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Article ID: CBB044505919

The Mixed Blessings of Pragmatism. Jean-Baptiste Dumas and the (Al)chemical Quest for Metallic Transmutation (2023)

Substantia: An International Journal of the History of Chemistry
Volume: 7
Issue: 2
Pages: 121-136
Publication date: 2023
Language: English

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Alchemy Metals Chemistry Metals and metallic compounds 19th century France Dumas, Jean Baptiste André

There were at least three prerequisites for the transmutability of metals to become once again a scientifically acceptable subject of research from the 1810s: new hypotheses concerning the mutual reducibility of certain elements, such as those of integer multiples and protyle put forward by the British chemist and physician William Prout; the experimental confirmation that chemical compounds with the same percentage composition could be substances with very different properties, i.e. the discovery of isomerism and allotropy; the comparison between metals and compound radicals of organic chemistry. This paper aims at illustrating how these premises were exploited by Jean-Baptiste Dumas, one of the leading French chemists of the 19th century, to reintroduce in the chemical discourse the alchemical topic of transmutation.

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