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History in the Chemistry Curriculum George B. Kauffman California State University The Current Sorry State of Affairs Today students show little interest in the past, and last year's slang and neologisms quickly become obsolete. Thus it is not surprising that college enrolments in history are at alltime lows. If history itself has fallen into disrepute, the history of science (Hall, 1969) and that of chemistry (Debus, 1985), despite their recent professionalization, are probably in even sadder straits. Most scientists seem to have little interest in the history of their particular science. Numerous appeals have been made for the introduction of more history into the undergraduate chemistry curriculum (Bent, 1977; Bohning, 1984; Bradley, 1984; deMilt, 1952; Fowles, 1957; Ihde, 1971; Jaffe, 1955; Kamsar, 1987; Knight, 1971; Madras, 1955; Schwartz, 1977, 1981; Stock, 1977; Wicken, 1976), and the advantages of history in science teaching have been widely recognized (Albury, 1983; Berger, 1963; Gee, 1971; Grote, 1977; Harrt, 1983; Home, 1977, 1983; Lagowski, 1984; Nelkin, 1987; Rosen, 1983; Westfall, 1986). The American Chemical Society's guidelines for undergraduate education in chemistry recommend that "'beginning and subsequent courses in chemistry incorporate historical perspective as well as reference to current developments in chemistry" (ACS Committee on Professional Training, 1983). Furthermore, despite their constantly increasing length and inclusion of a multiplicity of topics, most general chemistry texts have retained some historical content (Dunbar, 1938; Everett & DeLoach, 1987). An active Center for the History of Chemistry (CHOC) has been founded at the University of Pennsylvania (Wotiz, 1981), and it has recently received a large capital grant from Dr. Arnold O. Beckman, the eminent chemist, engineer, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. Yet, the collective health of history of chemistry courses is poor. Hardly ever required for the modern chemistry major, and still offered in only 10 percent of ACS-approved departments, these courses now languish on the fringes of the curriculum, almost as outcasts from it. As retirements take an insidious toll, and as younger faculty who are unable to populate such courses give up on them, their virtual extinction may be close at hand. (Everett & DeLoach, 1987). In short, most students of chemistry, in common with their instructors, have only minimal interest in or knowledge of the history of chemistry. My feeling that the history of chemistry has been and still is worse off than the history of other sciences has been confirmed by Stephen G. Brush: Chemists, compared with other scientists, have relatively little interest in the history of their own subject. This situation is reflected, and perpetuated, by the antihistorical character of most chemical education. . . . The state of current research in the history of chemistry is certainly not as healthy as it is in the history of physics . . . . [C]hemical education seems primarily oriented toward the training of professional chemists, chemical engineers and physicians, a group that is primarily interested in chemistry for its practical value, as a collection
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GEORGE B. KAUFFMAN of experimental facts tied together by a few correlation rules, rather than as an intellectuallystimulating discipline . . . . Most scientists are not interested in history for its own sake but only as a means of understanding how we got to the present state of knowledge, the so-called "Whiggish" view of history . . . .
History of Chemistry in the Past In contrast to the situation in the humanities, where the student is expected to steep himself in the classics, the average science major, on graduating, has little if any knowledge of the history of his chosen discipline. We take this for granted today. Yet this has not always been the case. Goethe, himself an amateur scientist, stated that "Die Geschichte der Wissenschaft ist die Wissenschaft selbst" (The history of science is science itself). In chemistry, many of the founders of the science were well acquainted with its history. The first popular history of chemistry in the English language was written by the Scottish chemist Thomas Thomson, an active practising scientist (Thomson, 1830-31). August Kekul6, the chemist who proposed the cyclohexatriene structure for benzene, spent much time reading the classics of chemistry before making any original scientific discoveries of his own. Sir William Ramsay and Lord Rayleigh made a careful reading of Henry Cavendish's 1785 paper on nitrogen, leading them to the discovery of the inert gas argon in 1894, more than a century later. Several founders of the American Chemical Society, for example, Benjamin Silliman, Jr., Henry Carrington Bolton, and Charles F. Chandler, were keenly interested and active in studying the history of chemistry.
Advantages of the Use of History Except for a few historically oriented books such as Leonard W. Fine's Chemistry Decoded (1976), most textbooks fail to make the obvious fact clear to students that chemistry is a human enterprise. C. P. Snow, especially in The Two Cultures (1961), focussed much attention on the split between humanists and scientists. The history of chemistry, by treating chemistry as a human activity carried out by human beings in a milieu of other human activities, can serve as a bridge across the chasm that splits these twin fields of endeavour. It can also motivate those students who are alienated by the impersonal, wholly rational, and logical approach emphasized by most chemistry textbooks. It is true, of course, that the scientist devises hypotheses and designs experiments to test them, that in the light of the results of these experiments he revises his hypotheses or discards them, and that he applies to his systems the canons of formal logic, but this is a dull, unimaginative way of describing his activities. Regardless of what the textbooks may imply, there is no universally applicable scientific method -- and if there were one, any self-respecting student should not be content to follow it mechanically like an automaton, a mere cog in a huge machine who could be replaced at will by another scientist without any noticeable change. Inclusion of history can help to combat this degrading and dehumanized view of science, which unfortunately many students still have. In fact, some chemistry instructors have used history to teach "human values" (Galloway, 1977; Seeger, 1980). A sense of history can also give the student a feeling for the movement, progress, and continuous change inherent in science. In Bent's words, "'Science is more a process than a product" (Bent, 1977; see also Lagowski, 1987). Without some history, the student is apt to regard the chemistry in his text and laboratory manual as a finished product un-
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changingly etched in stone. With some history, he learns that chemistry is a dynamic rather than a static structure, with today's theories merely being the leading edge of a trail from the past that stretches indefinitely into the future. According to Holmes (1976), The chief value of the history of chemistry (or any other science) to students of that science is that it can provide an entirely different perspective upon the nature of the science than they obtain by studying its present theoretical structure, laboratory operations, and experimental data. However, he feels that "the acquisition of any new perspective on a subject requires a sustained immersion in the approach from which the perspective is derived," and he fears that "small bits of history inserted into appropriate spots in a science course cannot provide this experience." He therefore favours a separate course in the history of chemistry. I share his feelings, but since my primary duties involve teaching general chemistry, I prefer to teach such a course with history rather than without it. Inclusion of history in the general chemistry course can also provide the student with a feeling for the inter-relationships between events in chemistry. In music, for example, it is a well-known fact that Johann Sebastian Bach wrote many of his works for organ rather than for orchestra because the small orchestra of his day did not possess the power that he desired for his more dramatic compositions. Along the same lines, he could not have written a saxophone concerto, for the saxophone had not yet been invented. Similar constraints and inter-relationships exist in chemistry, but students are often unaware of them. As a case in point, in my classroom consideration of Alfred Werner's co-ordination theory I mention the following sequence of events: During the first half of the nineteenth century, measurement of vapor density was the only method for determining molecular weights. Until the classic work of Raoult and van't Hoff on colligative properties of solutions (1882 et seq.) no reliable method existed for determining molecular weights of nonvolatile compounds. Thus, cobalt(III) chloride was thought to have the composition Co2C16 (by analogy with volatile FezC16), and hence cobalt-ammines were considered dimers, as formulated by Blomstrand. It was not until S. M. J~rgensen in 1890 and J. Petersen in 1892 deduced evidence for monomeric molecular weights by freezingpoint and conductance measurements of metal-ammine solutions that Blomstrand's original formulas were halved. Inasmuch as the concept of octahedrat configuration based on coordination number six was a fundamental postulate of Werner's theory from its inception, it is possible that without J~rgensen's halving of Blomstrand's formulas (e.g., Co2C16.12NH3 became CoC 13.6NH3), the coordination theory might never have been conceived. (Kauffman, 1976a) Integration of history into the chemistry course also places the nature of discoveries in a truer perspective. They are then not seen by the student as isolated and completely independent events created by great men. For example, in our study of the origins of the periodic system (Cassebaum & Kauffman, 1971), we found no fewer than six scientists who might lay claim to this important discovery. As Ihde (1948) has emphasized, "the primary factor in bringing about scientific discovery is not necessity, or individual genius, but the relentless pressure of accumulating knowledge." A consideration of historical events should also make the student aware of the resistance of scientists themselves to new discoveries, a theme pursued by sociologists and historians of science (Barber, 1961; Kuhn, 1962), Today the scientist, like the god-king or chieftain of primitive tribes, is often considered to be in possession of mana or magic power, and consequently, like the chieftain of old, he is often treated with great respect and fawning obeisance. Such an attitude, however,
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is tinged with ambivalence, perhaps a result of the almost traditional American suspicion of the intellectual and the national resentment of above average ability in all fields -- except for entertainment and athletics. To pursue the parallel with the primitive chieftain, if the scientist of today allows himself to be undeservedly deified, he may eventually suffer the fate of his aboriginal predecessor. Though for a while he may bask in adulation, sooner or later his admirers will realize that he does not possess the powers that they ascribe to him, and they will turn upon him in rage and disappointment and rend him as their ancient forebears did to their unsuccessful witch doctors. Indeed, this disenchantment with science has begun as science is blamed for problems ranging from pollution to war. A judicious integration of history into beginning chemistry courses can do much to counter-act the "bad press" that science has received. In our historical treatment of how science operates and what motivates the scientist, however, we should be careful not only to explain the nature and strengths of science but also freely to admit its limitations (Brush, 1974). There are many other advantages that the history of chemistry can offer to the student wishing to become a scientifically literate citizen, for example, encouragement for the novice researcher who will view the great men and women of science not as intellectual giants but as human beings with human strengths and weaknesses similar to his own; a badly needed link between the sciences and the humanities as the student learns that the creative scientist has much in common with the creative artist (Kauffman, 1973; Kauffman et al., 1987); a better recognition of and insight into his own creative abilities as he learns that intuition as well as logic is a legitimate method of problem solving and that there are different personality types in researchers (Farber, 1953; Ostwald, 1929); and an appreciation for the international character of science as he learns that no country has a monopoly on discovery. Most o f the advantages that I have considered have been characterized by vague words such as attitude, appreciation, insight, and recognition, which may be difficult to measure on tests but which are certainly extremely important elements in the education of the scientifically literate citizen so badly needed but so rare in contemporary technological society. Even though they may not be included on tests, well-chosen and pertinent items of history, thoughtfully introduced into our science courses, will, like lecture demonstrations, often be remembered by students long after they have forgotten the technical details.
Disadvantages of the Use of History Actually, many of the alleged disadvantages of integrating history into science courses are not absolute disadvantages but merely caveats -- possible negative points against which the instructor should be on guard. If we are made aware of them, we can avoid or overcome them. On closer examination, some of them will prove to be positive factors that can be utilized to add an extra dimension to our courses. First, there is a fundamental difference in goal and method between science and history. According to Holmes (1976), the contrast between the aim of the scientist, to get at the essence of a phenomenon, to strip away all the complicating features and see as clearly and directly as he can just what is really involved, is difficult to reconcile with the aim of the historian to recapture the richness of past events.
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But something that is difficult is not necessarily impossible. Science deals not with reality as it is but with a simplified version of reality. Reality is too complicated for scientists to deal with, so they simplify it and abstract it to the point where they c a n deal with it. In my introductory general chemistry course, I use an orbital board exemplifying the A u f b a u p r i n z i p and insert corks into the holes in this board to represent electrons. Yet I make it clear that corks are not electrons or even like electrons. Similarly, to write the complete solution to the Schrrdinger equation for an atom as simple as iron - - with 26 electrons -- would require for ink and paper more matter than there is in the entire universe. Yet this fact does not prevent us from writing and using the s , p , d , f - t y p e electron configuration for iron. Likewise, no gases conform to the gas laws exactly over a wide range of temperatures and pressures. Yet we do not throw up our hands in despair and refuse to deal with gases. Instead, we postulate an ideal gas, realizing that such an entity does not exist, and we recognize that the gas laws, like many other scientific laws, are limiting laws that are valid only within a limited range of conditions. Or we may introduce correction factors, as in the van der Waals' equation, to increase the agreement with our observations. Chemistry, like other sciences, abounds with simplified models, abstracted from nature, which sometimes require "fudge factors" in order to jibe better with reality. The oversimplified and abstract nature of chemistry, its tendency or necessity to ignore all those factors or parameters that are not of immediate consequence, constitutes its advantage and its power and at the same time its limitations and shortcomings. We should always strive to point this out to our students, for it is when this obvious truth is forgotten that science gets us into trouble. Admittedly, the historian strives to examine events in the light of their context, and he attempts to include almost anything that might have had an influence, direct or indirect, on the event - - almost the complete opposite of the scientist's goal of simplification. With care, however, I can walk the tightrope between history and science. From this fundamental difference in viewpoint between the historian and the scientist as well as from a consideration of other obstacles, Holmes (1976) concludes, I am doubtful that the history of science can be used as a central approach to teaching science itself, and I am sympathetic to the broader skepticism others have expressed that it can even be successfully integrated into a science course. Although he originally felt that " i f history of chemistry is to be taught as part of chemical education, it should be in separate courses, free to present the subject in its historical integrity," he later changed his mind and concluded that "even in the face of the obstacles I have sketched out, it is worthwhile to do what one can within the framework of a chemistry course." I, of course, agree with him that the obstacles and difficulties are not insurmountable and that they can be overcome, at least partially, if we r e a l l y wish to try. The crux of the problem is that modern man, particularly Western man, is overly prone to dichotomize -- to view things in terms of the correlatives " e i t h e r . . . o r , " that is, in terms of artificially created, mutually exclusive opposites with an adversary relationship - - right vs. wrong, good vs. evil, liberal vs. conservative, mind vs. body, means vs. ends, love vs. hate, rational vs. irrational, or in the case at hand, "historical" vs. "scientific." Eastern man, on the other hand, with his Taoistic symbol of Tai Chi unifies into a harmonious whole what Western man dualistically considers as polar opposing forces. Representative of the ultimate unity, the Tai Chi is divided into two complementary teardrops - - Yang, the light area, denoting the active or masculine principles of the universe, and Yin, the dark area, denoting the passive or feminine principles. The sigmoid line bisec-
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ting the circle is a flowing, curved one rather than a straight, sharp one. It conveys a sense of dynamic change, perpetual motion, "give and take," and flow between Yin and Yang. Each half includes an arc cut from the complementary half in order to emphasize that every thesis contains within it the germ of its antithesis, a viewpoint reinforced by the dark spot in the light area and the light spot in the dark area (Kauffman, 1973). Thus I suggest that we replace the negative, restrictive, limiting, mutually exclusive correlatives " e i t h e r . . . or" with the positive, expansive, all-embracing correlatives "not o n l y . . , but also." In the case at hand, we should explicitly recognize the fundamental difference between the viewpoint of the historian and the viewpoint of the scientist and clearly express this fact to our students. This should not blind us to the fact that the two viewpoints still represent the same reality and differ only in emphasis. The scientist emphasizes the abstract, universal nature of the event and subordinates the particular concrete details. The historian emphasizes the specific background of the event and subordinates its abstract aspects. We should therefore attempt to present to the student a harmonious balance between the two. Seen in the unifying light of the Tai Chi, apparent opposites disappear, and, paradoxically, disadvantages can be seen as advantages. One so-called disadvantage of introducing history into a chemistry course is the difficulty in testing students on this material. Bent (1977) deplored the lack of "easy-to-grade, non-trivial, yet not-too-difficult-to-answer exercises." Holmes (1976) feared that, "the means appropriate for testing a student's understanding of the history of science are so different from those used to test their proficiency in the science, that it is difficult to integrate these into a common framework of assignments and examinations." Such testing, he felt, "must involve writing essays and at least prose analyses based on the examination, comparison, and assessment of source materials." t have dealt with this problem in some cases by merely asking students on examinations to identify a particular scientist and the principle, law, or discovery with which his or her name is associated -- admittedly not satisfactory but still, I feel, better than eliminating historical material from the course entirely. Furthermore, no commandment from Mount Sinai says that we must test students on every topic with which we deal in the course. The point is often made that students will not take seriously and will fail to study material that is subordinate to the main concern of the course, especially if it is not included on examinations. In Bent's (1977) words, "anything not graded is passed over." Certainly all of us are well acquainted with the pre-professionat student, usually a pre-med student, who subordinates everything in his education to his goal of getting into medical school and who will work only at those things that "count." Yet this is not the whole story, for we have all had the experience of putting down our piece of chalk and sitting down on the lecture table or lab desk top (body language that clearly announces to the class that what will follow will not be on the exam) and then have all the students (even the least motivated) suddenly perk up and both follow and contribute to the ensuing discussion. This is the opposite side of the pre-med student problem. Kirshenbaum (1975) expresses this paradox as follows: Students gain and retain a great deal of knowledge and insight from this portion of the course [chemical history through birthdays and anniversaries] even though (or perhaps because) they know it will not be included on examinations. A real danger that must be guarded against by an instructor trying to integrate history into his chemistry course is the adoption of an approach which Butterfield called the Whig interpretation of history (Butterfield, 1965; see also Harrison, 1987; Russell, 1984). This is a particularly insidious type of distortion that views historical events not in the true
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perspective of their time but rather in the light of how they contributed to the present state of science today. Such a Pollyannaish view is easy to espouse. It is all too easy to judge past events in terms of present values and to regard any theories that did not lead to our present theories as "wrong." According to Brush (1974), "Whig history is precisely what the science teacher wants -- he is interested only in the earlier developments that led up to today's established theories and laws." Holmes (1976) likewise feels that "the selection of episodes from the past which can be conveniently fitted into the present structure of chemistry . . . inevitably distorts the past." I make it a point to avoid giving students the false but alluring impression of the progress of science as a smooth, unbroken, steadily ascending line. The history of science, in common with all history, is not a smooth, continuous function, but rather a messy chaotic one that proceeds in forward "spurts" and occasionally leads to dead ends or even backward steps. To belittle theories that are regarded as obsolete today, for example, to use the phlogiston theory as a foil for Lavoisier's oxygen theory of combustion, is to adopt a Whiggish interpretation. In Part 2 of my Classics in Coordination Chemistry (Kauffman, 1976a) I devote almost half the book to the now defunct Blomstrand-J~rgensen chain theory. In my treatment of coordination chemistry in my General Chemistry class, I carefully compare this theory with the coordination theory, emphasizing that on the basis of the evidence, a chemist in the 1890s would probably have sided with Sophus Mads J~rgensen rather than with his adversary, Alfred Werner. Of course, the inclusion of obsolete theories and dated nomenclature and formulas is completely irrelevant to a course designed only for practising chemists, but it gives a more realistic picture of how science actually progresses than does a course in which only successful ideas are presented. Another possible disadvantage in including history in a chemistry course is that in so doing we may estrange young and impressionable students from science by letting them in on the secret that scientists do not always behave as rational, open-minded investigators who proceed logically, methodically, and unselfishly toward the truth on the basis of controlled experiment. This is the theme of Brush's article "Should the History of Science Be X-Rated?" subtitled "The way scientists behave (according to historians) might not be a good model for students" (Brush, 1974). Goldwhite (1975) has applied Brush's question to chemistry by examining several of the most revered figures in chemistry, weighing them in the balance, and finding them wanting. For example, he cited Lavoisier, the founder of modern chemistry, as a proud man jealous of his priority who did not always give credit to his predecessors and who even changed the historical record when it suited his purposes. According to Goldwhite, John Dalton, the quiet and unassuming Quaker schoolmaster to whom we owe the atomic theory, was a closed-minded man whose opposition to Avogadro's hypothesis "helped plunge the whole question of the determination of atomic weights into a twilight zone which endured for sixty years." From these and other examples, Goldwhite concluded that "the 'truth' about many critical episodes in the history of chemistry is at least as complex as the chemistry itself and may be much harder to present in a clear and unprejudiced manner." He cautioned that if instructors are not willing to take the necessary pains and care in presenting history, their "only honest alternative is to leave the history of chemistry to specialists and special courses and concentrate, in chemistry courses, on the job that they are supposed to do: teach chemistry." Zuckerman, in a recent article, is even more negative toward the introduction of history into chemistry courses. He cites various biases in the history of chemistry (geographical, national, religious, governmental, ethnic, racial, cultural, and sexual) and recommends that we drop all history from our chemistry courses, especially that we
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GEORGE B. KAUFFMAN [refrain from] editorializing about general issues in written or oral chemical discourse; expunge the names of people from our artifacts, phenomena, and units; let expert historical scholarship set the record straight; excite interest by teaching the chemistry, not about who discovered, communicated, and exploited it; [and] deal with students in a manner unaffected by bias. (Zuckerman, 1987).
We all know that scientists can be as closed-minded as any other group with vested interests. This lesson was driven home to me in a very personal way at a conference on advances in coordination chemistry held in Columbus, Ohio during the summer of t962. There was an announcement of Neil Bartlett's discovery of compounds of the noble gases, I thought that it was some sort of joke until I read the news later that summer in the literature. We also all know the truth of Planck's statement. A new scientific truth is not usually presented in a way that convinces its opponents; rather they gradually die off and a rising generation is familiarized with the truth from the start. (Kauffman, 1988) Why not share this truth with our students instead of attempting to conceal it? Along the same lines, Holton (1975) points out the apparent contradiction between the often "illogical" nature of actual discovery and the logical nature of well-developed physical concepts is perceived by some as a threat to the very foundations of science and rationality itself. I feel that this fear is unnecessary, and I have already considered the advantages of demythologizing science when it is considered as a human activity. Perhaps I have been dwelling too much on the negative aspects of this history of chemistry, but, as I have tried to stress, these are more challenges to be met and obstacles to be overcome than actual disadvantages. Yet I must admit that history is not absolutely necessary for the production of what Kuhn (1970) calls " n o r m a l " scientists as opposed to creative scientists who overturn the accepted paradigms and institute new ones. Indeed, there may be little practical transfer of learning from a knowledge of history to practical laboratory problems. For example, in the early 1960s my graduate student James Hwa-san Tsai and I were attempting to establish the constitution and configuration of the yellow and red forms of trichlorotris(diethyl sulfide)iridium(III). We identified the yellow form as the cis isomer, but it was only after considerable time and effort that we recognized the red form to be a "polymerization isomer" of the yellow form (Kauffman et al., 1963). Although at the tune I was studying Chugaev's work on polymerization isomers (Kauffman, 1963), unfortunately I failed to make the obvious connection between my historical research and my laboratory research. On the other hand, a knowledge and appreciation of history can be directly applicable to a student's or practising scientist's own research work, an advantage that has not yet been considered. As already mentioned above, in a different context, when Lord Rayleigh encountered discrepancies between the density of atmospheric nitrogen and that of nitrogen prepared from compounds, he sought suggestions from readers of the journal Nature (Rayleigh, 1892). William Ramsay (Tilden, 1918) suggested that Rayleigh read Henry Cavendish's paper on nitrogen (Cavendish, 1785), which more than a century earlier had predicted the presence of an unknown gas in the atmosphere. In 1894, Ramsay and Rayleigh went on together to discover argon, the first of the noble gases, thus uncovering the existence of a completely unsuspected family of elements and making their own contribution to the history of science (Kauffman, 1987, 1988; Rayleigh & Ramsay, 1895).
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Approaches to the Use of History There are probably as many different approaches to integrating the history of science into our courses as there are instructors. It can be done extensively throughout the entire course or only for those topics in which the instructor has a particular interest. According to Thomas Carlyle, "The history of the world is but the biography of great men" and "History is the essence of innumerable biographies." The biographical approach can be one of the easiest and simultaneously one of the most inspiring to students (Kauffman, 1971, b,c). This may overlap with the anecdotal approach (Garrett, 1963). According to Rosen (1983), "for the nonscience student, I have found that the anecdotal approach to the history of science provides just the right amount of fascination and entertainment to help break down their resistance to learning the particular science itself." A particularly inspiring case in point is the story of how Charles Martin Hall (1863-1914) at the age of 22, while still a student, produced the first buttons of electrolytic aluminum in an improvised wooden shed with homemade batteries (Kauffman, 1982). As a result of the commercial success of the Hall Process the price of aluminum fell from $3 per pound to 60¢ per pound and made Hall a millionaire. Hall had been inspired to seek a cheap method for producing what was then an expensive curiosity by his chemistry professor at Oberlin College, Frank Fanning Jewett (1844-1926), who had worked under Friedrich W6hler (1800-1882) and who told his class of W6hler's work on aluminum -a fantastically fruitful integration of history into a chemistry course. At the time of his death, Hall left $3 million dollars to his alma mater. The independent and almost simultaneous discovery of the electrolytic method of preparing aluminum discovered by Paul Louis-Toussaint H6roult (1863-1914), when he was the same age as Hall, can also be mentioned to illustrate the common phenomenon of simultaneous or multiple discovery (Kuhn, 1959, Merton, 1973). I could adduce dozens of similar, interesting case studies from chemistry, and the imaginative teacher of other sciences can easily produce his or her own examples. Biographical and anecdotal material can be gleaned from the articles in Roger R. Festa's "Profiles in Chemistry" series and John H. Wotiz's "The Story Behind the Story" series, respectively, both published in the Journal of Chemical Education. Unfortunately, both series have been discontinued. Another useful method is the use of birthdays of scientists and anniversaries of discoveries and events, a sort of "this day in history" approach (Huntress, 1937; Kauffman, 1975a, 1976b, 1977a; Kirshenbaum, 1975). In my continuing -series of historical articles in the popular bimonthly "Looking Back" feature of Industrial Chemist (January, March, May, July, September, November), I have attempted to pursue this approach to make industrial chemists aware of their heritage, and these articles are well suited to integration into chemistry courses. Another approach is the use of classic experiments, either as lecture materials (Kauffman, 1966, 1975b,c, 1976a, 1977b, 1978) or in the form of reproducible laboratory exercises (Kauffman & Lindley, 1974; Kauffman & Myers, 1975; Kauffman & Chooljian, 1979). The case history method has also been recommended by chemistry instructors (Conant, 1957; Kooser & Factor, 1982). Autographs and rare books may also be used to provide students with a sense of contact with great historical moments of science (Sills, 1987). Materials can be found not only in books but also in articles in journals such as the
Journal of Chemical Education, Chemistry in Britain, Journal of College Science Teaching, Ambix, Annals of Science, Isis, and many others. For those interested in the original classics
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themselves, the reprint series Ostwald's Ktassiker der exakten Wissenschaflen, begun in 1889 by Wilhelm Ostwald, comprising hundreds of titles, many of them chemical classics, will be found useful. A modern English counter-part of this German series, Classics of Science, under the general editorship of Gerald Holton of Harvard University, began publication in 1963, but unfortunately the series was discontinued. Since all the definitions of history in most dictionaries contain the word " p a s t , " we must not lose sight of the fact that in science history is being made today. Twentieth-century discoveries adaptable for use in the chemistry classroom include the transuranium elements and the atomic bomb, penicillin, the structure of DNA and recombinant DNA, ferrocene and related "sandwich" compounds, to mention only a few examples. Even the daily newspaper can furnish up-to-date examples of contemporary discoveries.
Conclusions In my opinion, the education of a chemist without some inclusion of history remains somehow unsatisfactory and incomplete. As Aaron Ihde once told me, "While it is possible to train a chemical technologist without giving him a knowledge of history of chemistry, it is difficult to educate a creative chemist without such knowledge." In my preface to a symposium volume, Teaching the History of Chemistry, I wrote, "Even a cursory reading of the papers will reveal that all the authors are not in agreement with each other on various points" (Kauffman, 1971a). Ihde (1976) has confessed, " I am not terribly concerned about how history is introduced." After considering the various approaches with their pros and cons, I am in perfect agreement with him. No one method is best for everyone. Regardless of what approach or approaches an instructor decides to use, he should choose those for which he has a particular interest or aptitude. In other words, the instructor should play his strengths and interests, avoid his weaknesses.
References
ACS Committee on Professional Training. (t 983). Undergraduateprofessional education in chemistry: Guidelines and evaluation procedures. Washington, DC: American Chemical Society. Albury, R. (1983). Science teaching or science preaching?: Critical reflections on school science. In R. W. Home (Ed.), op. cit. (pp. 159-172). Barber, B. (1961). Resistance by scientists to scientific discovery. Science, 132, 596-602. Bent, H. A. (1977). Uses of history in teaching chemistry. Journal of Chemical Education, 54, 462-466. Berger, M. (1963, November). Using history in teaching science. The Science Teacher, 30, 24-26. Bohning, J. J. (1984). Integration of chemical history into the chemical literature course. Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Science, 24, 101-107. Bradley, J. (1984). History and the teaching of chemistry to the beginner. Education in Chemistry, 21, 12-14. Brush, S. G. (1974). Should the history of science be rated X? Science, 183, 1164-1171. Butterfield, H. (1965). The Whig interpretation of history. New York: W. W. Norton. Cassebaum, H., & Kauffman, G. B. (1971). The periodic system of the chemical elements: The search for its discoverer. Isis, 62, 314-327.
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