This fascinating and unique history reveals the major influence of the Oxford Chemistry School on the advancement of chemistry. It shows how the nature of the University, and individuals within it, have shaped the school and made great achievements both in teaching and research. The book will appeal to those interested in the history of science and education, the city of Oxford and chemistry in general. Chemistry has been studied in Oxford for centuries but this book focuses on the last 400 years and, in particular, the seminal work of Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and the proto- Royal Society of the 1650’s. Arranged in chronological fashion, it includes specialist studies of particular areas of innovation. The book shows that chemistry has advanced, not just as a consequence of research but, because of the idiosynchratic nature of the collegiate system and the characters of the individuals involved. In other words, it demonstrates that science is a human endeavour and its advance in any institution is conditioned by the organization and people within it. For chemists, the main appeal will be the book’s examination of the way separate branches of chemistry (organic, physical, inorganic and biological) have evolved in Oxford. It also enables comparison with the development of the subject at other universities such as Cambridge, London and Manchester. For historians and sociologists, the book reveals the motivations of both scientists and non-scientists in the management of the School. It exposes the unusual character of Oxford University and the tensions between science and administration. The desire of the college to retain its academic values in the face of external and financial pressures.

Jack Morrell has been an Honorary Visiting Lecturer in History of Science since 1992, and has had connections with Leeds HPS since 1967. Between 1964 and 1994 he was first Lecturer, then Reader in History of Science at the University of Bradford. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania (1970), a Supernumerary Fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford (1987), and a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow (1995-97). Between 1978 and 1981 he was Vice-President of the British Society for this History of Science, and in 1982 he was elected President. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1984.

Chemistry at Oxford

A History from 1600 to 2005

By Robert J.P. Williams, John S. Rowlinson, Allan Chapman

The Royal Society of Chemistry

Copyright © 2009 Royal Society of Chemistry
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85404-139-8

Contents

Chapter 1 An Outline of the History of Oxford University with Reference to its Chemistry School Robert J.P. Williams,
Chapter 2 From Alchemy to Airpumps: The Foundations of Oxford Chemistry to 1700 Allan Chapman,
Chapter 3 The Eighteenth Century: Chemistry Allied to Anatomy Peter J. T. Morris,
Chapter 4 Chemistry Comes of Age: The 19th Century John S. Rowlinson,
Chapter 5 Research as the Thing: Oxford Chemistry 1912–1939 Jack Morrell,
Chapter 6 Interlude: Chemists at War John S. Rowlinson,
Chapter 7 Recent Times, 1945–2005: A School of World Renown Robert J.P. Williams,
Index of Names, 292,
Index of Subjects, 301,

CHAPTER 1

An Outline of the History of Oxford University with Reference to its Chemistry School

ROBERT J.P. WILLIAMS

Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory, Oxford University, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QR

1.1 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE UNIVERSITY

We give this brief historical introduction to Oxford University to show how it has become so particularly constituted. Without such an introduction readers might well be puzzled as to how and why the university has become as it is today and why its history has greatly affected its chemistry school. The usual structure of universities and of their departments elsewhere is that they are more or less top-down in governance. There is a governing body or council including a Vice-Chancellor and it, with an administration, effectively makes policy much though a democratic assembly of professors and some lecturers, the Senate, can vet proposals. This assembly is mainly a safeguard against mal-administration but it has little real control over finances and major policy decisions. Within this structure, a chemistry department is constrained by its head, a professor, who manages, largely, the distribution of its finances and staffing. The lecturers have a well-defined set of duties beneath the professor but with a fair degree of freedom in research objectives. It would be stretching a point to say that the department is democratically organised. In fact it could well be that a genuinely democratic system is not to the advantage of a department or a university. It must be remembered that the English universities, to which we refer with the exception of Oxford and Cambridge, were established around or after 1850 to serve their local communities, were set up with a model in mind, and with a bias toward sciences linked to industry. Their birth and whole subsequent background is so different from that of Oxford that they serve only to show how very different Oxford and its chemistry department are due to their history.

In marked contrast then to the other British universities, Oxford University is similar only to Cambridge University in that both organisations, including their chemistry schools, are largely bottom-up, Cambridge to a lesser degree than Oxford. Here, bottom-up implies that ultimate power over all matters rests largely with the collective will of individuals, professors and fellow /lecturers, not with central authority. Unlike that in other universities, appointment at Oxford of a lecturer today is joint, with a fellowship, between the university and a college, hence the description fellow/lecturer. It is the dual position with two sets of duties together with the separate creation of professorships that has led to the peculiarities of Oxford chemistry.

Oxford University is associated in the first instance with different colleges, 39 today, listed in Table 1.1, each with an independent governing body of fellows (tutorial teachers), statutes and finances. For several centuries the colleges as they grew in numbers paid little regard to any central university authority, which in any event was managed by a committee of their heads. A fellow was active in a college but took little part in the university. However, in the nineteenth and especially the twentieth century, with the expansion in numbers and academic topics, increased common centralised powers and actions were obviously necessary in addition to the previously accepted minor common need of the university for a body with control over regulations and examinations leading to degrees. The new central requirements especially after 1850were increasingly for an administrative centre, linked to better lecturing and examining facilities, inter-college exchange of view and cooperation, laboratories and more extensive libraries, and to meet the demands from outside authority for the university to show that it, like other universities, served the community at large. The role of a college fellow then increased in the university for he was required to assist in lecturing in courses for all undergraduates. The number of faculties and sub-faculties quickly increased, all linked to the university. The resultant augmented power of central administration was in fair part due also to its increasing financial strength given to it for these purposes. It became financed by government grants, not given to colleges, and it had to respond step by step, as far as possible, to the conditions attached. By 1965 it had appointed three professors of chemistry with independence from colleges in newly built laboratories in which the professors and fellow/ lecturers had their own research units. It is easy to see how this change in financial strength and responsibilities with the need to organise led to a clash between the bottom-up system, with its highly independent internally democratic colleges, and the requirement to make top-down overall decisions. However, any top-down proposal was and is still open to a vote by Congregation, effectively all the fellows. The problem became more noticeable in chemistry especially after 1912 and is there today for all to see and its effects upon the chemistry school are also still very apparent. As the university took over the running of laboratories from the colleges the very strong link between a chemistry fellow and a college has slowly been replaced by a stronger link to the laboratory, effectively the university.

We give next a somewhat more detailed historical account since it will serve to make clear the way the chemistry school at Oxford has developed within the collegiate and dominantly an arts university. In this account we shall stress the marked contrast between any top-down governance and largely bottom-up Oxford in which, as we have indicated, individuals or groups of them, such as heads of colleges, differently minded professors or even fellow/lecturers, can exert considerable influence from their power-bases upon the overall organisation, the administrative centre, denning the degree to which the centre can act. This is the background against which the changes in teaching and research have evolved, and is essential for an understanding of the unique nature of the Oxford Chemistry School. We shall see that in fact individuals have coloured the School very considerably. There has been little attempt at central management of it until relatively recently. The very essence of the chemistry school even today arose from the roles played by single colleges and, quite separately, the university in appointments, financing, teaching and laboratory construction sometimes due to individual initiatives.

1.2 THE BEGINNINGS OF CHEMISTRY WITHIN THE UNIVERSITY

The University at Oxford began to take shape in the form of a loosely organised body of scholars who had taken up residence in Oxford in and before 1200. Certainly by 1230 this loose corporation of scholars or masters could be called a university with a Chancellor but without a written constitution. The Chancellor could refer matters to the congregation of masters for judgement. The teaching, in somewhat confusingly called ‘schools’, was based on masters who came to Oxford and had most frequently obtained a qualification from an earlier ‘school’ or university, such as Paris. They taught young men from grammar schools who had knowledge of Latin and who were to be trained in modes of argument based on logic or religious texts. In this way they became, after obtaining a qualification given by the university, able to be lawyers or clergymen for example. The Oxford ‘schools’ before and after becoming somewhat organised were financed in part by monies in the form of income from well-wishers and in part by fees. Of considerable interest to the subject matter of this book is that the students were made to read and discuss the works of Aristotle amongst others as probably the only basis of any taught science, at that time a part of philosophy. There is in these works only an attempt to describe the environment we experience by way of very general concepts that were applied to all the subject matters we now divide in sciences such as physics, botany, zoology, chemistry, geology and so on. Chemistry as a separate discipline did not exist. By 1355 a charter, backed by royal authority, raised the status of the university to be the dominant power in the City of Oxford. Notice that a powerful external body was then concerned about the university but it is only after five more centuries that it began to exert a strong influence on it except concerning religious matters.

In the earliest times scholars resided in various protected large private houses or halls but these halls had but a small income from endowments given by persons of little stature. The teaching was done in rooms associated with these halls all under general university regulations but the university had no premises of its own though it used the Congregation House, built in 1320, in St Mary’s Church. By bringing together a small number of halls, now with endowments from particular rich and often influential persons, some of these collective units became known as colleges, born as Christian Catholic societies. At first these colleges, see Table 1.1, were still little more than organised places in which to live and to be taught, protected by isolation from the Town. Their scholars, from what we now call students or undergraduates all the way up to the Masters, now called fellows, were still embraced within the university and at this stage the colleges had little independence in matters of teaching. A point of great interest for this book and the particular development of its subject matter, chemistry at Oxford, in the whole context of the colleges and the university is that this dominance of the university was lost to the colleges. Before 1600 the colleges had increased in number to fifteen and had gained greatly relative to the university through endowments and fees. They had growing privileges associated with their increasing wealth and each had its own statutes and a “democratic” governing body composed of fellows, which elected any addition to its numbers. They now used their resources to turn what had been merely places of board and lodgings into independent centres of learning with a nascent tutorial system. What a fellow of a given college did in ‘research’ was a matter for him. The colleges still resembled religious establishments in that their resident tutors, fellows of colleges, with a head, all appointed internally, were looked after (board and lodgings) by the individual colleges. Fellows were not permitted to marry (until after 1870) as was the case in foundations based on monastic traditions. Each college came to have it own library, dining rooms and chapel. Any visitor to Oxford today can see that the earliest foundations such as University, Balliol, Merton, and Exeter Colleges, quickly had impressive buildings quite separate from the university that had virtually none until after 1500. The governance of the university itself had also largely fallen into the hands of heads of colleges leaving the university with the management of lectures, examining, the giving of degrees and a general voice in the moral and religious behaviour and practices of college fellows. Individual fellows of colleges clearly did not need to bother much about the university. It is the creation of this loose organisation that has led to a bottom-up system in the university.

At this time the university had not changed its governance greatly. It had a Chancellor and a Vice-Chancellor who worked with the Congregation of Masters (fellows) to consider the programmes of work that had to be completed for a degree. However, by 1600 there had been a development of academic staff separate from the colleges in that the University had received some endowments for professorships, which could be thought of as maintaining a stronger line in academic work from the main body of college fellows and they were not teaching (tutorial) fellows. Remember that fellows were not appointed or paid by the university, as the professors were, but by the colleges. The professors gave public university lectures but the distinction between lectures given by professors and by fellows of colleges was not closely made at first. Very generally speaking, by accepted statutes a professor came to be an authority in a subject and was paid by funds, deliberately set aside by endowment or later by the university. He was usually made a fellow of a specific college and allowed to dine but not necessarily to live there, certainly not if he was married. The upshot of this well-meant intention of broadening teaching and allowing research separate from an internal college base had its merits and mattered little in Arts subjects but much later it did create an unforeseeable problem within chemistry and sciences generally. Once professorships in these subjects (here chemistry in particular) were associated with laboratories they became new centres of power separate from the colleges, as we shall see. Sciences such as chemistry could and did grow separately in the university and in colleges but did so noticeably only in the nineteenth century.

Somewhat sadly the initial intention of the original masters of the university that students should reach a greater general level of understanding by disputation was slowly lost. As a consequence, by 1650 or even earlier, the colleges became more or less places of leisurely education for gentlemen. The teaching of logic had been largely replaced by a humanistic approach based on classical literature and containing little, if any, science of any kind. It was the persistence of this style that left Oxford resistant to the changes in the outside world for the best part of two more centuries.

It is against this background that we must see another important development of the university from when it began to have buildings of its own. The earliest university buildings, of little consequence to later divisions of power, were associated largely with the Arts, ceremony and administration – the Divinity School, (1440–1490), the Bodleian Library (1630), the Sheldonian Theatre (1667), the Clarendon Building (1713), and the Radcliffe Camera (1749). They did not introduce novelty to the lives of most fellows even to today, but were very useful, acceptable additions to general facilities. It was the creation of the (old) Ashmolean Museum with a chemistry laboratory in its basement (1683) that was different in that it was here that a new discipline, the teaching of and experiments in science, could be carried out, see Chapter 2. The laboratory had no parallel except in a few college rooms and private houses. Its functions were part of a university activity under a Museum director, a university appointment, who was also the first university professor of chemistry and he was not necessarily very college-minded. (A professorship at that time was of very little note or power, however.) The laboratory had a purpose, the study by the then novel logical empirical, experimental, methods, which had been uncovered in the first part of the seventeenth century but were held in little esteem by many fellows of colleges in so far as they were then concerned about logic at all.

Now, as will be outlined in Chapter 2, the creation of a laboratory in the Museum arose through a breakaway from traditional Aristotelian science to empirical science in Europe that was introduced in Oxford by a group, not just fellows of colleges and not associated with a particular college led by Warden Wilkins of Wadham College. They worked together more in the style of a club promoting experimental philosophy, devoted both to academic and practical matters. Some of their work, often in groups, testing and confirming observations, gave one strand to the beginnings of chemistry, for example the studies by Boyle, often referred to as the first modern chemist. The other strand, which aided practice of this science only, was the efforts from earlier centuries, recorded as alchemy, to reach material “purity” often thought of as turning everything into gold. This club of experimental philosophy played a large part in the foundation of The Royal Society in 1660. Note again the impact was by a group of individuals, some associated with, even fellows of, colleges, but not by a central university organisation or by a college. Unfortunately, shortly after 1700 the impetus generated in chemical studies due to this group and the standing of the Ashmolean laboratory was largely lost. Whether this was due to lack of novel instrumentation or of a general disinterest in the colleges due to the switch away from logic to literae humaniores, or due to the distraction of the advances in astronomy is unknowable. Much of the so-called Scientific Revolution of 1640–1780 appears to have left Oxford untouched. For more than one hundred years little chemistry seems to have been done, except at Christ Church, the first college to have a laboratory, and we see the initiatives of Wilkins and Boyle leading elsewhere to the work of Priestley and Dalton in Britain and of figures such as Scheele, Berzelius and Lavoisier abroad, as described in Chapter 3. It is only after 1800 that Oxford chemistry was to have a professor again but even then the subject was taught merely as something a gentleman ought to have heard about and no research of note was done. During all the period from 1700 even to 1850 most Oxford colleges and much of the activities of the university kept themselves almost isolated from the money-making industrial outside world that became assisted by those in the new Universities despisingly called “tradesmen” by some in Oxford. This was contrary to the objectives of Wilkins and his group in the middle of the seventeenth century. A good deal of this College wish to avoid especially industry and its financial objectives lasted long into the twentieth century and remains one cause of some tension within the university even today. The activity in the university laboratory, in the Ash-molean, such as it was, was moved in the mid-19th century to a Magdalen College site.

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