Die Technowissenschaftlichen Laboratorien der Frühen Neuzeit

Abstract

In the early modern period laboratories existed, as a rule, only in alchemy and chemistry as well as in innovative arts and crafts which employed chemical operations, such as pharmacy, metallurgy and the making of fireworks. The paper presents a comparative analysis of the material culture of pharmaceutical and academic laboratories in eighteenth-century Germany. Based on this analysis, it is argued that until around 1800 laboratories were technoscientific sites of both learned inquiries into nature, technological investigations, and manufacture. This argument is supported by the local circumstances of the specific historical case described in the second part of the paper: the way in which the laboratory of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences was equipped with instruments, vessels and materials. The first director of this academic laboratory, the apothecary-chemist Andreas Sigismund Marggraf, as well as its third director, Martin Heinrich Klaproth, equipped the academic laboratory with the instruments, vessels and materials coming from their own pharmaceutical laboratories. There was thus a direct material transfer from an artisanal laboratory to an academic laboratory. © 2008 Birkhaeuser.