title: The "wonderful properties of glass": Liebig's Kaliapparat and the practice of chemistry in glass.
abstract: 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.
authors.forename: Catherine M
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Jackson
mesh_terms: D002621:Chemistry / Q000266:history*; D005060:Europe; D005898:Glass / Q000737:chemistry*; D049672:History, 19th Century; D066192:Manufacturing Industry / Q000266:history