Conversations on Chemistry: In Which the Elements of that Science are Familiarly Explained and Illustrated by Experiments

by Jane Haldimand Marcet

Conversations centers on the maternal Mrs. Bryant (referred to in the text as “Mrs. B”) and her two students, Caroline and Emily. This is the backdrop providing a snapshot of the general understanding of chemistry in the early 1800s. The sharing of scientific content through such dialogue was important to Marcet’s readers; indeed, she came to write not only Conversations on Chemistry but also Conversations on Political Economics as well as Conversations on Natural Philosophy.As she stated in her preface to Conversations on Chemistry, she took on the question of whether such material was suitable for women and knew there would be objections, but she also knew public opinion was on her side. She published the first edition of Conversations anonymously in 1805.Her Conversations was intended for the “Female Sex” and became her most popular and famous work. It was one of the first elementary science textbooks and contained Jane’s own drawings of chemical apparatuses. Throughout the text she emphasized the importance of both demonstration by experiment and theoretical rigor.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction

458 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Jane Marcet (née Haldimand) was an innovative, successful writer of popular introductory science books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Ma...

Reviews

[notgettingenough · Rating 4 out of 5]

My career as a scientific investigator ended when I was five.

I'd discovered that if you scratch your skin with your fingernail, it goes white and then if you lick it - or otherwise apply water - the scratch will disappear. I thought this was pretty interesting and I wanted to explore the idea more. I looked at the car. I got my metal cap gun. Just don't say a thing, okay? I did a pretty good job of ruining the paintwork, confident in the idea I was merely going to wash all those scratches away.

Don't ask what happened when my parents found out. Suffice to say, the aftermath of the Heidi incident http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... was a pat on the head and extra dessert by comparison.

Post-grad chemists, I gather, learn that in fact at least 85% of what they do for the rest of their lives will fail. I had an early one out of one, a hundred percent lesson.

You might think it is weird that I wanted to be a saint when I grew up, but honestly, being boiled in oil or eaten by cannibals just seemed so much more - well, civilised - that what happens to intrepid scientists.

You won't have heard of Jane Marcet. Female, you see. But maybe the most important, inspirational writer in education in the late eighteenth and then nineteenth centuries. She made Faraday what he was. Or so he later said. Here is both a discussion of her and a link to an online version of this book:

http://www.rsc.org/images/Woman%20tha...

[Gordon Clason · Rating 1 out of 5]

There is no book here

This thing has no text. There is an introduction, then a table of contents, then an index, and that's all.

[Madalene · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty interesting - socratic method style of writing on the chemistry known at this time in history. If you miss your chemistry class, you'll enjoy her experiments proving the basic chemistry that was just starting to be known, and how to proceed with asking questions. They had far fewer elements then, but most of the experiments would still hold true.