William H Brock The History of Chemistry A Very Short Introduction OUP Oxford 2015

Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of illustrations
Introduction
1 On the nature of stuff
	Artisanal science
	Glass and dyestuffs
	Metallurgy
	Recipe literature
	Why do stuffs change appearance?
	Speculations about matter
	Aristotelian chemistry
	Alchemy
	Chemical language
	Arabic alchemy
	What’s in a name?
	Chymistry becomes chemistry
	The disappearance of alchemy
	Alchemy’s heritage
2 The analysis of stuff
	Paracelsus and iatrochemistry
	Van Helmont’s water
	Daniel Sennert’s corpuscles
	Robert Boyle and the reform of chymistry
	The early laboratory
	Physics versus chemistry
	Newton’s chemistry and affinity
3 Gases and atoms
	The pneumatic revolution
	Combustion, composition, and language
	The water problem
	The new chemistry
	The atomic theory
	Are atoms split?
	What was the chemical revolution?
4 Types and hexagons
	Liebig’s achievement
	The ‘Giessen model’
	Two French brigands
	Chemical types
	Frankland’s introduction of valency
	Kekulé’s news from Ghent
	The benzene ring and ‘Kekulé’s dreams’
	The triumph of structural theory
	Bringing chemistry to order
5 Reactivity
	Are physical properties regular?
	The broad highway of thermodynamics
	Periodicity
	Signature tunes
	Ideal gases
	The gas analogy
	Ionic theory
	Kinetics
	The changing laboratory
	The inert gases
	Social chemists
6 Synthesis
	The beginnings of organic synthesis
	The electronic age
	Making organic chemistry physical
	The chemists’ wars
	Women in chemistry
	The instrumental revolution
	Chemistry’s millennium
Epilogue
Sources of quotations
Further reading
Index
Social media