The birth of the new American Republic and the origins of modern chemistry both occurred in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Although these two revolutionary transformations seem very different, there are a few connections.
The immigrants who settled the North American colonies brought with them a broad range of chemically based arts and crafts. These included cooking, tanning, dyeing, brewing, metallurgy, and the manufacture of ceramics, glass, soap, cosmetics, medicines, and potash. But these technologies were largely based on experience and tradition, with little understanding of or interest in the scientific principles involved.
In the colonies, chemistry could not compete with natural history. Most of the investigators mentioned in Raymond P. Stearns's Science in the British Colonies of America (1970) focused on the botany, zoology, geology, and geography of the New World. The strongest motivation for studying chemistry apparently came from physicians, and the first professor of chemistry in the colonies was Dr. Benjamin Rush (1745-1813) of the College of Philadelphia. Rush, who had received his medical training in Edinburgh, analyzed various American mineral waters and reported on their medicinal properties. He was also one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, whose chief author, Thomas Jefferson, called chemistry "among the most useful of sciences, and big with future discoveries for the utility and safety of the human race."
It is ironic that the American Chemical Society has adopted as its icon Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), who lived in the new nation only for the last ten years of his life. Priestley, who was born in Yorkshire, was a Unitarian clergyman who wrote voluminously on religion, history, rhetoric, law, education, politics, philosophy, and chemistry. His contributions to chemistry include the isolation and characterization of at least ten gases, most of them previously unknown. The most noteworthy of these was oxygen, which he first prepared in August 1774. The name he chose, "dephlogisticated air," reflects his adherence to the phlogiston theory, which held that combustible materials contain a principle of flammability called phlogiston.
Priestley's support of both the American and French Revolutions and his unorthodox religious beliefs made him a victim of verbal and physical attack. Finally, in 1794 he fled England with his family for the United States. He declined an invitation to become professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and instead settled in Northumberland, a small town on the Susquehanna River. There he did little original chemistry, rather concentrating his scientific writings to a defense of the phlogiston theory. His influence probably slowed American acceptance of the new "French chemistry."
Although the founder of this new chemistry, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794), never visited America, he is linked to the New World and to Joseph Priestley. Lavoisier learned of Priestley's new gas from its discoverer, and after some investigations of his own, the French chemist concluded that the gas was what today is called an element. He named it "oxygen" and included it in the list of thirty-three "simple substances" that appears in his Traié elementaire de chimie (1789), arguably the first modern chemistry book. Lavoisier correctly interpreted burning as the combination of the fuel or elements in the fuel with oxygen, not the loss of phlogiston. Thus, oxygen was literally a key element in what came to be known as the Chemical Revolution.
Lavoisier, like Priestley, was a man of wide-ranging intellect and interests. Among his many public duties was membership in the Gunpowder and Saltpeter Administration. As a commissioner, he had an apartment and laboratory in the Paris Arsenal near the Bastille. From Lavoisier's laboratory came a series of brilliant chemical discoveries; from the Arsenal came gunpowder of unprecedented quality, some of which was used by the American colonies to win their independence. One of Lavoisier's assistants was Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, the son of a family friend, Pierre-Samuel du Pont (1739-1817). Lavoisier was a member of the Ferme-Generale, a company of investors that contracted with the French government to collect taxes. Not surprisingly, this organization was unpopular, and participation in it proved fatal during the Reign of Terror that accompanied the French Revolution. Lavoisier and his fellow "tax farmers" went to their deaths on the guillotine on 8 May 1794. In 1799 Pierre du Pont and his two sons fled their troubled native land for the young United States. Éleuthère brought with him the principles of Lavoisier's new chemistry and his procedures for making munitions. He put both to use in the gunpowder factory he started on the banks of Brandywine Creek in Delaware, and proposed to call "Lavoisier Mills." That factory became E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company or, more familiarly, DuPont—one of the world's great chemical manufacturing corporations. Thus, it can be argued that chemistry contributed more to shaping the new American nation than the young country contributed to chemistry.