The 2009 Edelstein Address Sons of Genius: Chemical Manipulation and Its Shifting Norms from Joseph Black to Michael Faraday*

Chemistry, for all the growth in theoretical chemistry, is the laboratory science. Some laboratory chemists have the chemical equivalent of the gardener’s green thumb; some have raised practice to an art; while others have demonstrated less skill, or have arrived at their results in such a way that their experiments were unreproducible by others. I want to look at some prominent chemists from around the 1750s to 1830, to see how far their writings and published results give us an indication of what made for good practice. Good practice changed a lot in the decades around the Chemical Revolution: acceptable margins of error, accuracy and precision, replicable experiments leading to reliable results—much that we take for granted had to be invented. I shall begin with Joseph Black and end with Michael Faraday. Both were brilliant lecturers and masters of demonstration experiments. Black’s public experiments always succeeded, and his publications show a very clear grasp of experimental error. Before Faraday began his electrochemical researches, he worked mainly in analytical chemistry and wrote a book on Chemical Manipulation. Faraday explained that he wrote it (1):