Mary Jo Nye, Professor of Humanities and History at Oregon State University, has, since at least 1972, been publishing in the area of the history of science—in particular, physics and chemistry. Her latest book goes at length into the difficulties encountered by 19th century chemists in working out relative atomic weights and the geometry of bound carbon, and by physicists in coping with the problems of the nature of light, whether heat was a fluid or not, and the mechanical equivalent of heat, and problems posed by magnetism and electricity. An example of the mental blocks that had to be overcome is the author's quotation of a French chemist's statement to his students in the late 19th century that "bodies which are not volatile do not have molecular weight", since their molecular weights could not be determined by the Dumas method.

Because, presumably, of an irresistible hankering after simplicity in nature it was early decided that the formula for water, known to be 8/9 oxygen and 1/9 hydrogen by weight, just ought to be HO, and therefore oxygen had atomic weight eight on a scale of hydrogen being one. It is sobering to realize that all four of my grandparents were born some ten years before the world's chemists (some of them with considerable reluctance) made the switch from OH to H₂O, thus causing a chain reaction change in the formulas of countless compounds.

To be honest, I, as an organic chemist, found this book very heavily weighted toward physics. If you would like to see the mathematics of Bohr's reasoning in working out his picture of the atom, you will find it summarized here; if you want a brief sketch of the thinking that led to the Schrödinger wave equation, it is a few pages later. But when we get to Grignard, he turns out to be a chemist who got the Nobel Prize in 1912 (for what we are not told), and got involved in war work several years later when he "focussed on cracking heavy fractions of benzene to guarantee a French source of toluene."

It was surprising to find that Wöhler's 1828 synthesis of ureasurely a landmark in changing the philosophical thinking of chemistsis disposed of as having been an "accidental synthesis" (quite correct!) with no further comment.

When we teach chemistry and physics at the college level we simply have not got the time to go into the tortuous stories of the false leads, false assumptions, postulates that were followed up and turned out to be blind alleys, and the stubborn human resistance to novel ideas that characterized the development of chemistry and physics. But it is wise for the teacher to be well aware of the kinds of pitfalls that pioneers in science fell into. It should never be forgotten that it was the ablest men and women of their age (am I showing my prejudices?) who worked hard to get at the truth in their respective fields, and there is not the slightest evidence that the human IQ has improved an iota since 1800.

The book contains an excellent bibliography so that the reader can find, in any good college library, plenty of reading recommended by Nye on a wide variety of topics. This book properly takes its place alongside the somewhat similar (though it does not cover the same time period) Fontana History of Chemistry by William Brock (reviewed in J. Chem. Educ. 1994, 71, A214).