John Maxson Stillman (1852-1923) was a pioneer of the history of science in the United States. [1] He was also the first head of the chemistry department at Stanford University, [2] as well as its first Chemistry Professor. [3] His most enduring work was the posthumously published book The Story of Early Chemistry, decades later republished as The Story of Alchemy and Early Chemistry.
Son of physician Jacob Davis Babcock Stillman and of Caroline Maxson, John Maxson studied chemistry first at University of California (1874), and then for two years abroad at University of Strasbourg and University of Würzburg. On his return, after teaching at the University of California (1876-1882), and working for the American Sugar Refining Company in Boston (1882-1891), he was appointed at the newly founded Stanford University as its first Chemistry Professor, and head of the department in its opening year. [1] Although Stillman's appointment was essentially by fiat of Senator Stanford, who proposed a one-man list for David Starr Jordan to consider for this job, Stanford historian Eric Hutchinson writes that "There is always a risk that appointments made at the behest of the mighty may turn out badly, but Stillman's appointment was a good one." [3] At Stanford, Stillman focused mostly on teaching and administration. [2] He retired in 1917, [1] and concentrated on writing thereafter. [2] He died in December 1923. A 39-page in memoriam volume was published in the following year by five colleagues at Stanford. [4] Stillman married Emma E. Rodolph. They had three daughters, Cara, Minna and Dorothy. Cara Stillman was a victim of the 1903 Iroquois Theatre fire in Chicago.
Stillman's most significant work is The Story of Early Chemistry, a book published posthumously in 1924. A 1925 review in the Journal of Chemical Education by Edgar Fahs Smith found the book excellent but rather impersonal. [5] The book was republished in 1960 by Courier Dover with the slightly modified title The Story of Alchemy and Early Chemistry. [6] A review of this edition by historian Rhoda Rappaport (1962) in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences found it among the "best and most detailed treatments of a difficult subject", but criticized it for not being selective enough in deciding which of "those features of ancient and medieval thought and practice made a 'decided impress' upon the subsequent history" as the book's introduction promised. [7] The book was described by Aaron John Ihde in The Development of Modern Chemistry (1964) as "an excellent account of the developments through Lavoisier", with the additional observations that "although subsequent scholarship has thrown new light on several matters, it is still one of the best American books on the subject." [8] The editor of the Ambix journal remarked in 1994 that the Dover edition of Stillman's book was still in print and still worth reading. [9]
Regarding Stillman's overall work, Hutchinson (1977) writes: "Disregarding his papers on subjects other than science, Stillman published a total of nineteen papers and one book—and, even so, managed to acquire a good reputation as a chemist. Of those publications, seven papers and his book on the history of alchemy were the product of his retirement years. Yet, slender as Stillman's output may seem by modern standards, what he did write was marked by scholarship of a high quality. In spite of the fact that he was not a strong classical scholar, and in spite of the meager resources of early California libraries as regards medieval manuscripts, Stillman's studies in the history of science are carefully researched and clearly written." [3]
Alchemy is an ancient branch of natural philosophy, a philosophical and protoscientific tradition that was historically practised in China, India, the Muslim world, and Europe. In its Western form, alchemy is first attested in a number of pseudepigraphical texts written in Greco-Roman Egypt during the first few centuries AD.
Chemistry is the scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a physical science within the natural sciences that studies the chemical elements that make up matter and compounds made of atoms, molecules and ions: their composition, structure, properties, behavior and the changes they undergo during reactions with other substances. Chemistry also addresses the nature of chemical bonds in chemical compounds.
Roger Bacon, also known by the scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis, was a medieval English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empiricism. In the early modern era, he was regarded as a wizard and particularly famed for the story of his mechanical or necromantic brazen head. He is sometimes credited as one of the earliest European advocates of the modern scientific method, along with his teacher Robert Grosseteste. Bacon applied the empirical method of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) to observations in texts attributed to Aristotle. Bacon discovered the importance of empirical testing when the results he obtained were different from those that would have been predicted by Aristotle.
Basil Valentine is the Anglicised version of the name Basilius Valentinus, ostensibly a 15th-century alchemist, possibly Canon of the Benedictine Priory of Saint Peter in Erfurt, Germany but more likely a pseudonym used by one or several 16th-century German authors.
Pseudo-Geber is the presumed author or group of authors responsible for a corpus of pseudepigraphic alchemical writings dating to the late 13th and early 14th centuries. These writings were falsely attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan, an early alchemist of the Islamic Golden Age.
Corpuscularianism, also known as corpuscularism, is a set of theories that explain natural transformations as a result of the interaction of particles. It differs from atomism in that corpuscles are usually endowed with a property of their own and are further divisible, while atoms are neither. Although often associated with the emergence of early modern mechanical philosophy, and especially with the names of Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and John Locke, corpuscularian theories can be found throughout the history of Western philosophy.
Allen George Debus was an American historian of science, known primarily for his work on the history of chemistry and alchemy. In 1991 he was honored at the University of Chicago with an academic conference held in his name. Paul H. Theerman and Karen Hunger Parshall edited the proceedings, and Debus contributed his autobiography of which this article is a digest.
This timeline of chemistry lists important works, discoveries, ideas, inventions, and experiments that significantly changed humanity's understanding of the modern science known as chemistry, defined as the scientific study of the composition of matter and of its interactions.
James Riddick Partington was a British chemist and historian of chemistry who published multiple books and articles in scientific magazines. His most famous works were An Advanced Treatise on Physical Chemistry and A History of Chemistry, for which he received the Dexter Award and the George Sarton Medal.
Monas Hieroglyphica is a book by John Dee, the Elizabethan magus and court astrologer of Elizabeth I of England, published in Antwerp in 1564. It is an exposition of the meaning of an esoteric symbol that he invented.
Frank Sherwood Taylor was a British historian of science, museum curator, and chemist who was Director of the Science Museum in London, England.
Alchemy in the medieval Islamic world refers to both traditional alchemy and early practical chemistry by Muslim scholars in the medieval Islamic world. The word alchemy was derived from the Arabic word كيمياء or kīmiyāʾ and may ultimately derive from the ancient Egyptian word kemi, meaning black.
Ambix is a peer-reviewed academic journal on the history of alchemy and chemistry; it was founded in 1936 and has appeared continuously from 1937 to the present, other than from 1939 to 1945 during World War II. It is currently published by the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry.
Lawrence M. Principe is the Drew Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University in the Department of History of Science and Technology and the Department of Chemistry. He is also currently the Director of the Charles Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe, an interdisciplinary center for research at Johns Hopkins. He is the first recipient of the Francis Bacon Medal for significant contributions to the history of science. Principe's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and a 2015-2016 Guggenheim Fellowship. Principe is recognized as one of the foremost experts in the history of alchemy.
The Mirror of Alchimy is a short alchemical manual, known in Latin as Speculum Alchemiae. Translated in 1597, it was only the second alchemical text printed in the English language. Long ascribed to Roger Bacon (1214-1294), the work is more likely the product of an anonymous author who wrote between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries.
The Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine is a widely reproduced alchemical book attributed to Basil Valentine. It was first published in 1599 by Johann Thölde who is likely the book's true author. It is presented as a sequence of alchemical operations encoded allegorically in words, to which images have been added. The first Basil Valentine book to discuss the keys is Ein kurtz summarischer Tractat, von dem grossen Stein der Uralten, 1599.
Chymes was a Greco-Roman alchemist who lived before the third century. He is known only through fragments of text in the works of Zosimos of Panopolis and Olympiodorus of Thebes.
The Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry, founded as the Society for the Study of Alchemy and Early Chemistry in 1935, holds biennial meetings and a yearly Graduate Workshop, publishes the journal Ambix and a biennial newsletter Chemical Intelligence, and offers prizes and grants to scholars. It has a worldwide membership.
William Arthur Smeaton was a British chemist and historian of science, who wrote more than seventy-five articles and several books on the history of chemistry in France in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Henry Ernest Stapleton (1878-1962) was an English chemist, historian of chemistry, Arabist, linguist, and numismatist specializing in the history of alchemy and chemistry in the medieval Islamic world.
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