Freiberg Mining Academy Research Articles

Sustainable Gains: Dutch Investment and Bureaucratic Rationality in Eighteenth-Century Saxon Mines

A late-eighteenth-century encounter between Dutch merchants and cameralist Saxon officials is used to argue two related points. First, the history of knowledge can help us rethink hierarchical power structures like the Saxon mining bureaucracy. Mine owners had a right to information and could not be forced to pay contributions, which meant that mining officials were solicitous in sharing knowledge, fretted about investors’ favor, and took their desire for revenue into consideration. These observations directly challenge the traditional absolutist image of the Saxon mining bureaucracy. Second, the history of knowledge can help explain how certain rationalities (that is, combinations of means, ends, and values) came into being. Saxon officials sought to situate short-term income and expense in a success story that spanned decades and centuries. Informed by the concept of Nachhalt (sustainability), Saxon officials saw profit even in mines that lost money. This kind of sustainability thinking is best explained via the archival practices of the mining bureaucracy: officials collected information from yield sheets and local lore in order to calculate long-term outputs, to speculate about untapped deposits, and to disburse as little profit as possible. When the Dutch eventually understood this rationality, they withdrew. Saxony’s early modern mining bureaucracy was dismantled by liberal reforms in 1850s, but its peculiar brand of sustainability, aiming to extract resources at almost all costs, likely survived the dawn of industrial capitalism as young engineers and administrators became versed in it at the Freiberg Mining Academy. This article is part of a special issue entitled “Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge,” edited by Sebastian Felten and Christine von Oertzen.

BRINGING WERNER’S TEACHINGS TO THE NEW WORLD: ANDRÉS MANUEL DEL RÍO AND THE CHAIR OF MINERALOGY IN THE SCHOOL OF MINES OF MEXICO (1795–1805)

ABSTRACT Professor Andrés Manuel del Río (1764–1849) taught mineralogy from 1795 to 1846 in the School of Mines of Mexico City. This institution was the first mining engineering school of the New World and it followed closely the educational model of the Freiberg Mining Academy, established in 1765 in Saxony. The geological sciences, in particular, were taught at the School of Mines using Abraham Gottlob Werner’s (1749–1815) teaching method. This article analyzes the first ten years of Del Río’s work by studying the three branches of mineralogy that he taught: orictognosy, geognosy, and the ‘art of mining’. This analysis is based on the textbooks he wrote as well as other primary historical documents, many associated with students, that record the discoveries made by him from 1795 to 1805. This interval is considered to be the first golden period of his academic career during which he wrote textbooks and discovered vanadium.

Antimicrobial activity investigation of natural bromotyrosine derivatives

Annotation. The relevance of the search for new natural antimicrobials is dictated by global spread of antimicrobial resistance. Studies of marine sponges of the class Demospongiae, including more than 7300 species, have become promising from the pharmacological point of view. Sponges produce a wide range of biologically active substances of different classes such as steroids, isoprene, alkaloids, terpenoids, etc., which can inhibit the growth of pathogenic microorganisms or kill them. The trial of brominated isoxazoline alkaloid derivates named bromotyrosines has been enough promising. The aim of our work was to determine the antimicrobial activity of aeroplysinin-1 against clinical antibiotic-resistant strains of gram-positive bacteria and fungi of the genus Candida. The aeroplysinin-1 substance was isolated by methanol extraction from desiccated specimens of sponge Aplysina aerophoba followed with its separation by column chromatography in the Extreme Biomimetics Laboratory of the Electronics and Sensor Materials Institute, Freiberg Mining Academy, UT (Germany). Well method was used to determine antimicrobial action of the tested substance against clinical strains of bacteria and fungi (S. aureus, C. acnes, C. albicans). Aeroplysinin-1 was found to demonstrate high antibacterial activity against clinical strains of the genera Cutibacterium, Staphylococcus. The inhibiting growth zones around the wells filled with 0.1% solution of aeroplysinin-1 in dimethyl sulfoxide had diameters of 35.4±3.2 mm, 32.1±2.8 mm and 26.5±2.5 mm for cutibacterium, enterococci, and staphylococci, respectively. It was revealed aeroplysinin-1 had no activity against fungi of the genus Candida. So, after a comprehensive study of pharmacological properties of this natural bromotyrosine compound, which is a secondary metabolite of marine sponges Aplysina aerophoba, it can be added to the list of alternative compounds to struggle multiresistent to modern antibiotics pathogens causing human diseases.

Rethinking Romanticism with Spinoza: Encounter and Individuation in Novalis, Ritter, and Baader

Reconstructing the theories of encounter and individuation among Novalis and his contemporaries affiliated with the Freiberg Mining Academy, this article reconsiders German Romanticism through a Spinozan materialist tradition. Countering the reception of Novalis as a poet and an idealist philosopher of subjectivity belonging to Jena Romanticism, I advance an alternative constellation of his interlocutors that comprises an intellectual tendency around 1800, herein referred to as Freiberg Romanticism. This tradition is characterized by a materialist approach to the questions on forms of life, complexity, and power in the processes of emergence and becoming. In their respective theories of individuation, I show how Novalis, Johann Ritter, and Franz Baader share Spinoza’s materialist ontology of immanence and transindividuality offered in recent interpretations of Spinoza in continental philosophy. In his engagement with Ritter’s theory of Galvanism, Novalis develops a Spinozan logic of integration of individuals in nature. In his appropriation of Baader’s theory of elementary physiology, Novalis articulates the immanent causality in the determination of individuals. Interrogating Novalis’s, Ritter’s, and Baader’s respective epistemo-ontologies through Spinoza’s thought, this article demarcates the limits of Freiberg Romanticism and its potential lapses into animism and vitalism. While Spinoza contributes a strong concept of substance to Freiberg Romanticism, regulating and problematizing the equivocations of Novalis and his contemporaries, Novalis contributes to the Spinozan tradition a strong concept of encounter.

What is Practical in Mathematical Knowledge? : The Positions of Mining Master J.A.Scheidhauer and Building Master C.F.Steiner Around 1800

This article investigates the notion of 'practical mathematics' and its evolution over the last third of the eighteenth and first third of the nineteenth century. Two detailed case studies, taken together, give asense of both the richness and the difficulties of what practical knowledge could mean at the turn of the nineteenth century. After some preliminary remarks about the institutional context and the social status of practical mathematicians (actually mathematical practitioners) in the German regions the first case study is dedicated to the mining master Johann Andreas Scheidhauer (1718-1784). The biography of this previously unknown mathematical practitioner leads to an analysis of his writings and their reception, after which we analyze the diffusion of his work, most prominently through J.F.Lempe, professor of mathematics at the Freiberg mining academy. The second case study deals with apractitioner from the following generation: the architect Carl Friedrich Steiner (1774-1840), who lived in Weimar as acontemporary of Goethe. In acertain sense his textbook on Geometry descriptive reflects the consequences of the ongoing mathematisation, the status of mathematical knowledge for the training of young artisans and artists. Both case studies provide information about the historical understanding of practical mathematics.

Mining engineering education at the Freiberg Mining Academy in the light of social changes and globalization: Problems and solutions

Mining engineering education at the Freiberg Mining Academy in the light of social changes and globalization: Problems and solutions

Grigory (Gotthelf) Fischer Von Waldheim (1771-1853): Author of the First Scientific Works on Russian Geology and Palæontology

Sometimes called the 'Russian Cuvier', Grigory Fischer von Waldheim was born in 1771 in Waldheim near Freiberg in Saxony and graduated in 1792 from the Freiberg Mining Academy, where he studied under Werner and became friends with von Buch and von Humboldt. In Paris, he studied under Cuvier and the two became friends. In Russia, Fischer became Director of the Moscow University Natural History Museum (1804-1832), founder of the Moscow Society of Naturalists at Moscow University (1805), Corresponding Member (1805) and Honorary Member (1819) of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, and Professor (later President) of the Moscow Medical-Surgical Academy (1837), where he established its Natural History Museum. He gave systematic descriptions of materials in the Paris National Natural History Museum (1802-1803) and Moscow University's Natural History Museum (1805-1806). Using binomial nomenclature, he published the first scientific descriptions of the fossil fauna of Russia (1809) and the first descriptions of the fossil flora from around Moscow (1826) and the southwestern Urals (1840). He also wrote the first Russian monograph on geology and palaeontology (Oryctography of the Province of Moscow, 1830-1837). In effect, he founded palaeontology in Russia. His achievements were recognized during his lifetime and are remembered today in Germany and Russia, but are rather little known in the Anglophone world.

Freiberg and the Frontier: Louis Janin, German Engineering, and ‘Civilisation’ in the American West

Summary Mining companies after the Gold Rush depended heavily on foreign expertise, and yet historians of mining have glorified ‘German engineering’ in America. The application of German technology in America was fraught with difficulties, and most advances were micro- rather than macro-innovations, such as Philip Deidesheimer's famous square-set timbering on the Comstock Lode. The problem began at German mining schools, such as the Freiberg Mining Academy, where Americans like Louis and Henry Janin, while they acquired advanced training and adopted an engineering ethos, struggled to learn about Mexican and American mining. Having complemented their course of study to remedy this deficiency, the brothers returned to the US intending to modernize mining on the frontier. Louis attempted the ‘Freiberg Process’ of amalgamation on the Comstock Lode, but locally developed methods proved more feasible, and the experiment failed. He came to apply his training rather toward the micro-level problem of how to reprocess amalgamation waste heaps.

Scholars and Miners: Dowsing and the Freiberg Mining Academy

The Freiberg Mining Academy (f. 1765) illustrates how state control and the Enlightenment came to dominate European mining. Notwithstanding calls for a break with mining tradition, however, prospecting remained steeped in the tacit knowledge of miners, which legitimized the divining or dowsing rod. After 1800, German physicists and Romantic scientists developed a new theory of dowsing that drew on Galvani’s and Volta’s research. The famous Freiberg physicist Ferdinand Reich examined a dowser in the 1840s who claimed to experience a galvanic response to mineral ore. This case demonstrates a new synthesis of traditional prospecting and scientific theory that would mark dowsing practice in the modern age.

Unpacking Goethe's collections: the public and the private in natural-historical collecting

This paper argues that Goethe's collections, in particular his mineralogical collections, had both public and private purposes. The public purposes were closely tied to the tradition of mineralogizing exemplified by the Freiberg Mining Academy. Abraham Gottlob Werner provided technologies for standardizing mineralogical terminology and identification, and Goethe hoped that these technologies would allow for a vast network of collectors and observers who would collate their observations and develop a model of the Earth's structure. His own cabinet, in particular his collection of rocks (Gebirgsarten), was to be a representative sample of rock formations in particular locations that could reveal features of the Earth's structure and history. Goethe was also responsible for the scientific collections of Jena University. He argued that if such collections were to be useful for teaching and research, a goal he strongly supported, they could no longer be treated as the private property of professors. He recognized that social relations within the University would have to be reordered if museums were to fulfil their epistemic functions. In this respect Goethe was on the side of the modern museum and opposed to the world of the private collection and all its idiosyncrasies. However, his own collections had very private and personal purposes. Using some of the ideas of Walter Benjamin as a foil, this paper tries to uncover some of the private passions that fuelled Goethe's almost insatiable collecting. Though these passions were peculiar to Goethe, I argue that historians of science should attend more to the passions and their place in the sciences.

Knowledge From Underground: Leibniz Mines the Enlightenment

The history of geology has focused largely on the foundations of geology in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Considerable attention has also been given to grand theories of the earth, or cosmogonies, of the seventeenth century. This approach has left out most of eighteenth-century mineralogy; it has also left out mining. The argument here is that Leibniz's Protogaea is best understood in the context of the Harz mines, where Leibniz spent considerable energy doing administrative work and inventing new mining machinery. By looking to the mines we not only make sense of Protogaea, but of most of German mineralogy in the eighteenth century. J. G. Lehmann, J. F. W. Charpentier, C. G. Delius and many other practitioners working in and around mines were deeply concerned with mapping the subterranean structure of the earth's crust and they contrasted their work with the "fantastic" world of theorists. The Freiberg Mining Academy, other institutions, and the way vocabularies of mining changed will also be considered. Finally there are some concluding thoughts on why mining has almost disappeared from the history of geology.

Clemens winkler — A chemist at the freiberg mining academy during the 2nd phase of industrialization in Germany

(1990). Clemens winkler — A chemist at the freiberg mining academy during the 2nd phase of industrialization in Germany. History and Technology: Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 51-61.

Wilhelm August Lampadius (1772–1842)

AT the time when geologists and mining students flocked to the Freiberg Mining Academy in Saxony, and when Gottlob Werner was at the height of his fame, a twenty-year-old chemist because a member of the staff, and from that time onwards for half a century he taught, wrote and experimented with great success. This young chemist was Wilhelm August Lampadius, who in his fourteenth year had been apprenticed to a Göttingen apothecary. Born at Hehlen in Brunswick on August 8, 1772, Lampadius lost his father, a pastor, at an early age. Apprenticed by his mother at Göttingen-he devoted his spare time to study and was befriended by the university professors J. F. Gmelin and Lichtenburg. At the age of nineteen he entered the service of the metallurgist Count Steinberg of Bohemia. With the Count he made a journey to Russia and in the Count's laboratory made experiments on electricity and heat. His talents becoming known to Werner, he was given a post at Freiberg and on the death of C. E. Gellert (1713-1795) he was made professor of chemistry. In this situation he assisted German industry in many ways. He spread a knowledge of Lavoisier's discoveries, and made researches connected with mining and metallurgy, chemical manufactures, agriculture and meteorology. Especially important among the books he published was his handbook on smelting. A man of estimable character, respected alike by his friends and colleagues, he died at Freiberg on April 13, 1842) in his seventieth year. His place in the Academy was taken by Karl Friedrich Plattner (1800-1858), the chief of the royal department of assaying and an authority on the use of the blow pipe.