This essay follows recent work in environmental history to explore the history of recycling in physical sciences in Britain and North America since the seventeenth century. The term ‘recycling’ is here used broadly to refer to a variety of practices that extended the life of material resources for doing science in the early modern period. These included practices associated with maintenance, repair, exchange and the adaptation or reuse of material culture. The essay argues that such practices were common in early (...) modern science, and informed experimental spaces and techniques and the ideas that they generated. The essay considers some of the varied motivations that led to such practices, and concludes by examining the endurance of recycling in science since the end of the eighteenth century, particularly in recent efforts to create sustainable scientific research practices. (shrink)

Chemistry laboratories, as buildings, have been surprisingly little studied by historians of science; interest has been focused on them more as sites of specific scientific activity, with particular emphasis on the personalities who worked within them. This has overshadowed aspects of laboratories such as their specification, design, construction, fitting-out, adaptation, replacement, status as civic and academic structures, and so on. Systematic study of them would be aided by an agreed taxonomy of laboratory types, according to their purpose, and a scheme (...) is proposed here. Practically no pre-1800 chemical laboratories survive, and there are very few dating from earlier than 1900, at least in their original state. Encouragingly, there have been several recent archaeological excavations which have turned up interesting evidence of early examples from various cultures. Little interest has been shown in the preservation of laboratories as significant architectural or historical structures, certainly when compared with other building types. The paper closes by considering those English laboratories which enjoy some level of legal protection but questioning the criteria adopted in deciding the programme of preservation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT An examination of the use of the word “laboratory” before the nineteenth century yields two striking results. First, “laboratory” referred almost exclusively to a room or house where chemical operations such as distillation, combustion, and dissolution were performed. Second, a “laboratory” was not exclusively a scientific institution but also an artisanal workplace. Drawing on the historical actors' use of “laboratory,” the essay first presents (some necessarily scattered) evidence for the actual correspondence between artisanal and scientific laboratories in the eighteenth (...) century. A particularly instructive case is the way the equipment of the laboratory of the Prussian Academy of Sciences was acquired. There was, in this case, a direct transfer of instruments, vessels, and materials from a pharmaceutical to an academic laboratory. The essay then argues that we ought to distinguish between two different experimental traditions in the early modern period: experimental philosophy and the laboratory tradition that meshed studies of nature with technological innovation. (shrink)