Communications of Chemical Knowledge: Georg Ernst Stahl and the Chemists at the French Academy of Sciences in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century.

Abstract

Histories of eighteenth-century chemistry often assert that the works of the German chemist Georg Ernst Stahl (1659-1734), especially his ideas about phlogiston, were largely unknown to French chemists until the 1740s. A careful analysis of Stahl's writings and the publications of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris shows that academy chemists were well informed about, and even integrated, Stahl's chemical theories, experiments, and methods beginning in the 1710s, and that Stahl kept abreast of the work by his colleagues at the Paris Academy. It also reveals the frequency and significance of the communication between French and German chemical communities in the first half of the eighteenth century.