A Worthy Chase

John Buckingham. Chasing the Molecule. Stroud, UK: Sutton Publishing, 2004. xxiii + 199 pp. $24.95.

Reviewed by Peter J. T. Morris

The history of organic chemistry in the 19th century is a fascinating subject. There are important discoveries, interesting theories, and strong personalities, and the interactions between the three aspects are both complex and intriguing. Although there has been much excellent scholarship on different facets of this history in recent years, an overview that incorporates this new research has been lacking. William H. Brock’s Norton History of Chemistry (1993) provides an adequate substitute for the general reader, but we have yet to find a 21st-century Carl Schorlemmer or Paul Walden, chemists who wrote excellent historical syntheses. Could John Buckingham, another professional chemist and the founding editor of the Dictionary of Natural Products, fill this role?

This is an excellent book in almost every respect. Buckingham blends biography and chemistry to nice effect in this synthesis of 19th-century organic chemistry and its ramifications in the 20th century. He writes clearly and without excessive use of jargon, a great rarity among modern chemists. He doesn’t cover everything: as a natural product chemist Buckingham does not pay much attention to the development of synthetic dyes, and I would have liked more about the relatively mundane work performed by most late-19th-century organic chemists—though this would not fit Buckingham’s thesis that the 19th century (at least until around 1870) was a dramatic period. Nevertheless, Buckingham’s ability to draw on the work of professional historians and present good overviews of their current understanding of key episodes, even when they contradict the stories adopted by many chemists (e.g., Wöhler and urea or Kekulé and benzene), is particularly impressive. But although Buckingham has read the work of several professional historians of chemistry, he has inevitably missed some.

Chasing the Molecule is a good book, but what is its proper audience? Professional historians are unlikely to find very much that is new here, though they will most likely find Chasing the Molecule less irritating than most history written by professional chemists. Judging by the style and the title, it appears that Buckingham (or perhaps his publisher) was hoping for a general audience, but he has not written the kind of biographical story or “what 19th-century chemists did for us” that a general audience requires.

This is a book for professional chemists, but only as easy reading. Buckingham successfully presents the results of modern scholarship in a way that other chemists would find acceptable (e.g., by explaining the chemistry of the time in terms of modern chemistry, something that historians are often reluctant to do). But it is not in any sense a complete replacement for Walden’s History of Chemistry (1949). I suspect that most chemists would want more chemical details and broader coverage of late-19th-century developments. And it would not surprise me if some of Buckingham’s professional colleagues were bewildered by his delight in demolishing their favorite myths.

The one audience for which this book is ideally suited—though I am not sure Buckingham took it into account—is senior high school and college chemistry students. They will find Chasing the Molecule an interesting and useful core text for further reading in the history of organic chemistry. It is certainly much better than the lazy and inaccurate potted histories—often reproduced uncritically from older books—that one finds in chemistry textbooks.

Chasing the Molecule would make a perfect gift for someone embarking on a chemistry degree. But we still await an analytical history of 19th-century organic chemistry that satisfies the chemist who is serious about the history of his field and the professional historian looking for a critical synthesis of recent historiography.