Stuff You Missed in History Class
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Elizabeth Fulhame’s biography is largely a mystery, but in 1794 she wrote a book on chemistry that was way ahead of its time.
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frat. Three of my four most recent episodes have been about someone named Elizabeth, including today. I did not do that on purpose. It was just a coincidence. But if you've been looking at your app and kind of you've done a double take, like, didn't they just do this? They just had Elizabeth. It's a different Elizabeth. There are just a lot of Elizabeths, I guess. Welcome to the Stuff You Missed in History Class Festival of Elizabeths. Festival of Elizabeths. I just finished reading the last couple of books in the Edinburgh
Nights series by T. L. Hooch. These books are set in Scotland in a post catastrophe world that is full of ghosts and magic and the occult. And then there are also a lot of references to real historical figures underpinning this fictional world. And in the fourth book of this series, Elizabeth Fulham gets mentioned as the author of Catalysts and Accelerance: A Guide to Refining Practical Magic. And I thought, was that a real person? And Googled, and it was. That is not a real book, though. Elizabeth Fulham's 1794 book was on chemistry,
and it was ahead of its time. And I'm also just really fascinated by her, even though we really don't know much about her. So, most sources describe Elizabeth Fulham as Scottish, and that is because she was married to Thomas Fulham, who graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a medical degree in 1784. So, there's an assumption in play that they met in Edinburgh, or maybe somewhere nearby. We don't actually know exactly where Thomas was from either. People often came to Edinburgh to study medicine from other parts of the British and Irish Isles, and even other parts of the world. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, he was from Ireland.
In terms of Elizabeth's biography, that's basically it.
We don't know when she was born or who her parents were. We don't know what her name was before she got married, or what her childhood was like, or how long she lived. There are even some doubts about whether her name was Elizabeth. She published her work under the name Mrs. Fulham, and that is how 18th and 19th century writers referred to her. So if you're thinking, aren't there birth certificates or marriage certificates, something that we could use to confirm some of these very basic details? In Britain and Ireland, clergy kept records of baptisms, burials, and marriages going back to the 16th century. But there wasn't a legal framework for civil registrations
of these kinds of events until 1836 for England and Wales, 1854 for Scotland, and 1864 for Ireland. So it is possible that there are church records related to the lives of Elizabeth and Thomas Fulham somewhere, but if they do exist, no one has found them yet. In 1779, while he was in medical school, Thomas Fulham took a chemistry class that was taught by Scottish chemist and physician Joseph Black. In addition to being a highly respected chemist, Black had a reputation for being both inspired and inspiring as a teacher and attracting students from outside of Scotland to study chemistry with him.
Chemistry was part of the medical curriculum, but a lot of medical students also took more chemistry than they needed because they wanted to keep learning from him. That included Thomas Fulham, who continued to be connected to Black's chemistry classes until 1790. That was not just after he finished his chemistry requirement for his medical degree. It was years after he finished that medical degree. These two men were also correspondents, and Black credited Thomas Fulham with developing a method to manufacture white lead.
Black's lectures were also popular with the general public, and a significant number of people paid three guineas to take his general chemistry course. Women could not formally enroll at the University of Edinburgh until 1892, but there were some women who attended lectures that were open to the public before that point. And we don't really know if Elizabeth Fulham did that. There would have been few, if any, women in the audience quite as early as her lifetime. She may have pursued an interest in chemistry on her own, maybe with her husband's help, to get access to books and materials from the university.
It is likely that she became interested in developing techniques for dyeing cloth in 1780, when her husband started taking this chemistry class. One of Black's regular demonstrations involved dissolving metals in an acid solution and then precipitating metal chlorides out of that solution. Elizabeth wondered if it was possible to do something similar to precipitate metals onto textiles, creating fabrics that were basically dyed with silver and gold. And she mentioned this idea to her husband and some of their friends, and they all dismissed her. She thought she could really figure this out, though, which is so admirable.
In her words, "I imagined in the beginning that a few experiments would determine the problem, but experience soon convinced me that a very great number indeed were necessary before such an art could be brought to any tolerable degree of perfection." She went on to do experiments for 14 years, carefully recording her methods and results with various textiles, metals, and chemicals. We'll talk more about the methods in just a bit, but she was eventually able to make small bits of gold and silver cloth. She didn't really think these were worth public attention, but she kept trying until her only limit was her budget. She could basically make a piece of gold cloth
that was large enough to use up the components she could afford to buy for that experiment. She described one particularly good piece as measuring about a yard long and almost flawless. She mostly worked with silk, but she experimented with other fabrics as well. Some of her experiments apparently turned out just sort of stained and sad looking. But she also produced pieces of cloth in a whole array of other colors, some of which were flecked with silver or gold. She said that she had once seen a piece of fabric made for the late King of Spain, which was purple with gold wire running through it. It is possible that she saw this on a trip with her husband. We know that he traveled to Spain in 1789.
And she tried to get a similar effect on a piece of white silk and succeeded, quote, "having produced a beautiful purple color with gold beaming through it." Fulham also found another use for her techniques, which was more like a paint. In her words, quote, "I have applied it to some maps, the rivers of which I represented in silver and the cities in gold. The rivers appearing, as it were, in silver streams have a most pleasing effect on the sight and relieve the eye of that painful search for the course and origin of rivers, the minutest branches of which can be splendidly represented in this way."
In October of 1793, Fulham met, quote, "an illustrious friend of science." And that was most likely English chemist Joseph Priestley. He approved of her work and he offered to have it presented to the Royal Society. Priestley was a Fellow of the Society at that point. Fulham didn't say exactly why, but she decided to go a different route and publish her book herself. Now, it is possible that the reason for that traces back to Priestley, who was persecuted for his dissenting religious views and branded as seditious for his support of the American and French revolutions. Priestley fled to the United States in 1794.
And that was the same year that Fulham's "An Essay on Combustion with a View to a New Art of Dying in Painting, Wherein the Phlegistic and Anti-Phlegistic Hypotheses Are Proved Erroneous." One whole title, and it was printed by J. Cooper in Bow Street, London. In the 18th century, booksellers filled the role of publishers and Fulham's bookseller was Joseph Johnson. Johnson was Priestley's publisher as well, and he was also known for publishing works that were considered to be radical at the time. That included the work of religious dissenters and feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft.
Regarding that phlogistic and anti-phlogistic hypotheses situation referenced in that title, in the 18th century, one theory was that all combustible materials contained a substance known as phlogiston, which was released in the act of burning. The ash or other residue that was left behind was the deflogisticated substance. I love that word. This basic idea was first proposed by Johann Becker in 1667, and then it was further developed by George Ernst Stahl, who coined the term phlogiston in the early 18th century. By the time Fulham wrote her book, this theory had supporters and opponents. Supporters
included Joseph Priestley, who called oxygen "deflogisticated air" when he isolated it in 1774. Challengers to this hypothesis included Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier, who we've covered on the show before, and who was building on Priestley's work. In 1777, Lavoisier proposed a theory of combustion that described air as a mix of gases with one of those gases, which he called oxygen, being required for combustion. And we're going to get into how all of this connects to Fulham's book after we pause for a sponsor break.
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To get to the details of Elizabeth Fulham's book, she had doubts about whether the techniques that she had developed for dyeing cloth with metals could be established as an art or an industry. She was working without a patron or other financial backing, so her experiments were limited to what she and her husband could afford. That meant she didn't have access to anything like a fully equipped lab. She was doing experiments at home with a few glass vessels and a newt apparatus. A newt apparatus is a set of interconnecting glass chambers developed by John Mervyn Newt for carbonating water. We've actually talked about it before in our episode on Johann Schweppe and carbonated
beverages. This apparatus could also be used for other purposes. Surgeon Robert Liston, who we have also covered on the show, near and dear to my heart, adapted one to administer anesthesia to his patients. Fulham used a newt apparatus for various experiments involving gases, placing pieces of cloth in one of the chambers depending on exactly what she was trying to expose it to. Fulham also wrote that she did not have the means to patent her techniques. And even if she did have the means, she thought such an application would be in vain, quote, "if we may judge the future by the past."
She also thought the experiments themselves were not unworthy of the attention of other chemists, since, in her words, quote, "they seemed to throw some light on the theory of combustion." So even though she didn't feel like she could patent what she was doing, she wrote this book. She also seems to have thought that if she didn't write the book, someone else might try to pass off the ideas that she had developed in her experiments as their own. As she wrote in the preface, quote, "I published this essay in its present imperfect state in order to prevent the voracious attempts of the prowling pljury and the insidious pretender to chemistry from arrogating to themselves and assuming my invention in plundering silence.
For there are those who, if they can not by chemical, never fail by stratagem and mechanical means to deprive industry of the fruits and fame of her labors."
She also had some thoughts about the way she was likely to be received and treated as a woman publishing scientific work. These thoughts are honestly one of my favorite parts of this whole book. We are going to read a chunk of them. In her words, quote, "It may appear presuming to some that I should engage in pursuits of this nature, but averse from indolence and having much leisure, my mind led me to this mode of amusement which I found entertaining, and will, I hope, be thought inoffensive by the liberal and the learned.
But censure is perhaps inevitable, for some are so ignorant that they grow sullen and silent and are chilled with horror at the sight of anything that bears the semblance of learning, in whatever shape it may appear, and should the specter appear in the shape of a woman, the pangs which they suffer are truly dismal." Oh, it's so good. She went on to say, quote, "There are others who suffer the same nature in a still higher degree, but by virtue of an old inspiring tripod on which ignorance, servility, or chance has placed them, assume a dictatorship in science, and fancying their rights and
prerogatives invaded, swell with rage and are suddenly seized with a violent and irresistible desire of revenge, manifesting itself by innuendos, nods, whispers, sneers, grins, grimace, satanic smiles, and witticisms uttered sometimes in the acute and sometimes in the nasal obtuse twang, with an affected auteur and contempt of the specter, shrugs, and a variety of other contortions attending."
She did not dance around what she thought of people who got so wadded up at the idea of women doing science. Quote, "Sometimes the goblin, which thus agitates them, lurks latent and nothing is perceived but hollow murmurs, portending storms. Sometimes the lurking fiend darts with sidelong fury at the devoted object, which, if unarmed, falls victim to the grisly monster. But happily for humankind, the magic tripod drags none into its dizzy vortex. But those who are radically stupid and malicious, who are beasts of prey destined to hunt down
unprotected genius, to stain the page of biography, or to rot unnoted in the grave of oblivion." Fulham's preface is followed by an introduction in which she gives an overview of the evolving understanding of combustion, including the arguments for and against the Flogiston theory. She references multiple 17th and 18th century scientists, making it clear that she was well-read and familiar with the scientific literature and theories of the day. She concludes that neither side in the Flogiston debate was fully correct. She found Lavoisier's concept of combustion superior to the idea of Flogiston, but she
also thought his hypothesis didn't fully account for everything, including what was going on when bodies became heavier during combustion. After this introduction, the book doesn't just list out all of her years of experiments using metals, chemicals, and cloth. She thought that would be tedious to read, and beyond that, she wanted to arrange the experiments in a way that allowed them to mutually illustrate each other. So she covered 127 experiments, which was a fraction of the number that she actually carried out. She grouped them so that their successes and failures could illustrate a general
principle or provide data about how their methods could be improved. There are chapters on the reductions of metals by hydrogen gas, phosphorus, sulfur, charcoal, light, acids, et cetera, and chapters on the oxygenation of different combustible bodies. She wrote about her experiments in plain accessible language using what was called the French nomenclature. That was what was outlined in the 1787 publication Méthode de Nomenclature Chimique, which was written by chemists Bertollet, Fortois, Guyton de Morveaux, and Lavoisier. She also included a two-page glossary to help anyone who was still using the older
terminology and spelled out her reasons for using different terms than the French standard in a couple of places where she did so. She detailed her materials, methods, and results, including all those different colors of cloth that we mentioned earlier. As an example, here is one of her experiments with gold. Quote, "In order to determine whether a solution of gold in ether or one in water were best adapted to the object of these experiments, I evaporated to dryness a solution of gold in nitromuriatic acid and dissolved the salt in distilled water. In this solution, I immersed a piece of silk, which, after it was dried in the air,
was suspended in a glass cylinder, like the former piece, and exposed to the action of hydrogen gas about two months. The silk, after some time, assumed a purple color, and five or six specks of reduced gold the size of pinheads and one much larger were observed. Examining the silk in the sunbeams, I perceived the whole of it spangled with minute particles of reduced gold." As Fulhame discussed the results of the experiments in her book, she made some observations that were really quite ahead of her time. One was that some of the chemical reactions she was working with, specifically the reduction
of metals, happened only in the presence of water, and some substances seemed to burn better when they were damp. In some cases, chemical reactions happened at room temperature if there was water present, and without the water, she would have needed a smelter. It was obvious to her that water was facilitating these reactions and that it wasn't consumed by those reactions. She speculated that the water was being broken down into its components with those components facilitating combustion and then being reunited into water when the reaction was over. In this way, she said, quote, "As fast as these are consumed in the various processes
of combustion, equal quantities are formed and rise regenerated like the phoenix from her ashes." She didn't have the details exactly right, and observing this phenomenon also led her to the incorrect conclusion that all such reactions required the presence of water. But what she was describing was catalysis. That's a chemical process in which one substance facilitates a chemical reaction without being consumed in that reaction. The discovery of catalysis is usually attributed to Jan Zjakob Bruselius, who coined the term decades later in 1836.
Fulham was not the first person ever to observe and describe this kind of reaction, but she was the first person known to have framed it as part of a whole class of reactions that were all similar to one another. Catalysts are a truly enormous part of the chemical industry today, used in the production of everything from foods to medicines to plastics and in both the refining of petroleum and the limiting of emissions from gasoline-powered vehicles. Those are just examples, not an exhaustive list of everything catalysts are used for. Dear me, no. She also experimented with photosensitivity.
She described impregnating silk fibers with myriad of silver, which took on a bluish-black color when exposed to the sun, or immersing a piece of silk in silver nitrate and exposing it to the sun where it almost immediately took on a reddish color that darkened until it was almost black. Silk treated the same way but kept in the dark did not go through such a color change. She also described similar results with gold chloride and speculated that the reaction could be used to write letters or words. Various historians of photography have described what she was doing as a photographic process and as an early example of the kinds of experiments that would eventually lead
to daguerreotypes and photographs. We will talk about how Full Hame's work was received after we pause for a sponsor break.
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So we started off this episode by talking about how today we know almost nothing about Elizabeth Fulham. So it might seem like logically her work must have gone unnoticed when she published it in 1794, but it did not. It got some attention, both within and outside the scientific community. The Gentleman's Magazine was first published in London in 1731 and it remained in print for nearly two centuries. It was a popular periodical and it was also the first to use the word "magazine," meaning "storehouse," to describe a published collection of essays and articles and similar texts.
In June of 1795, The Gentleman's Magazine published an anonymous review of Fulham's book. It began, "An essay on combustion by a lady, thought we, could proceed from no other pen than that of Miss Williams or Mrs. Wollstonecraft, and must be a political disquisition disguised. We were agreeably disappointed to find that it relates entirely to a method of making cloths of gold, silver, and other metals by a chemical process." So in that passage, Wollstonecraft is obviously Mary Wollstonecraft. Miss Williams was probably Helen Maria Williams, who was an English writer and social critic
who was connected to Joseph Priestley and to Wollstonecraft, among other 18th-century figures. Apart from what this anonymous writer is implying about women and feminists in this piece, it suggests that Fulham's book was widely read enough to catch an editor's attention and be worth writing about in a popular magazine. In 1796, English physician and chemist Thomas Beddoes wrote about Fulham's book in the Monthly Review. He said it would be better titled "Experiments on the Reduction of Metals in the Ordinary Temperature of the Atmosphere." But he described her discovery
of the need for water to be present in certain reactions as singular, and the overall work as ingenious and, quote, "entitled to respectful consideration." He wrote, quote, "We applaud this lady's persevering ingenuity. We admire her dexterity in carrying on her researches almost without apparatus, and we sincerely sympathize with her on account of that disabling and discouraging narrowness of circumstances of which she so feelingly complains. May she soon meet with a being such as she has heard of on the record of fame but never seen one viz a liberal patron, or else experience such a change in circumstances as shall allow
full scope to her abilities." In 1798, Benjamin Thompson, who later became Count Rumford, published an essay called "An Inquiry Concerning the Chemical Properties That Have Been Attributed to Light" that was in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. In this, he describes the results of an experiment with gold as agreeing perfectly with similar experiments by the, quote, "ingenious and lively Mrs. Fulham." In a footnote in this paper, he went on to say, quote, "It was on reading her book that I was induced to engage in these investigations, and it was by her experiments that most of the foregoing experiments were suggested."
Thompson was a British physicist born in the colony of Massachusetts. And the year after publishing this essay, he and Joseph Banks established the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Other 18th century scientists cited her work as well. It was reviewed favorably in the French, Annales de Chimi, and a German version of her book was published in Gottingen in 1798. But not everybody's response was positive. While Joseph Priestley had apparently encouraged Fulham to publish her work, he later published a point by point rebuttal of her conclusions, saying her description of what we now know
as catalysis was, quote, "as fanciful and fabulous as the story of the phoenix itself." Irish chemist William Higgins sounded sort of petulant when he discussed Fulham's work in 1799. He did call it ingenious, and he said he read it with great pleasure. But in between those two more positive passages, he said, quote, "Had this fair author read my book," and indeed, I suppose she did not, having quoted every other treatise upon the subject, "no doubt she would have been candid enough to do me the justice of accepting
me from the rest of my cooperators in science when she told them they erred for having overlooked this modification of their doctrine, and also when she adduced it as an original idea of her own." He implied that he had had this same discovery regarding the presence of water in chemical reactions first, before she did, although his observations were focused only on the rusting of iron while she was looking at chemical reactions more broadly.
The scientific societies of Europe were not open to women at this point, but Fulham was named a corresponding member of the Philadelphia Chemical Society. Philadelphia chemist Thomas Peter Smith wrote "A Sketch of the Revolutions in Chemistry" in 1798, and in it, he said, quote, "I shall now present you with the last and most pleasing revolution that has occurred in chemistry. Hitherto, we have beheld this science entirely in the hands of men. We are now about to behold women assert their just, though two long-neglected claims of being participators in the pleasures arising from a knowledge of chemistry. Already have Madame Dossier and Mrs. Macaulay established their rights
to criticism and history. Mrs. Fulham has now laid such bold claims to chemistry that we can no longer deny the sex the privilege of participating in this science also. What may we not expect from such an accession of talents? How swiftly will the horizon of knowledge recede before our united labors? And what unbounded pleasure may we not anticipate in treading the paths of science with such companions?" If you don't recognize the names that he dropped in there, Madame Dossier is Anne Dossier, a translator, commentator, and scholar from France, who had died in 1720.
Catherine Macaulay was the first Englishwoman to become a published historian. She died in 1791. An American edition of Fulham's book was published in Philadelphia in 1810, and that characterized it as little known in North America. This edition began with an anonymously-written advertisement which characterized the book's pages as, quote, "assuredly deserving of more attention than they have hitherto received." From there, it read, quote, "Whether it be that the pride of science revolted at the idea of being taught by a female, I know not. But assuredly, the accomplished author of this essay has sufficiently evinced the adequacy of her requirements..."
In the promulgation of opinions subversive of a part of the highly esteemed edifice raised by the efforts of Lavoisier and others, that the work has hitherto remained unknown in this favored land where freedom of inquiry is so sedulously cherished is matter of surprise, especially when it is known that many years past, the author was elected an honorary member of the then-existing Chemical Society of Philadelphia, a distinction founded on the merit of this work. Later, this anonymous editor continued, quote, "I cannot doubt the justice of the opinions deduced by Mrs. Fulham from her numerous and well-conducted experiments. And although
it may be grating to many to suppose a female capable of successfully opposing the opinions of some of our fathers in science, yet reflection will serve to satisfy the mind devoted to truth, that she has certainly thrown a stumbling block of no small magnitude in the way of sentiments we have been taught to consider as sacred." Scientists and researchers on both sides of the Atlantic continued to refer to Fulham's work for decades. English polymath John Herschel is one of the people credited with coining the term photography, and he cited Fulham in his first paper on the subject, which
was published in March of 1839. Chemist George Thomas Fisher Jr. noted her gold chloride experiments in the introduction to his Manipulations in the Scientific Arts, Part Three, Photogenic Manipulation, whose introduction walks through the history of photography. That was published in 1843. It is not clear whether Fulham had a direct influence on the development of photography, but it is clear that people knew about and were talking about her work in the early years of photography's evolution. Over the 19th century, Fulham's work went from being actively discussed in the fields of chemistry and photography to being more of a footnote in textbooks and in works
about the history of those fields. And then those references also largely stopped until her work was rediscovered in the mid 20th century.
It is much easier to access her work today than it was in the 1960s, though. At that time, there were a few copies in archives and special collections in various libraries, which was where people rediscovered it. Today, though, all three versions of her book are available as scans online, either as text or as scans of the actual pages. That includes the original London printing, the German translation, and the 1810 American edition. That is Elizabeth Fulham, and I kind of love her even though we know almost nothing. I'm excited to talk about her on Friday. Me, too. Do you have listener mail in the meantime?
I do have listener mail. This listener mail is from David, and David wrote, "Just listened to your behind the scenes coffee episode where you shifted into typology and the long S." Or, and then David actually put the long S in the email. It's the one that looks kind of like an F. "I recently ran across this exercise in reading a story where the text regresses back through the centuries of English script and thought you'd enjoy it. I admit I hit a wall when the text reached the 1200s, but learned a lot of new script along the way. There's a nice description of the different eras at the end. I have to
admit that my inner 14-year-old went straight to, mind you, moose bites can be pretty nasty." That being from the very comical credits to the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Enjoy. And so this links to a piece called "How Far Back in Time Can You Understand English?" at DeadLanguagesSociety.com. That "Languages" is plural. "I also laughed at your description. Suspicion of shrimp and grits in New England reminded me of the time my brother caused a minor event at the airport when he tried to fly home from his visit here with white lily flower and grits in his luggage. Truly enjoy the show, David."
David was writing from South Carolina, that being why someone was returning home with white lily flower and grits. "P.S. Pet taxes is kitty cat KK taking over my chair, helping with the taxes than her normal repose of snoozing after belly scratches. Very cute kitty cat."
Thank you so much, David, for this email. I saw, I think, the author's thread on Blue Sky, which was similar, like, each piece of it was a different Yeah. mess. And so you could sort of step your way back to read what it would be like earlier and earlier in English. And I think I also got to not being able to understand it anymore at about the 1200s. So if folks want to look for that, again, it is called, How Far Back in Time Can You Understand English at Dead Languages Society dot com. It is a fun little exercise, both to just see, how far back do I understand this? And also to see how much English has evolved Yeah.
over the last approximately thousand-ish and something years.
We've had a whole episode of the show about that fact, a long time ago, about the history of the English language. So, thank you again, David. If you would like to send us a note, we're at [email protected]. You can see our show notes on our website, which is at missinhistory.com. And you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts.
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