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by a_thro_away
3431 days ago
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At the least, they were very much first principle kind of thing, often a tour de force of electromagnetic and mechanical nightmares. Mainframe line printers or upright vacuum columned 9 track tape drives come to mind and cause shudders. I might recommend to search out the early chemistry books, as well. They explain the early chemistry and processes of so many things we take for granted, in a lost art kind of way. I love reading these kind of books. |
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Volume 1: https://archive.org/details/chemistrytheoret01muspuoft
Volume 2: https://archive.org/details/ldpd_10922488_002
Most of the theory is nonsense by modern standards. But it's amazing to see how sophisticated the chemical process industries were already in the mid 19th century. And it's self contained: the manufacturing processes start from plant matter, things you can dig out of the earth, or other materials whose manufacture is described in the same book. The difference between this and a modern chemistry or chemical engineering textbook is, for a rough analogy, the difference between exploring how computers work on an Apple II vs. on a powerful modern laptop with all the Debian packages installed. The modern environment is broader and more powerful, but the older one has the benefit of making all the pieces visible at once and down to a low level. (Well, it's a benefit for the curious anyway. I won't claim that experience with old 8 bit computers makes for measurably better developers, or that reading dusty historical tomes makes for more capable chemists or ChemEs.)
Another thing that I enjoy about old chemistry books is the engagement of all the senses. Chemists observed and wrote about color, crystal texture, scent, the sounds procedures made, and even taste. Bad for life expectancy, great for reading. NMR spectra, though far less ambiguous and far safer for identifying substances, just aren't as much fun to read. The procedures that are described may be horrendously unsafe but they also reliably include enough details to reproduce. I hate the abbreviated style that you see in some modern articles where the authors are thrifty with detail in the experimental section. These old works were written to inform other people of useful and/or striking observations about nature, not to grind for XP on the track to tenure, and it shows.