The Pocket Laboratory: The Blowpipe in Eighteenth-Century Swedish Chemistry

This article examines the role of the blowpipe in the discovery process of the disproportionately large number of new elements found by Swedish chem-ists during the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. While individual chemists abroad used versions of the tool, in Sweden alone its use was ubiquitous across the chemical and mineralogical research community, and its consistently simple handheld design made basic dry chemical analysis quick, cheap, and portable. This shared use of the tool was crucial to the development of the mineral analysis projects that uncovered new substances, first by enabling the adoption of a system defining minerals by their chemical components and mineralogy by chemical analysis, and second by providing a simple and practical method for that analysis that facilitated collaboration across institutions, physical distance, and time.