Nationalism and the Process of Reception and Appropriation of the Periodic System in Europe and the Czech Lands

Abstract

The 1870s marked the onset of an exceptionally fruitful and dynamic period in the development of chemistry in the Czech Lands. University education and research in chemistry was taking place at several universities and technical universities, where the structure of the main chemical subjects developed gradually into organic, inorganic, analytical, physical, fermentation, and medical chemistry, just to mention the main specialties. At the same time, the process of the Czech National Revival led to the cultural, linguistic, social, and political emancipation of the modern Czech nation and stepwise almost entirely separated the linguistically Czech and German scientific communities in all their representations, including university education. In Prague, the divided German and Czech Polytechnics (and later Technical Universities) existed since 1869, whereas the Charles-Ferdinand University split into its Czech and German counterparts only in the years 1882 and 1883. The chemical community was organized in several professional associations that also reflected the ethnic division of the scientific scene. The Society of Czech Chemists, founded in 1866, had almost exclusively Czech membership, while a specialized German chemical association has never been created in the Czech Lands. This study deals with two closely intertwined themes: the reception of the periodic system in the Czech Lands and in Europe and the crucial role of the Czech chemist Bohuslav Brauner in this process. I am going to demonstrate a specific set of conditions that shaped the process of appropriation of this new scientific idea by not only scholarly argumentation, but also particular circumstances, in this case Slavic nationalism and Russophilia in the Czech society at the turn of the nine­teenth century. The course of dissemination and reception of the periodic system also showed linkage to the linguistic emancipation of the Czech nation as reflected in the controversy over the Czech chemical terminology, where the periodic system served as argument to one party of the dispute.

Mendeleev’s discovery of the periodic table and the first European Academy of Sciences to honour him

“…This periodic table modification by Brauner was most widely used in contemporary tabular displays at the time. Throughout his career, he continued to research atomic weights and rare earth elements, as well as disseminate the periodic table (28). The first Czech textbook containing the periodic table was the Rukověť chemie pro vysoké učení české.…”

“…The reception and dissemination of the periodic table in Czech Lands were closely tied to the development of Czech national chemistry terminology. During this period, the Czech chemical community began to distance itself from the German community and focused more on the Slavic community, with notable chemists such as Mendeleev, Butlerov, and Menshutkin playing important roles in this process (28).…”