Chemistry Arose from Technologists, Philosophers, and Alchemists

Historically [chemistry] arose from a constellation of interests: the empirically based technologies of early metallurgists, brewers, dyers, tanners, calciners and pharmacists; the speculative Greek philosphers' concern whether brute matter was invariant or transformable; the alchemists' real or symbolic attempts to achieve the transmutation of base metals into gold; and the iatrochemists' interst in the chemistry and pathology of animal and human functions. Partly because of the sheer complexity of chemical phenomena, the absence of criteria and standards of purity, and uncertainty over the definition of elements ... but above all because of the lack of a concept of the gaseous state of matter, chemistry remained a rambling, puzzling and chaotic area of natural philosophy until the middle of the eighteenth century.

Notes:

For a variety of different motives.

Folksonomies: history chemistry

Taxonomies:
/science/chemistry (0.560493)
/science (0.135203)

Keywords:
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Entities:
iatrochemists:Person (0.686478 (neutral:0.000000))

The chemical tree

Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Brock , William Hodson (1993), The chemical tree, W. W. Norton & Company, Retrieved on 2012-01-28

Source Material [books.google.com]

Folksonomies: juvenile nonfiction