Abstract
The previous chapter paints a rather bleak portrait of inorganic chemistry in the late 1800s. However, both chemists and historians have pointed to a significant upgrade in status—using terms such as revival, rebirth, renaissance—taking place even before the turn of the century.
Those of us who were familiar with the state of inorganic chemistry in universities twenty to thirty years ago will recall that at that time it was widely regarded as a dull and uninteresting part of the undergraduate course….that the opportunities for research in inorganic chemistry were few, and that in any case the problems were dull and uninspiring; as a result, relatively few people specialized in this subject.
Ronald Nyholm, The Renaissance of Inorganic Chemistry (1956)
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Notes
- 1.
Henry Newlin Stokes (1859–1942) was a chemist with the US Geological Survey and Bureau of Standards, and served a term as President of the ACS around the turn of the century, before turning to philosophy, becoming a leader of the Theosophical Society.
- 2.
Sophus Mads Jørgensen (1837–1914), a Danish chemist who made many of the early important experimental discoveries in coordination chemistry, but fought a long rear-guard action against Werner’s conceptual interpretation, until finally acknowledging the latter’s triumph in the early twentieth century.
- 3.
“Die Mitteilungen über anorganisch-chemische Untersuchungen sind bis jetzt in einer sehr grossen Ansahl von in- und ausländischen Zeitschriften verstreut zur Veröffentlichung gelangt; sie erscheinen als Fremdlinge unter der immer mehr wachsenden Anzahl von Arbeiten aus dem Gebiete der Chemie der Kohlenstoffverbindinungen. Diese Stellung entspricht nicht der heutigen Bedeutung der anorganische Chemie, denn diese ist im Laufe der letzten Decennien aus dem engen Rahmen einer rein beschreibenden Naturwissenschaft herausgetreten und nimmt Teil an der Entscheidung von Fragen, welche für die allgemeine Chemie von hoher Bedeutung sind.”
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Labinger, J.A. (2013). False Labor: Inorganic Chemistry in the Late Nineteenth-Early Twentieth Centuries. In: Up from Generality. SpringerBriefs in Molecular Science(). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40120-6_2
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