Ambix

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Wherever mercury-gold amalgamation mining unfolds, alchemical processes abound. They are there as catalytic agents forming amalgams at atomic levels. They are there as cultural agents transforming rocks into cell phones and all kinds of consumer goods. And they are there as ideological agents mutually translating human understandings across whole worlds we describe as the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. These processes, we argue, are made more legible - more readily perceived and conceptualised - by peering through the lens of environmental alchemy , a new critical framework in which we apply the historical use of alchemical terms to investigations of environmental change, and to understand the extraordinary complexity that gold and mercury set in motion when mining entangles nature and culture...

This article considers the presence and absence of mercury, and why in different social arenas where gold features, mercury can become either pervasive or elusive. To substantiate this argument, the article offers two contrasting examples: (1) presentation strategies at Pacific Seaboard gold rush heritage sites, and (2) the background to the Minamata Bay tragedy and the Minamata Convention's subsequent framing of mercury use in artisanal and small-scale gold mining in the Global South. By unpacking these divergent social histories of mercury use and its consequences, the article identifies the current disconnect between different histories of mercury, and the problematic consequences of this disengagement...

This article argues that the centuries-long history of mercury-gold amalgamation is crucial to contemporary debates surrounding global mercury pollution from artisanal and small-scale gold mining. Drawing on historical findings that examine Spanish colonial and Indigenous metallurgical knowledge as well as ethnographic and scientific research, we resituate the history of mercury amalgamation in Latin America, focusing on the Colombian Andes and the Peruvian Amazon - two regions where mercury pollution from artisanal and small-scale gold mining provokes international concern...

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Ancient and medieval alchemical works include several comparisons between the generation and development of metals and those of plants, animals, and living beings. These comparisons could refer to adopt physiological models in the explanation of the natural formation of metals and their artificial transformation, to justify the place occupied by alchemy within the broader study of the natural world, and to stand as metaphorical descriptions of specific alchemical procedures. This article analyses these features by focusing on the relationship between mercury and gold, the latter being the "perfect" metal that constituted both an ambitious goal of alchemical practice and one of its key ingredients...

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Robert Fludd was a thinker full of contradictions. He is famous for his theosophical system and for his experimental chymical constructions as well as for his Galenic medical practices. Furthermore, Fludd had his works published in luxurious folio formats by the publisher Johann Theodor de Bry, and the spectacular etchings and many of the engravings in his books were executed by Matthäus Merian the Elder. Fludd's elaborate explanations of these images reveal him to be a natural philosopher who expressed his thoughts graphically...

This paper examines the identification of chemical elements using mineral analysis, focusing on the controversy surrounding the "tantalum metals" between 1801 and 1866. Of these metals, only tantalum and niobium are still recognised as elements today; the discovery claims of columbium, pelopium, ilmenium and dianium were all retracted or refuted. Despite the theoretical and institutional changes that chemistry underwent during this time, the debates on the tantalum metals point towards a continuity in the identification of metals...

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This paper discusses fourteen letters that Heinrich Will (1812-1890), Justus Liebig's (1803-1873) successor at the University of Giessen, sent to Robert Warington (1807-1867), the chemical operator at Apothecaries' Hall in London, between 1842 and 1854. The correspondence illuminates a range of topics related to the development of the British chemical community in mid-Victorian Britain - its organisations, networks, and commercial opportunities, as well as offering insights into the importance of family, friendship, and collegiality in sustaining scientific careers...

This article introduces a collection of papers on women, gender, and chemistry in eighteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and the United States. After briefly surveying previous research on women and gender in science and outlining the long history of women in chemistry, we present this special issue's main findings concerning several key themes, including the identities and strategies of women engaged in chemical activities and the enabling circumstances and networks that helped these women gain entry into male-dominated institutions and fields of study...

During the second half of the eighteenth century, Western countries witnessed an explosion of societies and publishing initiatives aimed at creating and disseminating what contemporaries called useful knowledge. These "economic societies," "societies of friends of the country," or "societies of improvers" sought to improve their local communities through the scientific management of natural and social resources. This article analyses the opportunities that this movement of patriots opened up for women in chemistry, who went from being "exceptional women" to representing themselves as female "friends of the country...

The Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH) was the first of its kind when it opened doors in Trondheim in 1910. For the first time, engineers who were perceived as central to the country's industrial development could be educated in Norway. Of the 4,311 students admitted to NTH before 1940, twenty were women who embarked on the course in chemical engineering. In this prosopographical study, I aim to examine closely the first cohorts of women engineers in Norway, their motivations for studying chemical engineering, their career opportunities and choices and the extent to which they were supported by mentors...

Around the start of the 1920s, the situation of female chemists in the photographic manufacturing industry was literally and figuratively explosive, for their record in conducting hazardous organic syntheses made the research director of the largest photographic firm conclude that chemistry was not an appropriate field for women. About two decades later, by contrast, the photographic industry had developed into one of a relatively small number of industries where female chemists had obtained recognition and promotions not only as librarians, patent professionals, and chemical analysts but also as experimental and theoretical investigators in research and development laboratories...

This paper examines an episode of the history of chemistry, the campaign for the promotion of so-called "new chemistry," dating to the second half of the 1780s, to investigate the ways in which women could build their own reputation. I focus on the case of Marie-Anne Paulze-Lavoisier (1758-1836), today known as the wife and scientific associate of the French chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794). Drawing on a wide set of published and unpublished sources - laboratory notebooks, travel diaries, letters, and drawings - I will delve deeper into their collaboration, showing how Paulze-Lavoisier appropriated the campaign for the new chemistry to appear as a visible actor in the scientific circles of the time...

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Among the cross currents of social and intellectual life in the early modern era, wonder, utility, and playfulness combined to inspire curiosity and to give value to novel alchemical procedures and chemical remedies. One of the most skilful alchemical and medical performers, who brought theatrical techniques to bear upon an economy of alchemical secrets and magic, was the self-trained Paracelsian physician, mining expert, and alchemical adept, Leonhard Thurneisser zum Thurn (1531-1596). In creatively designed and illustrated books produced for a luxury market, he constructed, in words and images, theatres of procedure, instrumentation, and chemical curiosity based in traditions of Renaissance magic and Paracelsian natural philosophy...