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  • Discussing Chemistry and Steam: The Minutes of a Coffee House Philosophical Society, 1780–1787
  • Sarah Lowengard (bio)
Discussing Chemistry and Steam: The Minutes of a Coffee House Philosophical Society, 1780–1787. Edited by Trevor Levere and Gerard L’E. Turner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. viii+284. $135.

For historians of the eighteenth century, and especially for those who study Britain, the expression "coffee house societies" calls to mind a host of associations. Informally constituted gatherings with varying degrees of formality to their structure, these groups offered members—men, for the most part—voluntary engagement with social and intellectual topics in the sciences, technology, arts, aesthetics, and politics. They were especially but not exclusively linked to London. We know these groups were significant to the development and exchange of ideas throughout the eighteenth century, but our grasp of their details is not always secure. Records may not exist or may not offer many specifics. Access to archives of these groups is often via local-history publications that are not always well indexed or easily found.

So Trevor Levere and Gerard L'E. Turner, the editors of Discussing Chemistry and Steam, offer us a critical primary source, the extant minutes of a coffee house philosophical society devoted to the study of natural philosophy. Minutes of meetings are the core of the volume, which also includes biographic and bibliographic assessments of the membership and a chart of meeting attendance. These supplements, valuable in themselves, free the reader to concentrate on his or her interests in the minutes, undistracted by the need to re-create basic tools.

The data are supplemented with essays by three agile historians of chemistry, enhancing the central information through detailed explorations of the organization, the subject matter, and the risks and protections this society (and similar ones) offered to members' liberal political and scientific outlook. Thorough and helpful notes further clarify subjects, members' interests, and other details. Discussing Chemistry and Steam is an exemplary study of the individuals and the collective, contextualized activities of one apparently typical coffee house society.

The Chapter Coffee House Society, officially nameless but called after a principal meeting place, met regularly for seven years. Rules of order, revised from time to time, established governance (chairman, secretary, dues, membership, and attendance), the appropriate topics of discussion [End Page 647] (natural philosophy, including what we would consider related technology), and the formality of meetings (for example, members were not required to stand on the entry of a fellow member no matter his social position). Members of the society included figures as familiar to historians of eighteenth-century chemistry as Richard Kirwan and Thomas Cooper, popularizers or disseminators of scientific ideas such as William Nicholson and Adam Walker, and others, more and less well known. A group of honorary and foreign members, some of whom never attended meetings, contributed to the direction of inquiries.

Members chose meeting topics, papers were presented, and discussion followed. They brought to society meetings the fruits of correspondence with other philosophers and of their interactions at other meetings, and they encouraged conversations about relevant news. Chemistry and steam or pneumatics, connected to the professional activities of many, were regular subjects, but society members proposed the same questions that engaged natural philosophers throughout Britain and Europe at the time. Questions of skill arise, whether its role is to establish the evidence of Lavoisier's instrumental analysis or the risks of experimental medical treatments. Also prominent is the changing political climate, shifting as notions about science and specialization are.

The accompanying essays highlight possible meanings of society activities. Levere's introduction presents the organization, emphasizing what he calls the intense appetite for profitable science, and the extensive national and international networks members brought to discussion. Jan Golinski relates discussion content to the "state" of chemistry in this period, including the chemical debates and their social placement. Emphasis on experimental natural philosophy clarifies the discussion of phlogiston and the new chemistry as it took place among these practical thinking men, working to incorporate chemistry and physics into their occupational lives. Larry Stewart connects the study of air—free or captured, phlogisticated or oxygenated—as a medical therapy and air as a...

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