Douglas Allchin, “James Hutton and Phlogiston.” Annals of Science 51 4 (1994): 615-635.
Allchin’s article portrays Hutton as a chemist and looks at his theory of phlogiston and some of the contextual reasons why he maintained his view into the 1790’s. Allchin shows how Hutton and others saw ways for explanatory uses for phlogiston, even while accepting the existence of oxygen. My thesis will in some ways parallel this article, in that both show how leading scientists maintained and developed phlogiston theories after the supposed crucial experiment of 1785.
H. Gilman McCann. Chemistry Transformed: The Paradigmatic Shift from Phlogiston to Oxygen. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation; 1978.
McCann’s book develops many useful talking points on the Chemical Revolution as an exemplar of Kuhnian revolution. McCann studies statistical trends in publishing to show conversion patterns and how they differ based on the age and nationality of the author. He also shows that France was more productive in terms of number of articles published in chemistry during the second half of the 18th century. However, McCann’s narrow definition of chemists during this time period leads to several historical anachronisms and his reliance on journal-based statistics also seems too constricted. Many of the “chemists” that McCann mentioned published important monographs, dictionaries, and encyclopedias on physical science. While McCann says that he was trying to be inclusive in disciplinary boundary disputes between chemistry, mineralogy, meteorology, medicine, and pharmacy during this period, making distinctions of this nature at all is problematic in a time when few people interested in science studied or even identified any particular discipline. His description of London as scientifically bankrupt during this period also seems to be counter-intuitive in light of the production of Joseph Banks, Joseph Priestley, Henry Cavendish, James Watt, Richard Kirwan, and other notable scientific authors of the day. I think that McCann’s statistics may prove somewhat useful for contextual evidence of vague trends, and I hope that I will find that others have developed on some of his sociological methodologies in studying scientific revolutions. I think that historical research based on the bodies of the text, rather than just statistical data about them, will prove more useful in understanding the theories involved and how they changed over time.
