Disinfectants: Use of Different Types of Sanitization Techniques in 18th and 19th Centuries Britain and India

The article focuses on the use of different kinds of disinfectants used for sanitization and cleaning of public and private places for curbing the spread of diseases from one place to another. Multiple methods were employed for disinfection; some of which are easily accessible to the common people while others were particularly used in infirmaries and hospitals at the time of treatment. The article also shows that disinfectants were supplement to medicine and they target limiting of the contagion to a space whereas medicines were given for the treatment of patients. Historically, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed unprecedented development in the field of chemistry which led to the discoveries of different types of antiseptic solutions and disinfectants apparently endorsed by the germ theory. Image Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images [email protected] http://wellcomeimages.org

Translations of Roscoe's Chemistry Books into Japanese and Hebrew - Historical, Cultural and Linguistic Aspects

This research studies two translations of Henry Enfield Roscoe's chemistry book of 1872 into Japanese (1873) and Hebrew (1929). Roscoe's original chapter on candle burning is presented, in which he manifested his attitude to chemical experiments. The Japanese and Hebrew historical backgrounds of the translations, as well as their cultural and linguistic aspects are discussed. Roscoe's relations with Japanese scholars are presented. The study moves between events in three countries, England, Japan and Israel. The importance and complexity of translation of science and its later results are discussed.

Albert Ladenburg (1842-1911) – The Distinguished German Chemist and Historian of Chemistry of the Second Half of the XIX Century (To the 110th Anniversary of His Death)

Albert Ladenburg (1842-1911) was an outstanding German chemist and historian of chemistry of the second half of the 19th century. He ascertained the formula of ozone as O3 and proposed a triangular prism structure for the molecule of benzene. He studied the structure of aromatic hydrocarbons and organic compounds of silicon and tin, and devoted his work to explaining the structure of alkaloids and their synthesis. The purpose of this paper is to familiarize readers with the important events in the life of Ladenburg and his writing and research activities, in particular some of his experimental results, as well as his selected publications.

Our Short Talks

We recently organized the first edition of Substantia Short Talks to discuss some hot topics within the community of our journal. It was a recorded online event, that took place online on July 1, 2021, at 4 pm CEST. In 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic that forced us to restrain or limit our social and cultural activities, we thought to offer a lively cultural happening to strengthen our interactions and to ponder on some remarkable issues that affect our lives as scientists and citizens in a globalized world. Examples that came up to our minds were quite some. Just to mention a few: the protection of intellectual property and the worldwide distribution of life-saving drugs (e.g. the anti-Covid vaccines) at very low costs; the relationship between science and politics, i.e. Black Lives Matter and the harsh debate between some international scientific journals and publishers; or the denial of freedom and democracy and even the lack of scientific dissemination in some countries, and so forth.

The Revolution in Science in America, 1900-1950

The US lagged behind the European powers, Germany, Britain and France, in scientific research and development at the beginning of the 20th century. Why this occurred and how Germany and Britain supported their flourishing scientific research cultures are discussed. The first serious expansion in basic scientific research in the US occurred with the influx of European Jewish scientists fleeing Nazism in the 1930’s. They specifically brought with them knowledge of atomic physics. The influence of Vannevar Bush, who was Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War Two proved crucial for the expansion of civilian research and development after the War, supported by the Federal Government. Also after the War, Operation Paperclip brought German scientists to the US and they had significant influence on developments in aeronautics, rocketry and space exploration.

Review of "Ethics of Chemistry: From Poison Gas to Climate Engineering" by Joachim Schummer & Tom Børsen, eds. World Scientific Publishing, Singapore, 2021

BRINGING THE ETHICS OF CHEMISTRY TO THE CLASSROOM AND THE EXISTENCE OF A DOMAIN OF KNOWLEDGE Whoever has attempted to bring ethical discussions on chemistry to a student audience of chemistry and related fields knows of the problem: in contrast to the relatively robust bioethical literature, the literature of chemical ethics is poor, disconnected, and scattered all around the place even in rare cases that it exists. This is an interesting fact, especially if one considers the extended moral (and moralist) discussions over chemistry and its products, and that a great part of the bioethical challenges of the last forty years or so have been generated not by biology (or medicine) per se, but from their marriage to chemistry and its practices. The lack of ethics of chemistry literature dictates to the lecturer unprecedented levels of creativity and demands extra workload to be effective –and this, in times where ethics courses, in general, have become a necessity. It is this gap that the editors of this book (Schummer and Børsen, Ethics of Chemistry: From Poison Gas to Climate Engineering, World Scientific, 2021) have detected, and they strove to create a collection of case studies to cover it. In the introduction of the volume, the editors state teaching as the first aim of its existence –and add the establishment of the ethics of chemistry as an autonomous discipline in its own right.

Can Non-Recyclable Plastic Waste Be Made Environmentally Sustainable?

After death the fraction of living matter which is not biodegraded (shells, bones, corals, carbonaceous deposits) becomes environmentally sustainable. This is not the case for plastics so that these wastes should be either recycled or made environmentally inert and stored in secure repositories as a resource for future generations. Chemistry has offered different solutions to this problem, and each brings about advantages and disadvantages when compared to other options. One further possible route could consist in the enrichment of the plastics waste in carbon content (“carbonization”), in analogy with the production of charcoal from wood, but we hope to stimulate a debate about all the other possible routes among scientists and engineers in the involved fields.

Spin Temperature and Dynamic Nuclear Polarization. From the History of Researches (1953 – 1983)

An attempt is proposed in the most concise form to provide the reader with a history of research and applications of dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP). The main attention is paid to the first three decades of DNP research, and the history of the discovery and development of multiparticle DNP and its relationship with the spin temperature approximation are outlined in some detail. The article emphasizes the role of such researchers as Anatol Abraham, Maurice Goldman, Michel Borghini, Thomas Wenckebach, Vadim Atsarkin, Boris Provotorov, Maya Rodak, Mortko Kozhushner, Levan Buishvili, Givi Khutsishvili. As far as possible, the contributions of many other scientists are considered. The establishment of a uniform temperature for nuclear spins due to the effect of spin diffusion was first proposed by Nicholas Blombergen in 1949. The content of the article is based on the bibliography available in the public domains, in particular on the memoirs of the research participants, and first of all on the materials of Atsarkin's 1978 review in Sov. Phys. Uspekhi and on the oral history of the development of the multiparticle concept of DNP effects, recorded from the speeches of the participants of the Moscow seminar "Problems of Magnetic Resonance" in 2001. A simplified description of the effects of DNP and a summary of the history of their discovery is given in section “Introduction”. The shortest biographical data and portraits of participants in the DNP study are given in Appendix 1, and a selected bibliography on the problems of DNP and spin temperatures is given in Appendix 2. The bibliography divided into four sections according to the time and type of publication (I - historical research, memoirs; II – monographs, reviews; III - original publications 1953 - 1983; IV – some original publications of a later time, mainly during the transformation of DNP into an method for the implementation of nuclear magnetic spectroscopy and tomography in the interests of chemistry, biochemistry and medicine). The widespread use of DNP methods is evidenced, for example, by the fact, that by now company Bruker BioSpin has installed about 50 gyrotron based spectrometers for DNP operating upto 593 GHz worldwide to date.

Dante Alighieri Science Communicator

This paper deals with the issue of communication and dissemination of scientific knowledge outside the circle of specialists. In particular, in the occasion of the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, we will focus on the program for the popularization of knowledge outlined by Dante in the Convivio and De Vulgari Eloquentia, as well as several examples taken from his Divine Comedy concerning mathematical and natural sciences. Some solutions for communicating science proposed by Dante, such as the explanations of principles and scientific methods within a narrative framework (now often called the storytelling method), in addition to dialogues between characters, anticipate methods for science communication used by several authors after him. Examples are provided to show the depth of Dante’s knowledge concerning the basic concepts and methods of mathematics, physics and natural sciences (such as chemistry, meteorology, astronomy etc.). In addition, the examples demonstrate how effectively Dante used analogies and metaphors taken from sciences within his poetry.

Capillary Electrophoresis and its Basic Principles in Historical Retrospect. Part 2. Electrophoresis of Ions: the Period from its Discovery in 1800 till Faraday’s Lines of Electric Force in the 1840s.

This review is the first in a series that deals exclusively with electrophoresis of ions. Since in modern terminology "electrophoresis is the movement of dispersed particles relative to a fluid under the influence of a spatially uniform electric field”, electrophoresis is not limited to colloidal particles, it includes ions as well. The history of electrophoresis of ions therefore begins in 1800 at the same time as that of electrolysis, because the two phenomena are so inextricably linked “that one cannot happen without the other” (Faraday, 1834). Between 1800 and 1805 about half a dozen different theories of electrolytic decomposition and the movement of the particles - for which we coin the term electrophoretic current - were formulated, all contributing to the discourse, but lacking consistency and none fully convincing. They are discussed nonetheless because most of them fell into oblivion, even though they are interesting for historical reasons. However, from 1805/1806 the predominant theory, formulated by Theodor von Grotthuß and independently by Humphry Davy assumed that polarized molecules of water or dissolved ions form chains between the two electrodes. Only the terminal atoms of these chains were in direct contact with the electrodes and were liberated by galvanic action, but are immediately replaced by neighboring atoms of the same type. This decomposition and recombination of the molecules driven by electric forces which follow the “action at a distance” principle like in Coulomb´s law takes place over the entire chains; they represent the electrophoretic current. However, in 1833 Michael Faraday refuted all previous theories. Two of his groundbreaking findings were of particular importance for the electrophoresis of ions: one was that electricity consists of elementary units of charge. The ions thus carry one or a multiple of these units. The other was the revolutionary theory of the electric lines of force in early 1840s, and of what was later called the electric field. With these findings Faraday fundamentally changed the previously prevailing view of the electrophoresis of ions.