The first chemical revolution was spurred by the work of Lavoisier and Berzelius, who transformed the archaic language of chemists into a system understandable by people with little formal education. The result was a vast increase in the number of people interested in and practicing chemistry that has given a sustained record of chemical achievement over the past century and a half.

The introduction of the Beckman DU and subsequent flood of instrumentation in the following quarter-century has been said to constitute a second chemical revolution. This is no small claim, implying opening an exclusive field to laypeople, resulting in dramatically increased efficiency and innovation. While the introduction of modern instrumentation may not have been as dramatic as the extensive restructuring of chemistry brought about by Lavoisier and Berzelius, the results have propelled us into the era of truly modern chemical research.

The first chemical revolution took place when the ancient and obscure art of chemistry was revealed to the masses by the efforts of Lavoisier and Berzelius. Lavoisier was a chemist unsatisfied with conventional thinking. He helped disprove popular theory that earth could be formed from water, as evidenced by solids appearing from water after distillation. Lavoisier also helped disprove the concept of phlogiston, the ethereal substance with negative mass attached to everything until combustion; the release of phlogiston was thought to account for a sample's weight gain during combustion. The most important contribution Lavoisier made to chemistry was putting it into terms average people understood.

Before Lavoisier published his Traite Elementaire de Chimie in 1789, there was "terra foliata tartari of Muller;" afterwards there was potash. Lavoisier's treatise met with violent opposition from chemists who thought Lavoisier and his associates were destroying the language of the masters. In the words of one objector, Dr. Thomas Thomson, "The establishment of a new nomenclature in any science ought to be considered as high treason against our ancestors, as it is nothing else than an attempt to render their writings unintelligible, to annihilate their discoveries, and to claim the whole as their own property." Lavoisier decided his response when describing the task of reinventing chemical nomenclature,"We must clean house thoroughly, for they have made use of an enigmatical language peculiar to themselves, which in general presents one meaning for the adepts and another meaning for the vulgar, and at the same time contains nothing that is rationally intelligible for the one or for the other." (Jaffe, 1976)

Despite Lavoisier's simplification of chemical nomenclature, a heavy reliance on symbols and figures hindered newcomers to the field. Berzelius recognized the difficulty of using symbols, and devised a shorthand system of letters based on Dalton's theory of atomic weights as the differentiating standard. This system of nomenclature and the formulae describing its use were first introduced in Annals of Philosophy in 1814, and were adopted in textbooks beginning in 1832. The difference was immense; an example of Lavoisier's nomenclature is shown in Figure 1; translated into Berzelian notation, it reads Fe + 2H₂O + 3O₂ + 4N₂O. (Jaffe, 1976)

The introduction of modern chemical instrumentation has had a similar effect on today's chemistry. The Beckman Model G pH meter was the first instrument to use electronics as a primary tool for chemical investigation, a harbinger of the revolution in instrumentation that was to follow. The Beckman DU UV-vis spectrometer followed the Beckman Model G, introducing the vast potential spectrophotometric techniques to routine chemistry. While the introduction of the Beckman DU met with less hostility than the work of Lavoisier or Berzelius, its impact was just as great on the field of chemistry.

Before the introduction of the Beckman DU, chemical instrumentation was specialized equipment in the hands of a few labs that were either exceptionally skilled in optics and engineering or unusually well-funded. The DU made analytical instrumental analysis available to scientists not interested in or capable of making their own instruments at an affordable price. The result was a standardization of techniques and measurement that can be extrapolated across all disciplines of chemistry. For the first time, any lab could directly compare results with literature or other labs without having to replicate whatever homemade instrument was used originally. The introduction of almost every modern spectrometers can be traced back to the introduction of the DU, which in turn can be traced to the Model G pH meter.

The electronics of the Beckman Model G were borrowed to make the Beckman DU, and in that sense the Model G could be considered the true origin of modern chemical analysis. However, the flexibility of pH measurement is fundamentally less versatile than UV-vis absorption, and hence the Beckman G, though a landmark instrument in its own right, did not have the dramatic impact on chemistry, or the popularity, that has characterized the Beckman DU.

With the work of Lavoisier and Berzelius, chemistry went from being an exclusive domain strongly associated with alchemy and mystery to a powerful tool wielded by millions of moderately-educated citizens. Similarly, the introduction of modern chemical instrumentation made the stunningly powerful tools of electronic and electro-optics analyses available to almost every chemist, dramatically increasing the pace, breadth, and ease of chemical investigation.

References

Jaffe, B. Crucibles: The Story of Chemistry from Alchemy to Nuclear Fission. 4th ed. Dover Publications, Inc.: New York, 1976.