?" Fire seemed to have the "surprising power" to divide bodies into their "ultimate parts" and to reach "the most intimate nature of Bodies" (ibid., pp. 88-89). He did not believe, however, that fire could destroy the ultimate particles or ‘Elements themselves’ or that the substance of other bodies could be converted into "the very substance of elementary Fire" in the combustion process. Partly on theological grounds, Boerhaave believed that "the very same Fire does always exist, in the same quantity, and without alteration." He thus disputed the long-standing experimental conclusion that fire increased the weight of metallic calces. Cold, or the absence of fire, contracted bodies to form solid mass and thus could create the "most intimate union" (ibid. pp. 91-92).

In trying to present chemistry as a respectable academic science, while taking advantage of its material reach to construct a ‘true’ natural philosophy, Boerhaave advocated a unified ontology of nature based on universal instrumental practices. His conception of fire was primarily based on the thermometric experiment of expansion and contraction, which led to the conclusion that fire did not contribute to the weight or to the substance of bodies. This made it difficult for him to accept fire as a chemical substance. His discourse on fire omitted phlogiston altogether. By staking an elaborate claim embedded in a methodical discourse that fire and heat must be the same ‘thing’, however, he forced later generations of chemists and experimental physicists to scramble for a common instrumental method to stabilize the ontology of fire. In other words, he broke down the barrier between the disparate instrumental domains of heat and fire to invent a material being that catered to both domains. By doing so, he made heat an integral part of chemical constitution, now envisaged as an equilibrium between attractive and repulsive forces. It was this symmetric, discursive infiltration of heat and fire into each other’s instrumental domain that Lavoisier had to sort out later in his characterization of gases.
 
 

Boerhaave had a strong presence in the literary public sphere of the early Enlightenment (Ashworth 1977, Wellman 1992). Along with Stahl, he also had a formative influence on the French didactic discourse of chemistry during the second quarter of the eighteenth century when the transition in analytic method, the concomitant theoretical change, and the move away from the corpuscular philosophy all conspired to create a serious vacuum. At the operational level, chemists had to correlate the products of distillation with those of solution chemistry; at the theoretical level, they had to develop a new conception of chemical composition that was based on the chemistry of salts; at the philosophical level, Cartesian philosophy increasingly became a problematic language to rationalize chemical experience. The variegated operational/instrumental, theoretical, and philosophical identities of phlogiston did not cohere well in the changing instrumental and philosophical contexts.

Guillaume-François Rouelle (1703-1770), a popular teacher at the Jardin du roi, mixed Boerhaave’s physicalist notion of fire based on thermometric practice and Stahl’s chemical notion of phlogiston as a substance without much regard for theoretical consistency. He modified Stahl’s hierarchical theory of composition to stipulate four elements or principles (phlogiston or fire, earth, water, and air) which formed higher levels of composition – mixts, compounds, and supercompounds. All four units – principles, mixts, compounds, and supercompounds – could form aggregates. Of the six instruments Boerhaave listed, he named fire, air, water, and earth as ‘natural’ instruments that also serve as elements. The other two, solvents and vessels, were ‘artificial’ instruments. Rouelle deviated significantly from both Boerhaave and Stahl, however, in identifying phlogiston as fire or an element-instrument that could either combine with other principles or serve as an instrument of chemical action by changing the physical state of bodies as in the rarefaction of air. The action of fire was limited to breaking up the molecules of aggregates, without being able to penetrate more intimate levels of composition. In explaining combustion phenomena, however, Rouelle identified the ‘inflammable principle’ or phlogiston as a mixt composed of fire and another principle. It existed in the oily part of the body, dissipated into the air upon combustion, and entered into new combinations afterwards. Too subtle to be isolated through chemical analysis, it united with various bodies with different strengths (Rouelle 1767). In short, Rouelle sought to piece together an ontology of fire that would function as phlogiston in chemical operations and as the matter of fire in other instrumental and discursive contexts.

Pierre-Joseph Macquer (1718-1784), who wrote the most influential textbook of chemistry in the eighteenth century, also struggled to manage disparate meanings of phlogiston (Macquer 1749). Although he endorsed the four principles (fire, air, water, and earth), he defined them as the limits of chemical analysis rather than as the primordial, Aristotelian elements that made up all bodies. His notion of fire, built on Louis Lemery’s, distinguished between the ‘pure fire’ that acted on bodies to separate their parts and the ‘fixed fire’ that was called ‘inflammable principle, or sulphur principle, or phlogiston’. The principal property of pure, elementary fire was to penetrate and dilate bodies to establish a kind of equilibrium. It acted primarily to render a body fluid and could thus be called the principle of fluidity. Macquer thought that all bodies in nature were solid in nature, and that fire, essentially fluid, rendered them fluid. In other words, Macquer’s ‘pure fire’ incorporated the thermometric conception of fire. The combustion of inflammable matters indicated, however, that they contained the matter of fire as one of their principles. This ‘fixed fire’ differed from the elementary fire in that it did not communicate any heat or light to the body to which it was united. Nor did it render the body fluid. Most important, it could be transferred from one body to another, which made it plausible that it was a combination of the elementary fire with some other principle, which served as the base to form a kind of secondary principle. One could not isolate it in pure form, but the inflammability of a body would indicate that it contained phlogiston. Charcoal, an intimate combination of phlogiston and the earthly substance in vegetables and animals, facilitated the transmission of phlogiston to other substances. Macquer’s ‘fixed fire’ thus picked up the traditional notion of phlogiston.

Rouelle’s and Macquer’s discussion of fire and phlogiston indicates that these prominent public teachers of chemistry at the Jardin du roi sought to reconcile various meanings of the sulphur principle or phlogiston that had developed in different instrumental, theoretical, philosophical, and discursive contexts. Taken individually, each of these meanings could be illustrated in particular ‘instrumental’ contexts of chemical analysis, burning glass analysis, and thermometric experiments. When mixed together textually, however, these definitions of fire/phlogiston became a long list of inchoate meanings that destabilized its identity. Most problematic was the divergent characteristics of the (weightless) ‘matter of fire’ measured by the thermometer and (weighing) phlogiston as a chemical substance. It took a new set of instrumental practices in pneumatic chemistry to sort out the limits of representation regarding fire/phlogiston.
 
 

The stability of phlogiston in eighteenth-century French chemistry was rooted in the operational identity of the ‘sulphur principle’ as an oily matter distilled from various substances and its theoretical identity as a component of salts. Geoffroy’s method of analysis and synthesis in probing the general composition of metals strengthened this operational/theoretical identity and allowed him to identify it with Stahl’s phlogiston. Embedded in the affinity table, phlogiston acquired a secure place in the evolving chemistry of salts, which provided a comprehensive framework of investigation for eighteenth-century French chemistry. As salts and affinity tables multiplied, the place of phlogiston in chemical theory became stronger. As a stable chemical substance with well-defined operational and theoretical identities, however, phlogiston also carried a speculative/philosophical identity as the matter of light or fire. Homberg’s efforts to correlate the products of chemical analysis with those of burning glass analysis through a corpuscular ontology had created a discursive identity for the ‘sulphur principle’ that allowed chemists to rationalize their esoteric practice for the lay audience. Although it took a leap of faith to link the instrumental practice of the burning glass to the ‘matter of light’, this speculative identity of the ‘sulphur principle’ allowed Louis Lemery to conceptualize the new ‘model system’ for chemical analysis – selective dissolution of metals in acids – in an intelligible manner. In working out the solvent action of fire in corpuscular language and thereby re-inscribing the operational identity of the ‘sulphur principle’ as the universal solvent, Lemery strengthened the discursive identity of the sulphur principle that coordinated its operational/theoretical identity with its corpuscular ontology.

In other words, the complex ‘substance identity’ phlogiston acquired in the early decades of the eighteenth century was based on chemists’ manipulative capacity, theoretical framework, and ‘ontological attitude’. Determining what count as essential properties to define a chemical substance is a difficult problem (Schummer 2002) because this primary ‘object’ of chemical investigation is often a moving target that changes with the evolving laboratory practice, much like the ‘gene’ in genetics (Keller 2000). The ontological problem of what the scientific ‘object’ is cannot always be clearly demarcated from the epistemological problem of how one investigates it. The ‘object’ of chemical investigation often starts its career as an artifice constituted by the material culture of the laboratory and acquires a degree of naturalness only when it is embedded in an expanded classification of chemical/natural substances. Whether one considers chemical substances as natural or artificial depends critically on chemists’ ability to forge material connections between the chemical and the natural substances and to provide a comprehensive order of nature that includes them. Strange as it may seem to us, Homberg’s ‘true sulphur principle’ or the ‘matter of light’ had the ontological prestige of being a ‘natural’ body, while chemists’ ‘sulphur principle’ distilled from plants, animals, and minerals was regarded an artifice manufactured by fire. The burning glass supposedly revealed true nature, while distillation methods transformed the composition of natural bodies. Phlogiston could only be a ‘chemical’ substance from its operational/theoretical identity, but it acquired the status of a ‘natural’ body as the ‘matter of light’ or the ‘matter of fire’. Disciplinary hierarchy played a crucial role, then, in determining the naturalness of a chemical substance.

A new instrumental practice can cause a serious rupture in the established conception and order of chemical/natural substances. J. Schummer has argued that the ‘chemical species identity’ based on chemical operations (assisted by physical measurements and theoretical constraints) underwent a fundamental transformation through the use of spectroscopy. By changing the role of molecular structure from a theoretical ‘property’ of a chemical substance to the very definition of a new ‘molecular species’, spectroscopy changed not only the material practice, but also the ‘ontological attitude’ of chemists.[9] Similarly, the thermometer introduced a serious ontological problem for eighteenth-century chemists. Although Louis Lemery’s differentiation between the ‘fixed fire and the ‘free fire’ opened a way to incorporate thermometric practice and conception of heat into chemical theory, Boerhaave brought to the chemists’ attention that such a facile comprise could not be tolerated at the ontological level. His effort to craft a singular ontology of material fire by fusing the chemical (burning glass) weighing fire and the thermometric weightless fire destabilized the ontological status of phlogiston as a natural substance. This discursive development, which served to distance phlogiston from its operational roots, created much confusion for the younger generation of chemists who learned chemistry as a public discourse rather than as the apothecary’s material practice. If Boerhaave’s philosophizing on chemical art made it more appealing to the literary public, it posed new problems for chemical teachers such as Rouelle and Macquer in reconciling their art with the philosophical discourse.

By the 1760s, phlogiston had become primarily a textual entity in France, while the British chemists tried to re-invent its operational identity through pneumatic chemistry (Eklund 1972, Basu 1992, Holmes 2000). Its discursive identity consisted of an ensemble of its past identities without close association with the ongoing investigation. Lavoisier targeted phlogiston because it hampered his effort to rationalize chemistry as a logical discursive system with a new set of ‘metric’ instruments (hydrometer, thermometer, gasometer, and calorimeter) that would allow him to represent chemical action in an algebraic form. He thus invented a new hypothetical substance, caloric, that could absorb the philosophical identity of phlogiston as the most subtle fluid, yet be measured by a ‘meter’, which would make chemical action amenable to algebraic representation. In order to understand Lavoisier’s ‘anti-phlogistic’ campaign, then, we need to go beyond his rhetoric that phlogiston was an ‘imaginary’ substance. His vision of rational chemistry was based on metric measurements and expressed in algebraic terms. Phlogiston offered a unique resistance to this vision and had to be eliminated (Kim 2003, pp. 279-389).
 
 

I wish to thank members of the Triangle History and Philosophy of Science Group for a lively discussion on the first draft of this paper. Hasok Chang and an anonymous referee for Hyle provided detailed comments that helped me to identify various problems in getting the ideas across.
 
 

[1]  I use the capitalized ‘Chemical Revolution’ here to refer to the theoretical revolution initiated by Lavoisier and his cohorts at the Paris Academy of Sciences.

[2]  Guerlac’s pioneering work (1961) was followed by many of his students’. For a bibliography on Lavoisier scholarship, see Bret 1995.

[3]  ‘Salts’ in the early eighteenth century referred to substances distilled from natural bodies that dissolved in water, which included acids, alkalis, and any combinations thereof, referred to as ‘middle salts’.

[4]  The ‘experimental system’ in Rheinberger 1997 is the ‘genuine working unit’ at each site of scientific research that differentially produces the object of investigation, which thereby captures the constantly mutating micro-dynamics of research. The ‘model system’ articulated in Creager 2002 refers to a communally shared experimental system such as the Tobacco Mosaic Virus that acquired a representative status to constitute a stable field of inquiry.

[5]  Russell McCormmach (2004) has shown that the object of natural philosophy was defined in the eighteenth century as ‘speculative truth’ because natural philosophers, despite their advocacy of accurate observations and ingenious experiments, would pursue a broad comprehension of nature including the conceptions of space, time, matter, and force. Their notion of ‘theory’ thus comprised conjectures, assertions, worldviews, hypotheses, natural laws, and causes with differing degrees of reliance on experimental practice.

[6]  Homberg stated that the old burning mirrors were nearly useless for chemical experiments because they used concave mirrors to focus the solar rays from below, which necessitated that the experimental material would have to be placed on an upside-down dish. The Tschirnhaus burning glass used convex glass to focus the solar rays directly on a regularly positioned dish. Over three feet in diameter, it provided a much more powerful furnace than any other available chemical furnace (Homberg 1702b).

[7]  Homberg could not use it for the analysis of common sulphur, for example, because of its high combustibility (Homberg 1703). For an excellent example of disputes regarding the credibility of the instrument, see Schaffer 1989.

[8]  Boerhaave worked closely with Fahrenheit (Van der Star 1983).

[9]  Schummer’s and my position on the epistemological/ontological function of instruments differ from Rothbart and Slayden’s (1994) defense of ‘experimental realism’, which limits the role of instruments largely to their epistemic value as the analogs to natural systems.
 
 

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Mi Gyung Kim:

Department of History, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8108, USA; kim@social.chass.ncsu.edu

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Copyright © 2008 by HYLE and Mi Gyung Kim