ambix, Vol. 61 No. 2, May, 2014, 115–140

A Refuge for Inorganic Chemistry: Bunsen’s Heidelberg Laboratory Christine Nawa Universität Regensburg, Germany

Immediately after its opening in 1855, Bunsen’s Heidelberg laboratory became iconic as the most modern and best equipped laboratory in Europe. Although comparatively modest in size, the laboratory’s progressive equipment made it a role model for new construction projects in Germany and beyond. In retrospect, it represents an intermediate stage of development between early teaching facilities, such as Liebig’s laboratory in Giessen, and the new ‘chemistry palaces’ that came into existence with Wöhler’s Göttingen laboratory of 1860. As a ‘transition laboratory,’ Bunsen’s Heidelberg edifice is of particular historical interest. This paper explores the allocation of spaces to specific procedures and audiences within the laboratory, and the hierarchies and professional rites of passage embedded within it. On this basis, it argues that the laboratory in Heidelberg was tailored to Bunsen’s needs in inorganic and physical chemistry and never aimed at a broad-scale representation of chemistry as a whole. On the contrary, it is an example of early specialisation within a chemical laboratory preceding the process of differentiation into chemical sub-disciplines. Finally, it is shown that the relatively small size of this laboratory, and the fact that after ca. 1860 no significant changes were made within the building, are inseparably connected to Bunsen’s views on chemistry teaching.

Introduction Robert Wilhelm Bunsen’s laboratory building still exists today.1 In 2011, the year of Bunsen’s 200th anniversary, it was selected as a “Historische Stätte der 1

For biographical information on Bunsen see: Georg Lockemann, Robert Wilhelm Bunsen: Lebensbild eines deutschen Naturforschers (Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1949); Christine Stock, Robert Wilhelm Bunsens Korrespondenz vor dem Antritt der Heidelberger Professur (1852)—Kritische Edition (Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft, 2007); Heinrich Debus, Erinnerungen an Robert Wilhelm Bunsen und seine wissenschaftlichen Leistungen (Kassel: Fisher, 1901); Henry E. Roscoe, “Bunsen Memorial Lecture,” Journal of the Chemical Society 77 (1900): 513–54; Susan G. Schacher, “Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen,” in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles C. Gillispie, vol. 2 (New York: Scribner, 1970), 586–90.

© Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry 2014

DOI 10.1179/0002698014Z.00000000049

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Chemie.”2 The building was used as a chemical laboratory for more than a hundred years, and its exterior is but little different from the time it was put into operation.3 Although its directors also included eminent chemists such as Victor Meyer (1848– 1897), Theodor Curtius (1857–1928), and Karl Freudenberg (1886–1983), the building remains inseparably connected to its founder and is still referred to as the “Bunsenbau” today. This building is by no means one of “science’s hitherto unexplored spaces.”4 Countless obituaries for Bunsen (1811–1899) and autobiographical memoirs of his former students mention the laboratory as part of larger narratives, while some publications are dedicated to the laboratory itself. A first account of the original laboratory design was provided by its architect Heinrich Lang (1824–1893) in 1858.5 Fifty years later this was followed by a description by Bunsen’s successor, Theodor Curtius, and the chemical institute’s administrative director, Johannes Rissom (1868–1954). Their story of the development of the laboratory is primarily based on the archive files of the University and Curtius’s personal experience, not only as director of the laboratory (1897–1926) but also as a student of Bunsen’s (1878/1879).6 A comparative perspective from contemporary authors is given through the official reports of Charles Adolphe Wurtz (1817–1884), Giorgio Roster (1843–1927), and Edward Robert Festing (1839–1912).7 In 1985, the laboratory was the subject of an art-historical analysis of scientific and medical buildings at the University of Heidelberg.8 Yet, despite the wealth of historical accounts and sources from a Heidelberg perspective, recent historical research has neglected this famous laboratory. Within a German context, research has focused mainly on Liebig’s laboratory in Giessen, while general interest has shifted to laboratories in non-German countries.

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See Christine Nawa, Robert Wilhelm Bunsen und sein Heidelberger Laboratorium. Historische Stätten der Chemie (Frankfurt am Main: GDCh, 2011). Today it houses the Institut für Deutsch als Fremdsprachenphilologie of the University of Heidelberg. David N. Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 16. H[einrich] Lang, ed., Das chemische Laboratorium an der Universität in Heidelberg (Karlsruhe: Chr. Fr. Müller, 1858). Theodor Curtius and Johannes Rissom, eds., Geschichte des Chemischen Universitäts-Laboratoriums seit der Gründung durch Bunsen (Heidelberg: Rochow, 1908). Many of the files (Bauakten) this book builds on are preserved at the Universitätsarchiv Heidelberg (hereafter UA HD) and in the Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe (hereafter GLAK). For wider accessibility, I mainly refer to Curtius’s and Rissom’s book. [Charles] Adolphe Wurtz, Les hautes etudes pratiques dans les universités allemandes (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1870); [Edward Robert] Festing, Report of Visits to Chemical Laboratories at Bonn, Berlin, Leipzig, etc. (London: Eyre & Spottinswoode, 1871); Giorgio Roster, Delle Scienze Sperimentali e in particolare della chimica in Germania (Milano: Guiseppe Civelli, 1872). For an overview over contemporary laboratory descriptions see Eduard Schmitt, “Chemische Institute,” in Handbuch der Architektur, Vierter Theil, 6. Halb-Band, 2. Heft, ed. Josef Durm, Hermann Ende, Eduard Schmitt and Heinrich Wagner (Darmstadt, Arnold Bergsträsser, 1888), 158–275, on 271, 274–75; Eduard Schmitt, “Chemische Institute,” in Handbuch der Architektur, Vierter Teil, 6. Halbband. 2. Heft, ed. Eduard Schmitt, Josef Durm and Hermann Ende, vol. 2 (ergänzte und erweiterte Auflage) (Stuttgart, Alfred Kröner, 1905), 236–382, on 379–82. Bettina Albrecht, Die ehemaligen Naturwissenschaftlichen und Medizinischen Institutsgebäude der Universität Heidelberg im Bereich Brunnengasse, Hauptstraße, Akademiestraße und Plöck (Heidelberg: Univ. Diss., 1985); for a broader contextualisation see Hans-Dieter Nägelke, Hochschulbau im Kaiserreich: Historische Architektur im Prozess bürgerlicher Konsensbildung (Kiel: Ludwig, 2000), esp. 47–49.

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In this paper, I reconnect the historical depictions on Bunsen’s laboratory to the work of historians of science in recent years. Livingstone’s catchphrase, “space matters,”9 and with it the conviction that the analysis of actual workplaces and their surroundings can teach us a lot about scientists and their work, was a point of departure for writing this article. However, Livingstone’s approach is not entirely new. Ever since Hannaway’s and Shapin’s pathbreaking articles on laboratories in early modern England,10 historians of science have paid close attention to the particularities of specific places (and the supposed “placelessness”11 of more recent laboratories), as well as their roles within the production of reliable scientific knowledge.12 Nevertheless, and despite the socio-theoretical framework of these laboratory studies, a comprehensive overview is still lacking,13 with historical research remaining focused on single laboratories. Historians have also investigated architectural and social aspects of laboratories.14 They have asked about their equipment and the ways in which laboratories have been used for teaching and research.15 Recent studies emphasise the role of laboratories within the material culture of chemistry, explore the function and the disposition of these places, and investigate the relationship between laboratories and other sites devoted to the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge.16 However, within the diverse field of history of science, laboratory history plays a minor role. Thus, in 2008, Robert Kohler could still introduce a focus section in Isis with the remark, that “after a productive start … laboratory history is now surprisingly neglected.”17 For a few years now, the Sites of Chemistry project has systematically and successfully worked against this neglect. My aim in this paper is to show how Bunsen’s laboratory was tailored to his research interests, and to his specific stance on teaching.18 To support this argument, I explore the particularities of this building not only in terms of its architectural design, but also with regard to its technical equipment and to the questions of 9 10

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Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place, 5. Owen Hannaway, “Laboratory Design and the Aim of Science: Andreas Libavius versus Tycho Brahe,” Isis 77 (1986): 584–610; Steven Shapin, “The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England,” Isis 79 (1988): 373–404. See Robert E. Kohler, “Place and Practice in Field Biology,” History of Science 40 (2002): 189–201. A good overview over the respective trends in history of science is given by Robert E. Kohler, “Lab History: Reflections,” Isis 99 (2008): 761–68. However, a ‘blind spot’ in this account is that this overview is exclusively based on literature in English. A more complete bibliography on key accounts in laboratory history is given in Ursula Klein, “Die technowissenschaftlichen Laboratorien der Frühen Neuzeit,” NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin 16 (2008): 5–38. For a brief overview see Hardo Braun, Die Entwicklung des Institutsbaus: dargestellt am Beispiel der Kaiser-Wilhelm-/Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (München: Diss. TU München, 1987), 11–42. See, for example, Peter Galison and Emily Thompson, eds., The Architecture of Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). The fundamental text is Shapin, “House of Experiment”; more recently, see Catherine M. Jackson, “Chemistry as the Defining Science: Discipline and Training in Nineteenth-Century Chemical Laboratories,” Endeavour 35 (2011): 55–62. Ursula Klein, “The Laboratory Challenge: Some Revisions of the Standard View of Early Modern Experimentation,” Isis 99 (2008): 769–82; Klein, “Technowissenschaftliche Laboratorien”; Christoph Meinel, “Chemische Laboratorien: Funktion und Disposition,” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 23 (2000): 287–302. Kohler, “Lab History,” 761. This builds on my ongoing doctoral project on Bunsen’s research style and his teaching.

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how it was used, and how conditions for working in this laboratory changed over time. I follow its development from the planning stage to the moment when the laboratory was transferred to Bunsen’s successor, Victor Meyer. I show how the laboratory gained the reputation of being the best in Germany, but I also trace some more critical voices during the later period of its existence, that are usually almost inaudible when the story of Bunsen’s laboratory is told.

Beginnings When Bunsen accepted the chair of chemistry at the University of Heidelberg in 1852, a central aspect of his negotiations with the Grand Duchy’s Ministry of the Interior in Karlsruhe was the demand for a new chemical laboratory.19 The ground was well prepared for Bunsen’s wishes. From the 1840s, the previous holder of the chair, Leopold Gmelin (1788–1853), had repeatedly pointed out the necessity of new laboratories for the physical sciences, and in particular for chemistry.20 While Gmelin did not succeed during his tenure, the government took the precaution of accumulating money for a new laboratory building as soon as he retired. Officials were well aware that “a new laboratory building and a substantial increase in the laboratory’s budget was essential for the appointment (Berufung) of any one of the more famous chemists.”21 Bunsen’s expectations were therefore in perfect accord with, and even exceeded by, those of Baden’s government. Consultation over the site for the new building had already started by October 1852—less than a month after Bunsen’s arrival in Heidelberg. In June 1853, Bunsen and the architect Heinrich Lang (1824–1893),22 who had been commissioned on Bunsen’s recommendation, submitted a plan for the building and an estimate of its cost. The government accepted the plans in August and granted the handsome sum of 69,507 Gulden 23 for the laboratory and its furnishing.24 However, Bunsen’s hope that the construction work would have started by the autumn of 1853 were disappointed. The building site could only be acquired in December,25 and at the beginning of May 1854, construction work finally began.26 19

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For a full account of Bunsen’s demands, see Ministerium des Inneren to Großherzog von Baden and Großherzogliches Staatsministerium (5 May 1852): draft, GLAK 235/3113. See Petra Renate Stumm, Leopold Gmelin (1788–1853)—Leben und Werk eines Heidelberger Chemikers (Heidelberg: Univ. Diss., 2011), 49–51. Ministerium des Inneren to Großherzog von Baden and Großherzogliches Staatsministerium (5 May 1852): draft, GLAK 235/3113. For biographical details on Lang, see Hans Huth, “Lang, Heinrich,” in Historische kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed., Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. 13 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1982), 537; Bernhard Otto Müller, Heinrich Lang: Lehrer und Architekt (Diss. TH Karlsruhe, 1961). 1 Gulden is subdivided into 60 Kreuzer. For a comparison: according to Curtius and Rissom, Geschichte, 15, each of Bunsen’s assistants received a salary of 260 Gulden a year; in 1858 the price for 4 pounds of brown bread (first quality) in Heidelberg was 11 Kreuzer. Heidelberger Tagblatt (18 December 1858), 2. Albrecht, Institutsgebäude, 105, states that the permission was given on 17 August 1853, whereas Curtius and Rissom, Geschichte, 7, say that Bunsen only learned that the required sum had been placed in the budget on 19 October 1853. For a detailed description of the difficulties accompanying the acquisition of the building site, see Curtius and Rissom, Geschichte, 7, 10. Curtius and Rissom, Geschichte, 10.

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figure 1 Dominican monastery, plan of the ground floor. [Anonymous], “Ueber die naturwissenschaftlichen und medizinischen Institute der Universität Heidelberg” Intelligenzblatt IV. Beilage zu Heidelberger Jahrbücher der Literatur 4 (April 1820), 33–36, on tab. 1 (detail). The rooms that belonged to Gmelin’s lab are marked in grey. Bunsen’s lab is marked in black.

Bunsen was clearly eager to see the building project started: the number of chemistry students regularly exceeded the capacity of the laboratory in the old Dominican monastery, which had housed the chemical laboratory since 1818 and which also served Bunsen as an intermediate workspace (Figure 1).27 As he put it: “To work with 30 students in a space that was intended for 20, has personal and practical inadequacies.”28 Although the number of workbenches had been regularly increased as an interim measure, the situation worsened as the laboratory became more and more cramped. In his last semester in the monastery, Bunsen had thirty-six workbenches at his disposal, with forty-two practitioners working in the laboratory.29 27

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Curtius and Rissom, Geschichte, 7. Bunsen’s laboratory, however, was located in the former rooms of the anatomical institute (which moved out of the monastery in 1849) and not in Gmelin’s old laboratory on the same floor (Fig. 1). Curtius and Rissom, Geschichte, 7. Bunsen to Henke (27 October 1854): Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek (hereafter UB HD), Heid. Hs. 2741, I.

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The cooperation between Bunsen and Lang proved to be very productive. Both had been occupied with planning chemical laboratories immediately before their joint project: Bunsen with a new chemical laboratory at the University of Breslau that was just about to be finished when he left for Heidelberg, and Lang with the new chemical laboratory of the Polytechnic School in Karlsruhe constructed in 1850—the very first project of the twenty-seven-year-old architect.30 Prior to this, Lang and Carl Weltzien (1813–1870), professor of chemistry in Karlsruhe, had made the then usual tour of recently built and newly equipped laboratories in Darmstadt, Wiesbaden, Frankfurt, Giessen, Marburg, and Göttingen, in order to learn about the latest achievements in laboratory design and equipment.31 News of each step in the development of the laboratory spread quickly—and Bunsen contributed his share to it. At the beginning of November 1853, he reported to the physiologist Carl Ludwig (1816–1895) in Vienna that the Grand Duke of Baden had granted him 70,000 Gulden and that Bunsen hoped to be able to see construction work start in the spring of 1854.32 In January 1854, the Deutsche Universitätszeitung reported that “all doubts are removed about the construction of a new chemical laboratory in Heidelberg.”33 Students from different nations also carried the news about the newly emerging laboratory out into the world: for instance George Ronalds (b. ca. 1833) of New York. He enrolled in Heidelberg in the summer of 1853 and thus witnessed events from a prime position. He wrote to his former teacher James Curtis Booth (1810–1888) in Philadelphia: Here [in Heidelberg] I am attending Bunson’s [sic] Lectures and Jolly’s Physicks and Technology as well as working in B’s laboratory. I find him a very nice man and like him very much. He is building a laboratory here the dimensions of which are 190 feet long by 50 or so feet wide. It will contain rooms of the commencing students and advanced students, a lecture room, private laboratory and conveniences.34

When construction work finally started, it took less than a year until the first part of the new building was finished. In the summer semester of 1855, the laboratory and the rooms for the assistants were ready for use, and in September Bunsen could move into his apartment. The completion of the building was a milestone in the emancipation of the physical sciences at the University of Heidelberg. It was the first laboratory confined to one single discipline that was erected as such, and that was not housed in a 30

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For the laboratory in Karlsruhe see Carl Weltzien and Heinrich Lang, eds., Das chemische Laboratorium an der Grossherzogl[ich] Polytechnischen Schule zu Carlsruhe (Karlsruhe: Müller, 1853); Roster, Delle Scienze Sperimentali, 177–80. Müller, Heinrich Lang, 76. Bunsen to Carl Ludwig (6 November 1853): Stephanie Brigitte Hoß-Hitzel, “Es lebt sich himmlisch in Heidelberg”: Robert Wilhelm Bunsen und seine Korrespondenz (Heidelberg: Univ. Diss., 2003), 130, who gives the sum in Taler instead of Gulden. Akademische Monatsschrift (Deutsche Universitätszeitung), VI. Jahrgang 1854, Januarheft, 27. Geo[rge] L. Ronalds to James Curtis Booth (24 June 1854): Philadelphia, Archives of the Chemical Heritage Foundation (hereafter CHF Archives), Papers of James C. Booth, Series I: Correspondences, 1820s–1850s, 2005.070.001 Box 1 of 14.

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refurbished building originally devoted to other purposes.35 This demonstrated an absolute re-evaluation of chemistry. Prior to that, chemistry had shared the old monastery with a variety of physical sciences and medical facilities, among them physics, botany, and anatomy. This was in line with the government’s objective of uniting the medical and physical sciences in one place—and preferably in one building. In the mid-1840s, plans appeared to replace the increasingly dilapidated monastery with a new building for chemistry, mineralogy, and physics. When the University of Heidelberg first offered Bunsen a professorship including a new laboratory, the government still had this project with an estimated cost of 80,000 Gulden in mind.36 Bunsen, however, insisted on a separate building for chemistry—and the ministry gave its consent, although the first estimate alone came close to 70,000 Gulden, and the final building cost amounted to almost 77,000 Gulden. In fact, between 1850 and 1860, 97.1 per cent of funds for new buildings at the University of Heidelberg were devoted to chemistry.37 As Peter Borscheid has pointed out, the fulfilment of Bunsen’s wishes and conditions is not attributable to the fact that he negotiated skilfully, but rather to the fact that the government was already prepared to offer considerable support to chemistry in its own interest.38 In his influential and widely discussed thesis, Borscheid interpreted Baden’s willingness to invest in chemistry after the Revolution of 1848/1849 as a direct result of the poor food situation of the population. As many students as possible should receive thorough training in the ‘new sciences,’ to convert the new insights of agricultural chemistry into a remedy for the economic hardship that afflicted the population.39 This argument has since been qualified by other historians, who point out that Baden’s movement into science had already begun in the 1830s.40 Accordingly, they see the Revolution of 1848/1849 more as a catalyst than as the starting point for Baden’s efforts regarding the physical sciences. With reference to the works of Joseph Ben David, Arleen Tuchman highlights that, training in the exact method of the experimental sciences received institutional support in the German university system … because it had come to signify the kind of ‘cultural education’ (geistige Bildung) desired by a society trying to deal with the problems of a changing and growing economy.41

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The construction of a building for anatomy and zoology, finished in 1849, marked the new willingness of the state to invest in infrastructure at the University of Heidelberg. The new chemical laboratory of the Polytechnic School in Karlsruhe (1850) testifies to the broader scope of Baden’s efforts. Peter Borscheid, Naturwissenschaft, Staat und Industrie in Baden (1848–1914) (Stuttgart: Klett, 1976), 64; Arleen M. Tuchman, Science, Medicine and the State in Germany: The Case of Baden, 1850–1871 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 102. Eike Wolgast, Die Universität Heidelberg 1386–1986 (Berlin: Springer, 1986), 103. According to Borscheid, Naturwissenschaft, Staat und Industrie in Baden, 60, this equals a sum of 87,107 Gulden. For Bunsen’s lack of enthusiasm in negotiation, see also A. Vilmar to [unnamed] (28 August 1850): extracts given in Stock, Robert Wilhelm Bunsens Korrespondenz, 453, footnote 3. See Borscheid, Naturwissenschaft, Staat und Industrie in Baden, 208, 62. Tuchman, Science, Medicine and the State in Germany, 104–05. Tuchman, Science, Medicine and the State in Germany, 7.

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In addition, Frank James emphasises that the “cultural rivalry between the German States was obvious to those like Bunsen and Helmholtz” so that they “could manipulate the resulting competition between the states to secure high salaries and new buildings,” thus gaining and enjoying cultural prestige.42 Apparently, the ministry of Baden determined to respond to the struggle for cultural hegemony with other German states by institutionalising the physical sciences, and particularly chemistry, at Heidelberg. This plan paid off: Bunsen’s laboratory stole the crown from Prussia’s new laboratory in Breslau, and was almost twice as expensive as Liebig’s in Bavaria.43 Both Bunsen’s prominence and his reputation for teaching in Germany’s best chemical laboratory attracted students (and with them, money) from all over the world. Moreover, Bunsen helped to bring other eminent scientists to Heidelberg, starting with Gustav Kirchhoff (1824–1887) and Hermann Helmholtz (1821–1894), which perpetuated this effect.44 Bunsen clearly profited from these developments and his laboratory became a forerunner in terms of the (spatial) differentiation of the physical sciences in Heidelberg. It stood for a new appreciation of chemistry as a discipline and for its increasing economic importance.45 The downside was that the high cost of this building presumably postponed the erection of new laboratories for other sciences, namely for physics and mineralogy.

The laboratory Bunsen’s laboratory was located in the Vorstadt, an expanding quarter in the west of the old city centre and close to the old monastery (Figure 2). The completed building was a perfect symbiosis between Lang’s suggestions, based on his experiences in Karlsruhe, and Bunsen’s views on and needs for doing chemistry. Although the two buildings had no external similarities, they had groups of rooms with similar functions, and Lang himself stated that “regarding the fitting-out” the Karlsruhe laboratory “served as an example” for the Heidelberg laboratory.46 A closer comparison gives the impression of the two laboratories as prototype and finished product.47 42

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Frank A. J. L. James, “Science as Cultural Ornament: Bunsen, Kirchhoff and Helmholtz in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Baden,” Ambix 42 (1995): 1–9, on 7. The total cost for Liebig’s new laboratory was 40,000 Gulden: August von Voit and Justus von Liebig, Das chemische Laboratorium der königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in München (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1859), 43. The total cost for Bunsen’s laboratory was more than 76,500 Gulden: Curtius and Rissom, Geschichte, 14. However, Liebig’s new laboratory served a different purpose to Bunsen’s, for in Munich Liebig placed the emphasis on a large and representative lecture theatre and gave up laboratory teaching. According to William H. Brock, Justus von Liebig: The Chemical Gatekeeper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 293, “[t]his auditorium was to be the model of all German university lecture theatres built from the 1860s onwards.” See Christa Jungnickel and Russell McCormmach, “Kirchhoff and Helmholtz at Heidelberg: Relations of Physics to Chemistry,” in Intellectual Mastery of Nature: Theoretical Physics from Ohm to Einstein, vol. 1, ed. C. Jungnickel and R. McCormmach (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 285–310. On Baden’s efforts in boosting the physical sciences and in particular chemistry see Reinhardt Riese, Die Hochschule auf dem Weg zum wissenschaftlichen Großbetrieb: Die Universität Heidelberg und das badische Hochschulwesen, 1860–1914 (Stuttgart: Klett, 1977). Lang, Das chemische Laboratorium, Vorwort. For a comparison of the two laboratories see Müller, Heinrich Lang, 76–81.

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figure 2 Detail from Führer durch Heidelberg und seine Umgebungen, 5th ed. (Heidelberg, 1870). The ‘u’ marks the position of the former Dominican monastery and later on of the anatomy/zoology and the Friedrichsbau; ‘w’ marks Bunsen’s laboratory; ‘o’ the old university building. The physical layout of the buildings does not correspond to their forms on the map.

Bunsen’s new laboratory consisted of a single-storey central part and two two-storey wings. The interior division of the building is influenced both by the physical layout and by considerations in terms of urban development. Bunsen’s laboratory abutted onto open space to the north and east, onto the Akademiestraße in the west, and onto the Wredeplatz (today’s Friedrich-Ebert-Platz) in the south. The latter had actually been Bunsen’s preferred spot for the laboratory, but the town had declared that this site was never to be built on—and it is still an open space today. Accordingly, the sides of the building facing the Wredeplatz and the Akademiestraße are accentuated, whereas the two other sides are invisible from the street and hence more reticently designed. For instance, the side facing the Wredeplatz has a protruding entrance hall and demonstrates perfect symmetry, whereas the symmetry of the long side is unbalanced, dropping away towards the north (Figure 3). The origin of this laboratory design, a roughly L-shaped building, is attributed to Liebig’s 1839 laboratory in Giessen. It is also characteristic of the laboratories in Leipzig (1843), Karlsruhe (1850), Breslau (1852), Munich (1852), Königsberg (1857), Greifswald (1861/1862), Halle (1863), Aachen (1864/1865), and others.48 This form fundamentally changed only with the laboratories in Bonn (1868) and Berlin (1869). Bunsen’s building was divided into several functional groups. The subdivision is organised both horizontally and vertically, as can be seen in the longitudinal

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According to H. Fröbel, “Bau und Einrichtung der chemischen Laboratorien,” Centralblatt der Bauverwaltung 1882, no. 17: 141–43; no. 18, 149–51; no. 19, 161–63; no. 21, 181–82; no. 22, 185–88; and no. 23, 197–98, on 141. See also Schmitt, “Chemische Institute” (1888), 159; Schmitt, “Chemische Institute” (1905), 237.

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figure 3 Bunsen’s laboratory. Detail from the frontispiece of Lang, Das chemische Laboratorium (1858).

figure 4 Longitudinal section. Detail from Lang, Das chemische Laboratorium (1858), tab. III.

section of the building (Figure 4), which is also mirrored in the exterior view (Figure 5). Beginning with the horizontal divisions, the whole building had a basement floor, containing supply rooms.49 The ground floor was first and foremost devoted to doing chemistry. The southern and northern wings also had a first floor, which was reserved as living space. Like many other chemical laboratories from the second half of the nineteenth century, Bunsen’s laboratory also included housing for the laboratory’s director, his assistants, and a servant. This presented some obvious dangers, but offered the advantage of being right on the scene when prolonged experiments were performed that required repeated supervision even during the night. Pointing to other laboratories such as Göttingen, Leipzig, Berlin,

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Lang, Das chemische Laboratorium, 5, hints that there was an additional room in the basement “for the preparation of chemical substances that require a room which is detached from the other laboratories.”

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figure 5 Side view (from the west) with marking of the functional groups. Detail from Lang, Das chemische Laboratorium (1858), tab. II.

and Breslau that offered this amenity, Bunsen insisted on the director’s apartment being integrated into the building.50 The three vertical divisions show not only a functional, but also a hierarchical order. All three parts could be accessed separately, but were also interconnected. The southern wing faced the Wredeplatz and held the more prestigious rooms. It contained the lecture hall and director’s apartment, the latter taking up the whole upper floor, and also some rooms on the ground floor separated from the teaching facilities. This part of the building was accessible from the Wredeplatz.51 It had high windows on both levels and was lavishly designed. The bipartite entrance hall worked as a room-divider, separating public and private space. It had two entrances, walled off from each other. On the left-hand side the students entered the lecture hall, while on the right-hand side Bunsen entered his apartment (Figure 6).52 The middle section of the building contained the main laboratory. Its importance, and with it the importance of practical work, was emphasised by the demonstrative placement of the laboratory’s main entrance in the middle of this section. The entrance was accentuated by a central avant-corps, including a dedication plaque for the benefactor at the point usually occupied by a tympanum in sacred buildings. The centre of the edifice held separate laboratories for beginners, for advanced students, and for the director of the laboratory. Separate from the main laboratory, to keep the contents safe from corrosive vapours, were a balance room that also contained the department’s reference books, a room for physical and chemical instruments, and a room for storing chemicals that also served as a preparation room for the lecture—“subsidiäre Funktionsräume” in Meinel’s words.53 An additional office for the director was probably transformed into a room for spectroscopic

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See Bunsen to Friedrich Fröhlich (27 April 1852), as summarised in Stock, Robert Wilhelm Bunsens Korrespondenz, 535. In addition, it had a servants’ entrance on the east side of the south wing. It consisted of nine rooms, plus kitchen, larder, and a toilet. Bathrooms only became commonplace equipment for bourgeois households in the 1870s. For a comparison, see the description of Liebig’s new house in Munich as described in Brock, Justus von Liebig, 294. Meinel, “Chemische Laboratorien,” 291.

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figure 6 Floor plan of the ground floor. Detail from Curtius and Rissom, Geschichte (1908), 11.

investigations later on.54 The attic over the middle section was used for storing glassware and was accessible from the first floor of the northern wing, and also from Bunsen’s apartment. The northern wing lacks the representative character of its southern counterpart. This segment of the building is one axis shorter than the southern wing, and designed without ostentation. External access is only provided through the yard. The ground floor of the northern wing contained a number of smaller working rooms devoted to special purposes, such as gas analysis and electrochemical experiments, an open hall that was used to conduct experiments with poisonous substances, and a small laboratory (called “Stink-Zimmer”55) for operations that were not allowed in the larger laboratories (because of their obtrusive smell, risk of explosions, etc.). Finally, it contained a workshop that included a workbench, a glassblower’s table, and a sink, as well as two storage rooms. The first floor contained rooms for the assistants and a chamber for the laboratory’s servant. The height of the second floor, and with it the height of the windows, is lower than that of the southern wing—as though indicating the lower rank of its inhabitants. In addition, the window design differs from that of any window on the two ‘display’ sides of the building, and is more modest. At the same time, the assistants came off badly with regard to the positioning of the living space in relation to the laboratory rooms. The principle of separating living spaces as far as possible from the rooms confined to practical laboratory work was applied more in the case of the director’s apartment. The latter was located above from and next to the lecture hall, which was in use for only a couple of hours per day, and was also separated from the main laboratory rooms by Bunsen’s office, the preparations room, 54

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Compare LeRoy Wiley McCay, “My Student Days in Germany,” Journal of Chemical Education 7 (1930): 1081–99, on 1097–98. Henry Carrington Bolton, “Reminiscences of Bunsen and the Heidelberg Laboratory, 1863–1865,” Science 10 (1899): 865–70, on 868.

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and the rooms for instruments and scales. While the assistants’ rooms were partly separated from the main laboratory by a storeroom and a corridor, they were located directly above the Stink-Zimmer. Presumably, the planners supposed that the assistants would accept this inconvenience since they would not stay in their positions, and hence in their accommodation, for too long.

Bunsen’s personal laboratory history For every single room (or group of rooms) there is a story to be told as to how it relates to Bunsen’s fields of research, his stance towards teaching, and his experience of working in previous laboratories. The site of Bunsen’s own training and first professional experience, Friedrich Stromeyer’s (1776–1835) laboratory at the University of Göttingen (1828–1830, 1834–1836), disposed of separate space for practical training of students, with a separate room for delicate instruments, and with movable ovens.56 These were features which Bunsen greatly missed when he moved to the poorly equipped rooms at the industrial school (Gewerbeschule) in Kassel (1836– 1839). There, space was so limited that the students experimented not only in the actual laboratory but also in the schoolyard, the smelting furnace room, and even on landings. The ventilation was so bad that corrosive fumes damaged the physical instruments even though they were stored in a different room.57 Not least, Bunsen suffered a great deal from the lack of ventilation when he performed his noxious and toxic experiments with cacodyl.58 In Marburg, where he moved in 1839 into Ferdinand Wurzer’s (1765–1844) old laboratory in the former Deutschordenshaus, Bunsen experienced better conditions.59 However, in the long term, the thirteenthcentury building could not fulfil the increasing demands of a nineteenth-century chemical laboratory. Finally, the laboratory in Breslau had allegedly not been altered since 1820, or used since 1833.60 It is therefore not surprising that Bunsen insisted on new laboratory buildings when he was called to Breslau and then to Heidelberg, and that good ventilation and separate rooms for operations using toxic or odorous substances were of central concern for him. 56

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This laboratory was in a particular and privileged position, as it had originally been built as a chemical laboratory in 1783, and had repeatedly been extended and refurbished since that time. For the refurbishing under Stromeyer see Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen 73/74 (1810), 721–30. Supplementary accounts can be found in Friedrich Saalfeld, Johann Stephan Pütters Versuch einer academischen Gelehrten-Geschichte von der Georg-Augustus-Universität zu Göttingen Theil 3: Von 1788–1820 (Hanover: Helwing, 1820), 447–53; and Georg Heinrich Oesterley, Johann Stephan Pütters Versuch einer academischen Gelehrten-Geschichte von der Georg-Augustus-Universität zu Göttingen Theil 4: Von 1820 bis zur ersten Säcularfeier der Universität im Jahre 1837 (Göttingen: Vandenhoek, 1838), 150–53. Bunsen to Kurfürstliche Direktion der Höheren Gewerbeschule (11 June 1837): in Stock, Robert Wilhelm Bunsens Korrespondenz, 152–56. See Debus, Erinnerungen an Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, 6–7. For details on Bunsen’s laboratory in Marburg see Christoph Meinel, Die Chemie an der Universität Marburg seit Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts: Ein Beitrag zu ihrer Entwicklung als Hochschulfach (Marburg: Elwert, 1978), 16–31. Julius Schiff, “Das erste chemische Institut der Universität Breslau,” Archiv für die Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik 9 (1920/1922): 29–38, on 35; Arnt Heilmann, “Robert Wilhelm Bunsen in Breslau (1851– 1852): Bunsens Breslauer Zeit im Spiegel der Korrespondenz mit Ernst Henke,” Würzburger medizinhistorische Mitteilungen 19 (2000): 239–54.

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Compared to the sites of Bunsen’s early career, his new premises in Heidelberg were not only much more spacious, but could also boast of what was, for the time, an impressive number of rooms devoted to specific functions. These specialpurpose laboratories were more than tools for everyday use; they were central to Bunsen’s research interests at the time when the laboratory was built. The prime example is a room for gas analysis. For decades, Bunsen was among the leading experts in gas analyses, with publications in this field spanning the period from 1838 to 1877.61 When the laboratory was built, he was on his way to publishing the results and methods of previous works in his famous compendium Gasometry.62 Likewise, the electrochemical room reflects another of Bunsen’s research foci. This room was a true novelty and speciality that could neither be found in Karlsruhe nor in Munich. Bunsen had entered the field of electrochemistry in the early 1840s, and when the Heidelberg laboratory was planned he had just worked on the electrolytic preparation of alkaline and alkaline earth metals, as well as chromium.63 In contrast with Liebig, who became increasingly weary of teaching and therefore declined a call to Heidelberg in 1851, Bunsen had strong interests in both research and teaching. He made the lecture hall his stage, and was a gifted speaker, experimenter, and performer.64 During the hours of practical training he was present at all times, and was very approachable when students had questions or needed advice. It was thus important to him to have excellent teaching facilities at his disposal. The inclusion of the workshop, and the fact that it had been assigned a separate room, mirror Bunsen’s delight and dexterity in inventing and improving apparatus, and his skills as a glassblower. Bunsen’s laboratory was expensive, state-of-the-art, and strongly targeted towards his research interests. Newly emerging branches of chemistry that were not among Bunsen’s specialities, such as organic and physiological chemistry, were not accounted for. Thus, the building that emerged in Heidelberg in 1855 does not represent chemistry as a whole, but instead reveals an early specialisation towards analytical and physical chemistry—thus reflecting the internal differentiation of chemistry. This specialisation was only possible in the Heidelberg context, as the University had maintained a second Ordinariat (for pharmaceutical, organic, and physiological chemistry, as well as toxicology) in the medical faculty since 1853, and with it a second laboratory. However, this professorship was by

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Compare the list of Bunsen’s publications as given in Lockemann, Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, 231–38. Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, Gasometrische Methoden (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1857); Bunsen, Gasometry: Comprising the Leading Physical and Chemical Properties of Gases, trans. Henry E. Roscoe (London: Walton and Maberly, 1857). Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, “Darstellung des Magnesiums auf electrolytischem Wege,” Annalen der Chemie und Pharmacie 82 (1852): 137–45; Bunsen, “Ueber die Darstellung von metallischem Chrom auf galvanischem Wege,” Annalen der Physik und Chemie 91 (1854): 619–25; Bunsen, “Notiz über die elektrolytische Gewinnung der Erdund Alkalimetalle,” Annalen der Physik und Chemie 92 (1854): 648–51. See, for example, Debus, Erinnerungen an Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, 11; John Tyndall, New Fragments (New York: Appleton, 1892), 238.

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no means as well endowed as Bunsen’s. It was held by Wilhelm Delffs (1812–1894), who basically had to equip the laboratory at his own expense.65 Probably more critical is the somewhat conservative assessment regarding the size of the teaching laboratories, which quickly became too small—a fate that Bunsen’s laboratory shared with many others. From 1855 to 1860, the number of workspaces had been gradually increased from fifty to sixty until the available space was fully utilised.66 Bunsen and Lang may have underestimated the rapid growth of student numbers in chemistry, or their original calculation may have been limited by considerations regarding the estimated cost. It is conceivable, though, that these external factors may have been augmented by Bunsen’s basic attitude to teaching, suggesting that Bunsen did not fully adapt to the transition from practical training of a small number of students around an acknowledged master, to laboratory training as an “effective vehicle for educating en masse,” as Robert Kohler puts it.67 Bunsen obviously considered the education of young chemists a matter for the ‘boss.’ At the same time, he was not willing to accept a second Ordinarius, an außerordentlichen Professor, or even a Privatdozent in his laboratory. Bunsen may well have considered fifty to sixty students to be the largest possible number who could be supervised together with two (later three) assistants.68 It may have been for this reason that Bunsen did not use a call to Berlin to succeed Eilhard Mitscherlich (1794–1863) as grounds for negotiating an expansion and enhancement of his Heidelberg laboratory, as might have been expected. Instead, he used it to create a third full professorship in chemistry for Hermann Kopp (1817– 1892), who taught theoretical chemistry and crystallography. That move placed the University of Heidelberg in the unique and extraordinary position of having three specialised full professors of chemistry as early as 1864—and, since Kopp was given a simple laboratory for his use,69 of having three chemical laboratories.

The equipment of the laboratory Bunsen’s laboratory was certainly not revolutionary in size. Although it was slightly larger than the laboratory in Karlsruhe, it by no means exceeded the conventional dimensions of laboratories, as did those in Bonn and Berlin about a decade later. It was the quality of the equipment that served as a model. The differentiation of 65

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Delffs’ lab was first located in Gmelin’s and than in Bunsen’s laboratory in the Dominican monastery. For an interim period it moved into the Haus zum Riesen and was finally assigned rooms in the Friedrichsbau, a joint building for the physical sciences and physiology, which replaced the monastery in 1863. Rudolf Stefan Ross, “Der Chemiker Wilhelm Delffs und die Institutionalisierung der Medizinischen Chemie an der Universität Heidelberg im 19. Jahrhundert,” Würzburger medizinhistorische Mitteilungen 16 (1997): 467–85. Bunsen to Großherzogliche Bau- und Oeconomie-Commission (9 December 1855): UA HD G II 92/1; Borscheid, Naturwissenschaft, Staat und Industrie in Baden, 64; Curtius and Rissom, Geschichte, 14. Kohler, “Lab History,” 761. As a rule, Bunsen’s assistants were chemists who had just received their doctorates and had not yet acquired a permission to teach on their own (venia legendi). It was a typical ‘springboard’ position for an academic career. This only consisted of a lecture hall and a small study in the servants’ house in the garden of the former Dominican monastery. In 1875, Kopp was assigned some of the rooms in the Friedrichsbau formerly occupied by the physiological institute. Curtius and Rissom, Geschichte, 23.

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the rooms and the technical equipment behind the walls of Bunsen’s laboratory soon became the standard for chemical laboratories. It is worthwhile, therefore, to examine the equipment more closely.70 The lecture hall in the southern wing was furnished with ascending tiers (ten rows with eleven seats each) allowing a good view of the experimental setups. Lighting was provided by two windows on the south and three windows on the east side of the room, while an iron oven served as heating. The huge experimental table was equipped with connections for gas, water and wastewater, electricity,71 and a bench-mounted fume cupboard. A passageway between the lecture hall and a preparation room contained a hearth for boiling and evaporating substances, and could be hidden behind a large blackboard. The mid-section of the building comprised the core of the laboratory. The large laboratory, with twenty-eight workspaces for advanced students, was situated in an accessible position, directly across from the main entrance. To the south it bordered on Bunsen’s private laboratory. The two rooms were connected by a glass door, allowing Bunsen to observe the advanced students from his lab, a situation that evokes Liebig’s peephole at Giessen.72 To the east, the laboratory for advanced students was connected with the slightly smaller laboratory for up to twenty-two beginners. While the lighting situation was better in the bigger laboratory—it had seven windows and was less deep than the smaller lab, which only had four windows—the equipment in individual work places was the same, as were the larger pieces of apparatus for common use. The workbenches were made of oak, and each place had some storage space for the student (one drawer and a lockable cupboard) and was equipped with gas and with a small vent. Each two places shared a cupboard for chemicals and a tap for fresh water over a porcelain funnel that led to an oak barrel for wastewater. All places could also be supplied with electricity (Figure 7). The two laboratories were equipped with air heating. They were connected through a glass door, and the partition between them consisted mainly of windows rather than solid walls. This partition contained equipment for common use on each side, including stone workbenches, ovens with hot plates, and smelting furnaces, as well as a shared sand bath accessible from both sides. In addition, each laboratory was equipped with a large sink, a large still, and an evaporating apparatus. The small laboratory had a supplementary small fume cupboard for common use. Bunsen’s private office was equipped with four well-lit workbenches, a washbasin, two evaporating apparatus, and some large tables for using bigger instruments. Unlike the situation in Giessen, not only did Bunsen have a good overview of his 70

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This section is based on the description in Lang, Das chemische Laboratorium. I have greatly profited from the insights given in Meinel, “Chemische Laboratorien.” For details of the laboratory’s power supply, see below. Later on, a large battery (Tauchbatterie) provided additional electricity when necessary. Compare the description in Meinel, “Chemische Laboratorien,” 293.

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figure 7 Workbench with connections for water, gas, and electricity. Detail from Lang, Das chemische Laboratorium (1858), tab. IV.

students, but he was also easily available to them. With Christoph Meinel, we can read the laboratory as a “symbolic space that structures social relationships and ways of knowledge in chemistry.”73 As the laboratory adjacent to Bunsen’s private lab was meant to serve for advanced learners, the spatial arrangement obviously mirrored an order of knowledge and hierarchical structures at the same time. Those who accumulated more knowledge were closer to the director’s office; the workbenches directly next to Bunsen’s office were allegedly taken by his assistants. The teaching programme underlined this spatial hierarchy, with complete beginners instructed by an assistant. After the first steps, Bunsen took over, and as the students progressed they gained access to all parts of the laboratory. The highlight was the introduction to gas analysis. This room was almost always locked to

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Meinel, “Chemische Laboratorien,” 287.

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keep the experimental conditions unaltered, and the way in which Bunsen granted and limited access to this space sometimes gained the quality of an initiation rite. The equipment in this room was superb, and revealed the true mastery of its planners. It was located at the northern end of the building. One of the windows facing east could be closed by sliding shutters embedded into the walls in order to adjust the brightness of the room. The work benches and the floor were constructed in a way that would funnel spilled mercury to a single point. It was also the only room in the whole building without provision for heating. The ice cellar was located beneath it, and the walls were partly hollow to keep the temperature as constant as possible. The adjoining electrochemical room was not part of the teaching programme. It served for research and to provide a power supply for the single workspaces. For in situ investigations, it was equipped with some wooden and stone workbenches and a kiln. The speciality was a cupboard containing galvanic cells that served as a source for electric energy for the whole institute. In this room, the water and gas pipes that were isolated from one another throughout the rest of the building were laid open, and each could be connected to one pole of the galvanic cells. When the water tap and the gas tap were connected at one of the workplaces or in the lecture hall, the electric circuit was closed. The description of these two rooms gives an idea of what really drove up the costs for the building, namely its distinctive use of equipment that was hidden behind the walls. In fact, the walls and the floor of the building were “so packed with pipes” that Lang asked the ministry to be informed about and involved with future alterations, since “an inexperienced hand could ruin a lot.”74 The detailed descriptions and drawings of fume hoods, water and gas pipes, the ventilation system, and a costly water reservoir in Lang’s coloured folio volume suggest that he and Bunsen were very conscious—and proud—of their innovations in technical equipment and the novelty of the building. It was probably in this area (‘building technology’ in modern parlance) where Lang’s and Bunsen’s combined expertise had the greatest synergetic effects. As this example shows, Sophie Forgan’s claim that in building laboratories “the client’s expertise was generally superior to that of the architect” cannot easily be transferred from the British to the German context.75 What first captured the attention of the laboratory’s visitors and users were probably the visible facilities at the individual workspaces, which offered unprecedented comfort in experimenting. This equipment is likewise pictured in great detail in Lang’s book, and accords perfectly with Bunsen’s reputation as the inventor of many useful apparatus. Special emphasis is given to the construction of the workbenches; to the connections for gas, water, and electricity; to Bunsen’s newly 74

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Lang to Ministerium des Innern (26 November 1855): Albrecht, Institutsgebäude, 220–22, on 222; later Lang even included a description of the laboratory’s ventilation system as an example in his Allgemeine Bau-ConstructionsLehre, mit besonderer Beziehung auf das Hochbauwesen. IV. Theil (Stuttgart: Hoffmann, 1863), 168. Sophie Forgan, “Bricks and Bones: Architecture and Science in Victorian Britain,” in The Architecture of Science, eds. Galison and Thompson, 181–208, on 190.

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developed gas burners and a test tube rack; as well as to the glass blower’s table in the workshop and to a fume hood in the Stink-Zimmer. Although hierarchical by design and by organisation of training, there were also elements of equality (or arguably equalisation) in Bunsen’s laboratory. All students had to complete the same basic training programme on first entering the laboratory,76 and, apart from the lighting conditions, all their workspaces were equipped in the same way. The modality of usage of the institute’s resources (including gas and water), however, added an element of true equality. The rules for working in the laboratory were the same for everyone alike: students, assistants, and even Bunsen himself.77

Transient fame Due to the outstanding equipment and Bunsen’s excellent scientific reputation, the laboratory rapidly gained international attention. As already mentioned, the laboratory was the subject of discussion in private letters and newspapers even before it was completed. Upon completion, the laboratory quickly developed a reputation as “new and the best in Germany”—as even the New York Tribune noted.78 Much information travelled by letters and by word of mouth. And it is likely that, again, Bunsen himself helped to spread the news. He had certainly done so previously, while the new laboratory in Breslau was in the process of development. At that time, he kept his colleagues both within and outside Germany updated on the progress of its planning and construction.79 In the autumn of 1851, for example, he had reported to Henri-Victor Regnault (1810–1870) in Paris that “a splendid laboratory is being built for me [in Breslau], worth 80,000 Francs and equipped with a scientific budget of another 5,000 Francs, thus, it may now probably be the richest one in Germany.”80 In June 1852, shortly before his departure from Breslau, he informed Friedrich Wöhler (1800–1882) about the completion of the “really magnificent laboratory.”81 Clearly, laboratories were also indicators of scientific and social standing, then as now. An early, very enthusiastic testimony to the reputation of the Heidelberg laboratory by a third party was given by the Philadelphian James Francis Magee (1834–1903). In letters to his family from the period of his study in Germany, Magee repeatedly praised the quality of Bunsen’s laboratory, describing it as the 76

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Theodor Curtius, Robert Bunsen als Lehrer in Heidelberg (Heidelberg: Hörning, 1906), 11; McCay, “My Student Days in Germany,” on 1095. See Jean L. Scurlock, “Rules for Working in Bunsen’s Laboratory,” Journal of Chemical Education 55 (1978): 581; Henry E. Roscoe, The Life and Experiences of Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe (London: Macmillan, 1906), on 87. [Anonymous], “Foreign Chemical Laboratories. From a Private Letter of an American Student to a Correspondent in the City,” New York Tribune (6 March 1857): 3. Unfortunately, no such letters of Bunsen’s with regard to his Heidelberg laboratory are preserved. Bunsen to Henri-Victor Regnault (7 September 1851): in Stock, Robert Wilhelm Bunsens Korrespondenz, 522–23, on 522. Bunsen to Wöhler (21 June 1852): Göttingen, Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. Ms. F. Wöhler 26,1; Stock, Robert Wilhelm Bunsens Korrespondenz, 542, suggests 2 June 1852 as an alternative date for the letter.

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“best” and as “the finest laboratory in Europe.”82 He explicitly ascribed this to its circumstance in having “so many convenient arrangements that work cannot only be done quicker, but without so much trouble, and more neatly than it can be done [in Göttingen].”83 When the time came to leave Göttingen for Heidelberg, he lamented in pain of parting that he will be very sorry to leave Göttingen. Hofrath Wöhler has been so kind to me and also the assistant, and then I have such nice lodgings, and the people are so clever. I only wish, the laboratory was as good as the one in Heidelberg. There you have everything you want, all the newest arrangements, and although I should prefer to remain in Göttingen, the advantages there are not to be overlooked. I may find a better laboratory, but I can’t find a better chemist, a pleasanter man, and one who is more attentive to his students than Wöhler.84

Magee’s fellow student from Göttingen, Evan Pugh (1828–1864), who travelled on the same route, was more critical. He judged that “for physical chemistry for an advanced student Heidelberg has not its equal but a chemist who has worked only in that Lab. would be a one-sided chemist indeed.”85 Over the course of subsequent decades, this one-sidedness, paired with Bunsen’s ignorance regarding structural organic chemistry, would lead to unfavourable judgements of Bunsen. For five years, though, from 1855 to 1860, Bunsen’s laboratory at the University of Heidelberg was the most modern and best equipped chemical laboratory in the German-speaking lands (and beyond). Thereafter it was Wöhler, with his new laboratory in Göttingen, who would first outstrip Bunsen’s laboratory in 1860. With the emergence of new and increasingly gigantic chemistry palaces constructed in rapid succession in Bonn, Berlin, and Leipzig, Heidelberg quickly lost its position as a role model. Already in 1869, the French chemist Charles Adolphe Wurtz (1817–1884) described its design as a sort of intermediate stage in the development of the modern laboratories of his time:86 For twenty years, various laboratories that can welcome a large number of students for practical training have been built in Germany and Switzerland. To name only the most important ones, I will mention those in Karlsruhe, Heidelberg, Göttingen, Greifswald, Munich, [and] Zurich, which in terms of their size and layout represent in a way the transition between the old establishments of this kind [such as Liebig’s] and the imposing new buildings just erected in Bonn, Berlin, and Leipzig.87

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George W. Magee Jr., ed., An American Student Abroad: From the Letters of James Francis Magee (Philadelphia, PA: Magee Press, 1932), 67, 172. Magee, American Student Abroad, 67, 174. Magee, American Student Abroad, 157. Pugh to Johnson (2 August 1857), in C. A. Browne, “European Laboratory Experiences of an Early American Agricultural Chemist—Dr. Evan Pugh (1828–1864),” Journal of Chemical Education 7 (1930): 499–517, on 510. His report was only published in 1870. However, although the visits for the report were made in June and July 1868, the report is dated March 1869. See Alan J. Rocke, Nationalizing Science: Adolphe Wurtz and the Battle for French Chemistry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 293. Wurtz, Les hautes etudes pratiques, 16.

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Wurtz’s slightly vague description needs some explanation. With few exceptions,88 chemical laboratories at the modern German universities were first housed in buildings which initially served different purposes. Liebig’s Giessen laboratory was quartered in a former barracks, Leopold Gmelin’s Heidelberg laboratory in a former monastery, and Wurzer’s Marburg laboratory in the former Deutschordenshaus. Bunsen’s laboratory, though, was among the first purposebuilt university chemical laboratories. Yet, it did not measure up to the new ‘chemistry palaces’ of the 1860s. Thus, Bunsen’s Heidelberg laboratory represents both an intermediate stage in laboratory building and a “first-generation institute.”89 When Wurtz was given the task of preparing a report on the equipment of scientific facilities at Germany’s leading universities,90 Heidelberg was naturally on his itinerary.91 He gave due credit to the ‘older’ chemical laboratories mentioned in the quote above, and explicitly acknowledged the research done in Bunsen’s lab.92 However, close descriptions including ground plans and other details were confined to the new ‘chemistry palaces’ in Bonn, Berlin, Leipzig, and Vienna. Although Wurtz’s attention was caught by the newly invented water jet pumps he saw in Heidelberg, Bunsen’s laboratory as such clearly was no longer thought of as a model for future chemistry institutes, as a temple de l’avenir (to use Pasteur’s phrase). Interestingly though, most of the items in Wurtz’s idealised description of the interior of modern laboratories, with regard to partitioning and furnishing, were anticipated in Bunsen’s laboratory:93 namely, a spacious laboratory, separate rooms for scales and physical instruments, a darkroom, a room for gas analyses, a basement for storage and technical facilities (e.g. ventilation), a lecture hall with ascending rows, a preparatory room connected to it, private laboratory space, and a director’s apartment, as well as rooms for “preparateurs” integrated into the building.94 One noticeable aspect of Bunsen’s laboratory is that no major alterations were made after 1860. In the late 1860s, the laboratory was equipped with Bunsen’s newly invented water jet pumps.95 After a fire in 1876, major parts of the roof truss had to be rebuilt and repairs were made in the assistants’ rooms; while alterations to waste disposal caused some expenditure in 1879.96 These adjustments, 88

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These include Johann Friedrich Gmelin’s (1748–1804) laboratory in Göttingen, built in 1783. Another forerunner, albeit situated in the Habsburg monarchy, was the chemical laboratory at the Schemnitz school of mines (1786). See Peter Konečný, “Sites of Chemistry in the Schemnitz Mining Academy and the Eighteenth-Century Habsburg Mining Administration,” Ambix 60 (2013): 160–78. The quotation is from Jeffrey A. Johnson, “Academic Chemistry in Imperial Germany,” Isis 76 (1985): 500–24, on 502, and refers to laboratories that had been completed before 1866. For a broader context on this report see Rocke, Nationalizing Science, esp. 269–99. Le ministre de l’instruction publique, V. Duruy, to Charles Adolphe Wurtz (6 June 1868), in Wurtz, Les hautes etudes pratiques, 4. See Wurtz, Les hautes etudes pratiques, 17, for his brief description on Bunsen’s laboratory. Though Wurtz probably had the new laboratory in Zurich in mind when he wrote this description. See Wurtz, Les hautes etudes pratiques, 19: “C’est ce dernier [professeur Bolley] qui a présidé à la construction et à l’aménagement de ce beau laboratoire [à Zurich] qui eut servir de modèle.” Wurtz to the ministre de l’instruction publique [undated]: Wurtz, Les hautes etudes pratiques, 5–14, esp. 7–11. See Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, “Ueber das Auswaschen der Niederschläge,” Annalen der Chemie und Pharmacie 148 (1868): 269–93; Wurtz, Les hautes etudes pratiques, 17. Curtius and Rissom, Geschichte, 14.

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however, had no direct consequences for the distribution or use of the rooms in the laboratory. The reasons are varied: first, Bunsen did not really aim for more students; second, the university had not only one but three chemical laboratories to maintain, which generated considerable costs, although major financial responsibilities were passed to Delffs, and probably also to Kopp. Bunsen’s laboratory was a coherent, expensive, high-quality building without previously envisaged possibilities for expansion. It had neither the equipment nor the space to allow facilities to be added easily, for instance for organic synthesis, which could only be realised with a new building. This, however, was not in Bunsen’s interest. He had given up research in organic chemistry before leaving Marburg, and had last taught on this subject in Breslau. Instead, he specialised in analytical and physical chemistry, and his laboratory mirrored this specialisation. By the mid-1870s, weakness had once more become strength. For with more and more professorships being occupied by organic chemists, experts in inorganic and analytical chemistry became rare. Consequently, students of chemistry, but also of mineralogy and geology, interested in learning thorough analytical methods made a pilgrimage to Bunsen’s lab. Thus, the system perpetuated itself, and neither expansion nor a new building became issues. Although Bunsen continued to enjoy an excellent reputation and received various marks of respect, and although his laboratory classes were still in high demand, the laboratory itself was not. Undoubtedly, it had secured a permanent place as one of the first chemical laboratories of nineteenth-century Germany, both among contemporaries and in today’s historical research.97 But already for Wurtz it had lost its character as a model for new buildings. On the contrary, later authors, such as the architects H. Fröbel and Eduard Schmitt, focused on the shortcomings of the older buildings. Their critique was not unjustified: Fröbel in particular claimed that good lighting was most fundamental for the work of the chemist, as for the architect. He criticised the one-sided lighting of the working laboratories in Heidelberg, at the Academy and the Polytechnic in Munich, in Greifswald, in Aachen, and in Berlin, as being far from ideal in terms of providing light and also with regard to the utilisation of space.98 However, he acknowledged that the laboratories in Heidelberg and Aachen used the partition wall between two laboratories for shared facilities, and that especially in Heidelberg the shortcomings of the lighting were reduced to a minimum by the addition of windows and glass doors to the partition.99 In addition, the furnishing of the laboratory was not replaced during Bunsen’s active career, and became increasingly worn and dilapidated. Further critiques referred to outdated technology, for instance regarding the heating.100

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See Johnson, “Academic Chemistry,” 502; for contemporary assessments see Fröbel, “Bau und Einrichtung der chemischen Laboratorien,” 141; Schmitt, “Chemische Institute” (1888), 159; Schmitt, “Chemische Institute” (1905), 237. 98 Similar: Schmitt, “Chemische Institute” (1905), 262. 99 Fröbel, “Bau und Einrichtung der chemischen Laboratorien,” 142. 100 Schmitt, “Chemische Institute” (1905), 316.

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Charles Loring Jackson (1847–1935) of Boston, who enrolled in Heidelberg in the fall of 1873, and later became one of the most prominent organic chemists in the United States, wrote in a complete inversion of the judgements by James Magee and Evan Pugh quoted above: We frequently complain justly of the poor accommodations in our laboratory [at Harvard] but they are paradise compared with Bunsen’s. My desk was covered with such a sticky paint that if you put a beaker down on it the chances were that it left its bottom sticking to it when you took it up. To remedy this defect one got a large piece of brown paper and some thumb tacks from the janitor, covered one’s desk with this, and worked on paper! I was warned at once not to use any of the reagents on my desk as they were made so badly that they were worse than useless. There was only one set of reagents for the forty-odd students and as it was in the other room I had to walk twenty to thirty feet whenever I needed a reagent and then often found some one else using it. The one good thing in the laboratory was a set of overelaborate waterbaths. All of which impressed on my mind that it is the man that counts, not the laboratory.101

Over time, the number of references to Bunsen’s laboratory decreased significantly.102 It became more appealing in terms of historical rather than chemical interest. In this regard, Curtius’s and Rissom’s book on the history of the chemical laboratory at the University of Heidelberg was clearly a milestone. It offered a reevaluation of the building that led to a new and lasting positive assessment. Their account was the first to situate the origins and achievements of Bunsen’s laboratory within their historical context, and in fact one of the first attempts to relate, in a more systematic way, chemical research and teaching with the spatial dimensions of a particularly famous site of chemistry. The authors portrayed his laboratory in a way which would probably not have been possible in Bunsen’s lifetime, and certainly not during his active time as a university teacher: as a landmark of science and a memorial site for chemistry. It was therefore appropriate that the volume appeared on the occasion of the unveiling of a bronze statue of Bunsen in Heidelberg in 1908.

Limitations The newly emerging methods, techniques, and sub-fields of mid-nineteenth-century chemistry generated a pressure towards the functional division of spaces. In Heidelberg, this had led, by 1864, to the creation of three separate laboratories, each managed by a full professor. This unusual arrangement for the time anticipated the disciplinary differentiation of chemistry, suppressed elsewhere in Germany by 101

102

George Shannon Forbes, Charles Loring Jackson, 1847–1935: A Biographical Memoir (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1964), 99. Compare the difference in length of the description of Bunsen’s laboratory in the first and the second editions of the Handbuch der Architektur in 1888 (on 241) and 1905 (on 344). Edward Cookworthy Robins did not even mention it in his Technical School and College Building (London: Whittaker, 1887).

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the Ordinariensystem. In that regard, too, Bunsen’s Heidelberg period can be seen as a transition stage. Major modernisation of Bunsen’s laboratory only took place after his retirement in 1888/1889.103 Each of his successors, Victor Meyer and Theodor Curtius, both organic chemists, built completely new laboratories next to it: one for organic chemistry (1892) and a second one for training medical students (1900/1901), while Bunsen’s former laboratory continued to be used to teach introductory courses in inorganic chemistry. However, this move must not be seen as evidence for a further differentiation into autonomous chemical sub-disciplines. On the contrary, already in 1889, when Victor Meyer succeeded Bunsen as director of the chemical institute, the de facto independence of the different branches of chemistry, represented by three ordentliche Professoren running separate laboratories, came to an end. Bunsen, Kopp, and Delffs retired almost simultaneously. Afterwards Meyer (and after him Curtius) was the only ordentlicher Professor for chemistry in Heidelberg. He was supported by several Privatdozenten and außerordentlichen Professoren, but they were by no means colleagues with equal status or rights. The issue of the unity of the discipline vs. the autonomy of emerging sub-fields was in fact much discussed at the time when the “second-generation institutes”104 emerged between 1866 and 1895. In 1888, the semi-official Handbuch der Architektur discusses—and explicitly dismisses—the option of dividing and thus separating the various branches of chemistry into several buildings with individual directors. Next to financial reasons, the main argument was that the entire layout and furnishing of a chemical laboratory has to be determined by one—and only one—‘decisive chemist,’ i.e. the sole full professor and chair holder.105 Nineteenth-century German universities rarely had more than one chemical laboratory. One exception was Leipzig, where there were two full Ordinariate for chemistry with independent laboratories: the so-called “First Chemical Laboratory,” built in 1865 for the organic chemist Hermann Kolbe (1818–1884), one of Bunsen’s most prominent German pupils, and the older “Second Chemical Laboratory,” directed by Otto Linné Erdmann (1804–1869), assigned to applied and inorganic chemistry. A history of the differentiation of chemical sub-disciplines comparable to Eulner’s study on the branches of medicine is still missing.106 Among the milestones of this process are the foundation of the first teaching laboratory for physical chemistry at the University of Leipzig (1871) and the creation of the first ordentliche Professur for physical chemistry for Wilhelm Ostwald (1887), who was given a new building for physical chemistry in 1898. The situation for inorganic chemistry was even more 103

For these changes, see Curtius and Rissom, Geschichte, 27. Johnson, “Academic Chemistry,” 503. See Schmitt, “Chemische Institute” (1888), 160. 106 See Hans-Heinz Eulner, Die Entwicklung der medizinischen Spezialfächer an den Universitäten des deutschen Sprachgebietes (Stuttgart: Enke, 1970). 104 105

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difficult.107 By and large, however, academic chemistry maintained the ideology of the unity of the discipline, embodied in the persona of the Ordinarius, up to the first decades of the twentieth century. It goes without saying that institutional power, academic prestige, and control over resources were key factors for the problematical perpetuation of the regime of “German Mandarins,” to use Fritz Ringer’s term.108

Conclusion In this paper I have followed the path of Bunsen’s laboratory from an object of intrinsic chemical interest to an object of the history of chemistry. Built in 1855, the furnishing of the laboratory was not only state-of-the-art—it set standards. The operations performed in these rooms had not yet become mere tools: they were research objects; objects of the development of new methods. The technical equipment left nothing to be desired. From the beginning, however, this equipment reflected a specialised approach to chemistry that became increasingly visible when the specialities not covered by the laboratory, first and foremost organic chemistry, began to dominate chemistry in Germany. By the 1880s, the rooms assembled in Bunsen’s laboratory had come to be regarded as the basic set of rooms necessary for the analytical department of a chemical institute, but not of a complete chemical institute.109 Thus, Bunsen’s Heidelberg laboratory was at first a forerunner and finally a refuge for inorganic and physical chemistry. Together with the laboratories of Delffs and Kopp, it anticipated not only a spatial but also a factual differentiation of chemistry into sub-fields that were to emerge as sub-disciplines later on.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the audience at the 2012 conference “Sites of Chemistry in the Nineteenth Century” and the three anonymous referees who provided feedback. I am also grateful to Antonio García-Belmar and John Perkins for their thoughtful comments on an earlier draft. The Chemical Heritage Foundation provided generous support. Special thanks are due to Christoph Meinel, whose continuing engagement with my work has been most helpful.

Notes on contributor Christine Nawa works at the Museum der Universität Tübingen (MUT). Her research focuses on the history of nineteenth-century science. In her ongoing dissertation at the University of Regensburg she connects university history and the history of chemistry by focusing on Robert Wilhelm Bunsen’s research style and 107

See Meinel, Die Chemie an der Universität Marburg seit Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts, 346–49. Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969). 109 Compare Fröbel, “Bau und Einrichtung der chemischen Laboratorien,” 151. 108

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his teaching. From 2010 to 2012, Nawa was a fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia, and studied Bunsen’s reception in America through his students. Her further research interests include the history of collecting and the history of scientific drawings. Address: Lehrstuhl für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Universität Regensburg, D-93040 Regensburg, Germany. Email: Christine.Nawa@ psk.uni-regensburg.de