History of Chemistry

The history of chemistry traces the development of chemical theory and laboratory practice from ancient and medieval alchemy through the eighteenth century chemical revolution to modern chemistry, working from primary treatises, laboratory notebooks and surviving apparatus rather than from chemistry's own retrospective account of its progress. The German chemist Hermann Kopp gave the field its first comprehensive scholarly treatment in his four volume Geschichte der Chemie, published between 1843 and 1847, which traced chemical practice back through its alchemical roots rather than treating Antoine Lavoisier's 1789 reforms as chemistry's true beginning and everything earlier as mere superstition to be set aside.

Alchemy sat inside religious and esoteric traditions for most of its history, tied to Hermetic philosophy, Daoist internal cultivation and Islamic and Christian spiritual allegory, and its practitioners frequently described their laboratory work in explicitly religious terms, transmutation of metal standing for transformation of the soul. The history of chemistry gives the atlas the technical vocabulary and dated laboratory record needed to describe what an alchemical text's operations actually involved materially, distinct from and alongside the spiritual reading a tradition layered onto the same procedure.