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Article ID: CBB231312398

Cooking Niter, Prototyping Nature: Saltpeter and Artisanal Experiment in Korea, 1592–1635 (2022)

Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 113
Issue: 1
Pages: 1-21
Publication date: 2022
Language: English

URI: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/718283

DOI: 10.1086/718283

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Crafts and craftspeople Manufacturing Gunpowder Saltpeter 16th century 17th century Choson dynasty (Korea, 1392-1910) Korea

From experimental philosophers in England to workshop managers in Korea, practitioners across the seventeenth-century world developed new ways of investigating nature while studying saltpeter (potassium nitrate), the chief ingredient of gunpowder. Contrary to global histories that emphasize circulation, however, this early modern convergence had less to do with the fluid movement of knowledge and technology than with the very moments when such movement failed. This essay argues that in Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910) the problem of adopting a Chinese method of manufacture—a “thing that did not work”—proved productive in unexpected ways. In the process of vetting the foreign knowledge, the Korean saltpeterers (artisans and military officers) discovered solutions that suited the local conditions. They also established a mode of experimentalism that used hands-on trials to investigate the natural world, drew on the artisanal techniques of “experiment” (sihŏm) and “prototyping” (kyŏnyang), and operated in two languages—the vernacular, hangŭl script and literary Sinitic.

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