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2000
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Chemistry for Everyone
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Boerhaave on Fire
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Damon Diemente
Trinity School, 101 West 91st Street, New York, NY 10024
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January 2000
Vol. 77 No. 1
p. 42
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| Abstract |
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In 1741 an English translation of Herman Boerhaave's celebrated textbook Elementa Chemicæ was published under the title A New Method of Chemistry. True to its time, this book included elaborate discussions of the elements earth, water, air, and fire. This article offers to teachers for classroom use a selection of passages from Boerhaave's chapter on fire. Now, today's teacher of chemistry is apt to feel that little of significance to the modern classroom can be gleaned from a two-and-a-half-centuries-old text, and especially from a topic as old-fashioned as fire. But this view is decidedly shortsighted. Boerhaave offers demonstrations and experiments that can be instructively performed today, quantitative data that can be checked against modern equations, and much theory and hypothesis that can be assessed in light of modern chemical ideas. In the readings presented here I have found material for discussion in class, for investigation in the laboratory, and for a few homework assignments. Modern students are well able to comprehend and paraphrase Boerhaave, to check his results, appreciate his insights, and identify his shortfalls. From him they learn firsthand how painstaking and difficult it was to imagine and develop the concepts of thermochemistry. To read from his chapter on fire is to stand witness to the birth and infancy of thermodynamics as conceived in the mind of a great chemist from the age when coherent chemical theory was just beginning to emerge.
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| More Information |
 Citation |
Diemente, Damon. J. Chem. Educ. 2000 77 42.
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Keywords |
History / Philosophy; Introductory / High School Chemistry; Calorimetry; Teaching / Learning Aids; Thermodynamics
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History |
Created:
Last Updated: |
December 9, 1999
April 15, 2005
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January
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