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This essay provides the first historical account of the origins of synthetic organic chemistry, one of the most powerful and productive of late nineteenth-century sciences. It builds on a revised understanding of the program of organic analysis instituted in the early 1830s by Justus Liebig, showing why and how Liebig guided his students August Wilhelm Hofmann and James Sheridan Muspratt in the introduction of synthesis to organic chemistry in early 1840s Giessen. What Muspratt and Hofmann called “synthetical experiments” became Hofmann’s main investigative method, but they did not enable the artificial laboratory production of specified target substances. Instead, synthetical experiments increased chemical understanding of reactions and their products. When applied to aniline, Hofmann’s model for natural alkaloids, they produced the array of artificial organic bases underpinning Hofmann’s major theoretical innovation, the ammonia type. Despite his reliance on artificial bases, this essay shows that Hofmann’s primary and enduring scientific goal was to understand the natural alkaloids. By revealing the essential stabilizing and progressive role of chemists’ daily work at a time when theory was uncertain and contested, it contributes to ongoing studies of science as practice.

Everybody knows that glass is and always has been an important presence in chemical laboratories. Yet the very self-evidence of this notion tends to obscure a supremely important change in chemical practice during the early decades of the nineteenth century. This essay uses manuals of specifically chemical glassblowing published between about 1825 and 1835 to show that early nineteenth-century chemists began using glass in distinctly new ways and that their appropriation of glassblowing skill had profoundly important effects on the emerging discipline of chemistry. The new practice of chemistry in glass-exemplified in this essay by Justus Liebig's introduction of a new item of chemical glassware for organic analysis, the Kaliapparat--transformed not merely the material culture of chemistry but also its geography, its pedagogy, and, ultimately, its institutions. Moving chemistry into glass--a change so important that it warrants the term "glassware revolution"--had far-reaching consequences.

INTRODUCTIONThis paper has a number of inter-related goals concerning research school methodology, nineteenth-century chemistry, and the means by which knowledge is transferred from one location to another. I begin with a short discussion of Jack Morrell's research school concept, and how this has been extended by more recent work. I then discuss Justus Liebig's school in Giessen, highlighting those aspects of that research school that remain controversial and showing how more recent historical work on training and research in both theoretical and laboratory contexts can usefully be applied to Liebig's Giessen laboratory. Next, I use the key characteristics of Liebig's research school that emerge from that analysis as a new standard against which to examine what August Wilhelm Hofmann was expected to re-create when he was brought to London in 1845 to be the first director of the newly founded Royal College of Chemistry (hereafter RCC). Finally, I suggest how the new insights gained from this study may be used to supplement Morrell's original research school approach in ways that produce a clearer understanding of how successful training and research organizations are created and propagated.Morrell's celebrated comparison of the schools of Justus Liebig and Thomas Thomson brought the research school concept into prominence as a unit of historical analysis early in the 1970s.' His work struck a chord with prevailing themes within the discipline of history of science, and provided a tool with which historians were able to integrate social, cultural, and technical aspects of their field of study. The rapidly professionalizing discipline of nineteenth-century chemistry provided rich material for Morrell's approach.' New substances, especially organic chemicals, were being isolated in increasingly large numbers from natural sources and the study of chemical transformations produced yet more artificial compounds. Chemists, most notably Liebig and his associates, attempted to understand the identity of these substances by applying the techniques of quantitative organic analysis to determine their elemental composition. Inthe period before 1860, the number of well-characterized substances in the chemical literature rose to about 3000, doubling approximately every twenty years.' This growing body of knowledge urgently required rationalization in order to remain manageable and the ability to analyse the composition of organic substances accurately and speedily was crucial to that process. This was Liebig's chosen research goal, achieved by introducing a new method for analysis and increasing the number of people able to apply it, with the result that the Giessen

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