Wilhelm Homberg (1653-1715) was one of the most prominent and ambitious chymists of the late seventeenth century. Once admitted to the Parisian Acad�mie Royale des Sciences in 1691, he labored for the rest of his life to establish a sound foundation for chemistry, at once more practical and experimental than the airy speculations of the physicists and more theoretically rigorous than the recipe-based compliations of contemporaneous chemical textbook writers like Nicolas Lemery. His system was to be summarized in a comprehensive textbook of his own. While selected chapters were published serially from 1702 until 1709, the complete work was never published. Following extensive archival explorations, I have collected four versions of the text dating over a twenty-year period. This paper will examine the changes in Homberg's ideas about the constitutive principles of mixed bodies, the difficulties he faced in isolating them, and his remarkable experimental programs that forced him frequently to revise his conclusions as new observational results emerged from his laboratory

Seeking true principles: The evolution of Wilhelm Homberg's <i>Essais de chimie</i>

246th National Meeting (2013)

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Seeking true principles: The evolution of Wilhelm Homberg's Essais de chimie