The "Subtile Aereal Spirit of Fountains": Mineral Waters and the History of Pneumatic Chemistry.

The standard history of pneumatic chemistry is dominated by a landmark-discoverers-type narrative stretching from Robert Boyle, through Stephen Hales, Joseph Black, and Joseph Priestley, to Antoine Lavoisier. This article challenges this view by demonstrating the importance of the study of mineral waters - and their "aerial component" - to the evolution of pneumatic chemistry, from around van Helmont to the period before Black (1640s-1750s). Among key figures examined are Joan Baptista van Helmont, Johann Joachim Becher, Robert Boyle, Friedrich Hoffmann, and William Brownrigg.

London's Water Supply before 1800 and the Roots of the Networked City.

The New River Company was founded in London in the early seventeenth century to provide water for its inhabitants through a network of pipes. Although it grew slowly at first, after 1660 the company began to take on tens of thousands of customers. The company's rapid expansion caused it serious problems in distribution, forcing it to re-evaluate its strategy for distributing water. Relying on the recommendations of Christopher Wren and others, the company reorganized its network by adopting a host of technological and business measures. In doing so, it was forced to work increasingly by designing individual components in light of their effects on the whole network. This integrated design stabilized the infrastructure sufficiently to allow its further growth in the eighteenth century. In the early nineteenth century, London's water supply infrastructure explicitly became a model for water networks and other kinds of large-scale urban infrastructure elsewhere in the world.

Let it burn: distinguishing inflammable airs 1766-1790.

The issue of the number of species of inflammable air was debated particularly in the period 1777-1786. The work of Henry Cavendish in 1766 and Alessandro Volta in 1777 in characterising two species of inflammable air set the stage for the work of other chemists, particularly in Paris, as they debated this question, mostly concerning heavy inflammable air. Different ways of generating gases were discovered up to 1783, when the synthesis of water and the proposal of carbon as an element created a framework for the question to be answered. In 1785-1786, Claude-Louis Berthollet reported the composition of heavy inflammable air and volatile alkali, while Philippe Gengembre analysed phosphorated hydrogen and hepatic air. In the end, it was the new chemical nomenclature of 1787 that spread their results widely.