Science and Polity in France by Gillispie Charles Coulston; Gillispie Charles Coulston Coulston;

Author:Gillispie, Charles Coulston; Gillispie, Charles Coulston Coulston;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2008-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

Glancing through the above writings, and turning over many handsome plates, one may at first take them for a continuation in revolutionary circumstances of the treatment accorded arts and crafts in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert and the multivolume Description des arts et métiers of the Academy of Science. So they were, in a sense, but with a signal difference reaching farther than the military urgency that motivated their composition. The Encyclopédie was conceived as a literary enterprise wherein technical subjects were treated, sometimes by amateurs, sometimes by practitioners, in an informed manner. Among the purposes was raising the prestige of the arts and crafts in the republic of letters and the world at large. The Academy’s compilation, by contrast, was brought to completion by Duhamel du Monceau, who had no ulterior ideological purposes.105 A stalwart of useful knowledge, he enlisted leading figures in the trades themselves and persons who for economic or administrative reasons were knowledgeable about the specialties they treated. Three minor academicians took on a number of small articles as a favor to Duhamel, but no leading member of the Academy of Science participated. The title is accurate. The enormous work, invaluable and value free, is descriptive, not analytical, and what it describes are techniques.

The revolutionary manuals are deeper in vein, though not more practical. They may properly be defined as early items in the literature of technology, where the word is taken in its original and literal sense meaning not, as it soon came do to, a whole body of techniques, but rather scientific knowledge of particular techniques. The authors were important scientists. Their treatment was analytical as well as descriptive and reached to the scientific principles underlying the processes in question. What brought them to the problems, however, was neither scientific curiosity, nor a wish for recognition from their peers in a defunct Academy. It was the summons from the Committee of Public Safety. Nevertheless, the prototype antedates the military emergency and the Revolution. In 1786 Vandermonde, Monge, and Berthollet had already prepared a fully technological memoir on the nature of iron.106

Their principal finding was that the solubility of carbon in molten iron is responsible for the properties of steel. The trio of authors begins the revolutionary postscript with an abbreviation of their earlier account of the chemistry of smelting, making use now of the vocabulary of modern chemical nomenclature unavailable to them in 1786. Their main purpose is to instruct iron masters on methods for converting iron into the three main types of steel. The first type, “natural” or ingot steel, was generally called German steel, since it predominated east of the Rhine. In order to produce it, the amount of charcoal in the blast furnace is increased. The resulting pig iron is then fused directly while shielded from air by a coating of slag. The best quality came from Styria and Carinthia, and our authors draw their information from Hassenfratz, who had visited that region for the government office of mines in 1783–84.

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