Re-Examining the Research School: August Wilhelm Hofmann and the Re-Creation of a Liebigian Research School in London

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This paper has a number of inter-related goals concerning research school methodology, nineteenth-century chemistry, and the means by which knowledge is transferred from one location to another. I begin with a short discussion of Jack Morrell’s research school concept, and how this has been extended by more recent work. I then discuss Justus Liebig’s school in Giessen, highlighting those aspects of that research school that remain controversial and showing how more recent historical work on training and research in both theoretical and laboratory contexts can usefully be applied to Liebig’s Giessen laboratory. Next, I use the key characteristics of Liebig’s research school that emerge from that analysis as a new standard against which to examine what August Wilhelm Hofmann was expected to re-create when he was brought to London in 1845 to be the fi rst director of the newly founded Royal College of Chemistry (hereafter RCC). Finally, I suggest how the new insights gained from this study may be used to supplement Morrell’s original research school approach in ways that produce a clearer understanding of how successful training and research organizations are created and propagated. Morrell’s celebrated comparison of the schools of Justus Liebig and Thomas Thomson brought the research school concept into prominence as a unit of historical analysis early in the 1970s. His work struck a chord with prevailing themes within the discipline of history of science, and provided a tool with which historians were able to integrate social, cultural, and technical aspects of their fi eld of study. The rapidly professionalizing discipline of nineteenth-century chemistry provided rich material for Morrell’s approach. New substances, especially organic chemicals, were being isolated in increasingly large numbers from natural sources and the study of chemical transformations produced yet more artifi cial compounds. Chemists, most notably Liebig and his associates, attempted to understand the identity of these substances by applying the techniques of quantitative organic analysis to determine their elemental composition. In the period before 1860, the number of well-characterized substances in the chemical literature rose to about 3000, doubling approximately every twenty years. This growing body of knowledge urgently required rationalization in order to remain manageable and the ability to analyse the composition of organic substances accurately and speedily was crucial to that process. This was Liebig’s chosen research goal, achieved by introducing a new method for analysis and increasing the number of people able to apply it, with the result that the Giessen