Chemical discovery and invention in the twentieth century / [Sir William Augustus Tilden].

  • William A. Tilden
Date:
[1916]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Chemical discovery and invention in the twentieth century / [Sir William Augustus Tilden]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    subject to the payment of royalty or other consideration, the amount of which is determined by the Board of Arbitration provided for in the Scheme. Many other details are considered and arranged in the pro¬ gramme, which appears from a report by Professor Duncan to have met with remarkable success during the four years it had been in operation. Eighteen Fellowships had been established in the University of Kansas, and twenty were about to be instituted in the University of Pittsburg. This appears to show that the industrial employer had been satisfied with the results. There appears to be no reason why this plan should not be adopted in many other universities, as it could manifestly be put into operation in all those cases in which direct daily observation of processes going on in the works is not essential. That is the qualification which seems to indicate a greater con¬ venience in the other system, previously described, in which the chemist in the laboratory has immediate access to the manu¬ facturing operations, for the advantage of which he is supposed to be at work. Sufficient has now been said to convey a general idea of the position of chemistry as the basis of a calling or profession. In the chapters which follow a description will first be given of some chemical laboratories, which may be regarded as typical, and of the more important operations which are carried on in them, in order that the reader who is not a chemist may gain some notion of the work carried on in the scientific laboratory and in the chemical manufactory. Chemistry is that department of natural knowledge which is concerned primarily in determining composition, or in other words finding out what things of all kinds are made of. The chemist has to deal with gases like common air, with water and other liquids, and with solid matters of all kinds whether mineral or organic. He is therefore not confined to the study of com¬ position only, but, with the aid of methods and instruments drawn from other departments of science, he examines the properties of bodies and the conditions under which compounds are formed or are decomposed. In every operation of nature chemical change is incessant, in the material of the earth’s crust, in the sea and in the air, in life, death, and decay. The chemist has all nature for his province. By careful study by many generations of men, more par-