Chapter 3 Without a Thermometer: the Technical Knowledge of Heat in the Early Modern Age
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Abstract
The history of the scientific study of heat has been mostly reduced to the history of thermometry and calorimetry. Recently, historians of chemistry have suggested a more nuanced view of the evolution of the scientific study of heat in the early modernity by emphasizing the interplay of sensory evidence and thermometric measurement in laboratory practice and science teaching. However, historians mostly endorse the view by which the knowledge of heat based on sensory evidence has progressively been regarded insufficient per se and supplanted with thermometer-based quantification. In this paper, I reject the idea that the modern science of heat, grounded on a systematic employ of the thermometer, merely came to replace a knowledge of heat based on unmediated sense evidence. I rather claim that the advent of thermometry collided with a much more articulated and better-defined body of knowledge than the immediate and unthinking relationship to heat implied by the idea of “reliance on the senses.” Until the late eighteenth century, the evolution of the thermometer, and more generally the emergence of a modern scientific study of heat, faced the persistence of a “technology of heat” – whereby I mean a codified body of knowledge that emerged from artisanal work and other experimental activities (chemical laboratory trials, cooking, etc.). The point is proved by analysing the emergence and codification of a technical vocabulary of heat, as well as the elaboration of non-thermometric methods to measure heat, in the period 1600–1750.