Joseph Black

Joseph Black (1728-1799), Scottish chemist and physicist, was born in 1728 at Bordeaux, where his father - a native of Belfast but of Scottish descent - worked in the wine trade. At the age of twelve he was sent to a grammar school in Belfast, leaving in 1746 to study medicine at Glasgow University. There, William Cullen was his instructor in chemistry, and the relation between the two soon became that of professor and assistant rather than of master and pupil.

One of the questions of the day was the action of lithontriptic medicines, especially lime-water. At that time, the caustic nature of alkalines was explained by the supposed presence in them of the principle of fire, "phlogiston"; quicklime, for instance, was chalk which had taken up phlogiston, and when mild alkalis such as sodium or potassium carbonate were causticized by its aid, the phlogiston was supposed to pass from it to them. Black showed that, on the contrary, causticization involved the loss of something, as proved by loss of weight; and this something he found to be an "air," which, because it was fixed in the substance before it was causticized, he spoke of as "fixed air." Taking magnesia alba, he showed that on being heated it lost weight owing to the escape of this fixed air (named carbonic acid by Lavoisier in 1781), and that the weight was regained when the calcined product was made to reabsorb the fixed air with which it had parted. One of his experiments involved placing a mouse into the fixed air; when it died, Black concluded that the air was not breathable.

These investigations were described in the thesis De humore acido a cibis orto, et magnesia alba, which he presented for his doctor's degree in 1754; and a fuller account of them was published in 1756 as "Experiments upon magnesia, quicklime and some other alkaline substances". Black left to others the detailed study of this "fixed air" he had discovered.

In about 1750, Black developed the analytical balance based on a light-weight beam balanced on a wedge-shaped fulcrum. Each arm carried a pan on which the sample or standard weights was placed. It was much more accurate than any other balance of the time, and became an important instrument in most chemistry laboratories.

In 1756, Black succeeded Cullen as lecturer in chemistry at Glasgow, and was also appointed Professor of Anatomy, exchanging that post in 1757, for the position of Regius Professor of the Practice of Medicine. The preparation of lectures thus took up much of his time, and he was also gaining an extensive practice as a physician. Moreover, his attention was engaged on the studies which led to his doctrine of latent heat. He noticed that when ice melts it takes up heat without undergoing any change of temperature, and he argued that this heat, which as was usual in his time he looked upon as a subtle fluid, must have combined with the ice and thus become latent in its substance. This hypothesis he verified by experiments at the end of 1761.

In 1764, with the aid of his assistant, William Irvine (1743-1787), he measured the latent heat of steam, though not very accurately. This doctrine of latent heat he taught in his lectures from 1761 onwards, and in April 1762 he described his work to a literary society in Glasgow. He also noticed that different bodies in equal masses require different amounts of heat to raise them to the same temperature, and so founded the doctrine of specific heats.

In 1766 he succeeded Cullen in the chair of chemistry in University of Edinburgh, where he devoted most of his time to preparing lectures. Never very robust, his health gradually became weaker. He died in Edinburgh on the 6th of December, 1799.

"As a scientific investigator, Black was conspicuous for the carefulness of his work and his caution in drawing conclusions. Holding that chemistry had not attained the rank of a science - his lectures dealt with the "effects of heat and mixture" - he had an almost morbid horror of hasty generalization or of anything that had the pretensions of a fully fledged system. This mental attitude, combined with a certain lack of initiative and the weakness of his health, probably prevented him from doing full justice to his splendid powers of experimental research." from Encyclopedia Brittanica 11th edition

Apart from the work already mentioned he published only two papers during his life-time - "The supposed effect of boiling on water, in disposing it to freeze more readily" (Phil. Trans., 1775), and "An analysis of the waters of the hot springs in Iceland" (Trans. Roy. Soc. Ed., 1794).

After his death his lectures were written out from his own notes, supplemented by those of some of his pupils, and published with a biographical preface by his friend and colleague, Professor John Robison (1739-1805), in 1803, as Lectures on the Elements of Chemistry.