Lehman, Christine (Author)
Nuncius: Annali di Storia della Scienza
Volume: 31
Issue: 2
Pages: 361-407
After having been forgotten for more than half a century, the question of the nature of diamond was again raised by Jean d’ Arcet before the Académie des sciences in the 1770s. Quite surprisingly, diamond totally disappeared when heated to very high temperatures and, in order to understand this fascinating behaviour, Parisian chemists enthusiastically performed experiments from 1771 to 1773. They first used porcelain furnaces and then Tschirnhaus’ lens, an unsurpassed masterpiece constructed in Germany in approximately 1700. The analysis of handwritten laboratory notebooks, describing in detail the experiments conducted with this burning lens, reveals a little known close collaboration between Pierre-Joseph Macquer and Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier. The successive steps of their research led to the revelation of the “true” nature of diamond, since it burned in air like common charcoal, releasing a gas that precipitated lime water. Contrary to the legend, Trudaine’s lens shed no additional light on the experimental evidence produced by the preceding collaborative academic research.
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