| This dissertation argues that there is no divide between scientific and didactic practice in chemistry: they are one in the same. Similarly, it argues that representation is inherently re-presentation, which is to say, there is also no divide between the production and the reproduction of scientific knowledge. These arguments are based upon visual practices of nineteenth-century chemistry, in which chemists made knowledge through careful practices of visual representation.; The historical argument begins with two post-alchemical systems of representation, the chemical characters of Jean Henri Hassenfratz and Pierre Auguste Adet, introduced in the Nomenclature chimique of 1787, and John Dalton's atomic symbols. It argues that although the symbols of both systems did not survive, the visual practices within which they were situated did. Focusing on the teaching of American chemists Benjamin Silliman and Robert Hare, it examines chemical didactics after Dalton, including the visual practices of Dalton's colleague, William Wollaston.; The larger context of visual practices in the nineteenth-century figures in the history of chemistry. Anschauung, or reflection on direct observation or perception, was at the core of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Friedrich Fröbel's reforms in early education. It also influenced chemical practice. Fröbel's kindergarten modeling practices, the kindergarten movement in mid-century England, and Anschauungsunterricht, or teaching through images, have historical links with chemical representation, in particular the use of graphical formulas by Alexander Crum Brown and Edward Frankland. Crum Brown's formulas and Frankland's Lecture Notes for Chemical Students form the center of an investigation of the didactic, rhetorical, typographical, and personal factors involved in representational practices in chemistry, and the production of chemical knowledge on the page. These aspects of chemical practice in turn influenced chemical atomism.; The dissertation concludes by comparing Benjamin Brodie's “calculus of chemical operations” and graphical formulas. Brodie's calculus was a positivistic, algebraic alternative to virtually all existing chemical inscriptions. The failure of Brodie's calculus and the success of Frankland and Crum Brown's notation together demonstrate the historical embedding of visual practice and the centrality of didactic practice to chemistry. |
