Abstract
THOUGH the event has apparently passed unnoticed, on April 16 last occurred the bicentenary of the birth of Joseph Black, whose name is rendered immortal by his epoch-making chemical discovery of the nature of ‘fixed air,’ or carbon dioxide, and by his enunciation of the doctrine of latent heat. These two important additions to knowledge were made by Black in early manhood, but though he lived to the age of seventy years, history records no further contribution to scientific discovery by him, while of all men of science his writings are of the scantiest. His fame, however, was world-wide. His great contemporaries in England were Priestley and Cavendish; in France, Lavoisier, Berthollet, and Fourcroy, and it was the last who once referred to Black as “the Nestor of the chemistry of the eighteenth century.” Proust, also on Black's name being mentioned, exclaimed: “Ah ! c'est le Patriarche de la Chimie.” Of Black's career and work, practically all that will probably be known is contained in “The Life and Letters of Joseph Black, M.D.,” the last published work of the late Sir William Ramsay. From a scrap of autobiography given in this we learn that Black was born at Bordeaux on April 16, 1728, his father and mother both being of Scotch descent. He was one of a family of eight boys and five girls, and was taught English by his mother. At the age of twelve years he was sent to school at Belfast. At sixteen he entered the University of Glasgow, at twenty-one he removed to Edinburgh, and in 1754, at the age of twenty-six, took his degree of M.D. with the thesis, “De Humere Acido a Cibis Orto, et Magnesia Alba,” which, developed and perfected, was read two years later to the Medical Society of Edinburgh with the title “Experiments upon Magnesia Alba, Quicklime, and other Substances.”
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The Bicentenary of Joseph Black. Nature 122, 59–60 (1928). https://doi.org/10.1038/122059a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/122059a0