German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, Halle, Germany
In 1693, Kunckel became a member of the Academia Caesarea Leopoldina (now German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina).
French Academy of Sciences, Paris, France
Kunckel was a member of the French Academy of Sciences.
1693
German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, Halle, Germany
In 1693, Kunckel became a member of the Academia Caesarea Leopoldina (now German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina).
French Academy of Sciences, Paris, France
Kunckel was a member of the French Academy of Sciences.
https://www.amazon.com/Collegium-Physico-Chymicum-Experimentale-Laboratorium-Chymicum/dp/1169149669/?tag=2022091-20
1732
Johann Kunckel was born in 1630 or 1638 in Hutten, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. The details of his life are obscure and are gleaned principally form his own writings. It is known that he was the son of an alchemist in the service of Duke Frederick of Holstein.
Kunckel learned chemistry from his father and practical chemistry from pharmacists and glassworkers.
In his twenties, Kunckel was in the service of Dukes Franz Carl and Julius Heinrich of Sachsen-Lauenburg as a pharmacist and chamberlain. About 1667 he became chemist and gentleman of the bedchamber to Johann Georg II, elector of Saxony, where there was an active alchemical circle. At Dresden, he also learned the chemistry of glass manufacture.
After about ten years Kunckel lost his job (through the calumnies of his enemies, in his view); he then taught chemistry at Wittenberg. In 1679 he was invited by Frederick William, elector of Brandenburg, to become head of his chemical laboratory at Berlin and possibly the director of the glassworks there. On the elector’s death in 1688 he entered the service of King Charles XI of Sweden, as a minister of mines. He probably remained in Stockholm until his death.
In 1679 Kunckel published a work which was much read for the next century and which comprised essentially a series of essays on aspects of glassmaking. This was a translation into German of Christopher Merret’s Latin edition of Antonio Neri’s L’arte vetraria of 1612. Kunckel preserved Merret’s notes and added further notes as well as a section on the making of colored glass, together with several short treatises on related topics by other German writers. Its translation into French in the mid-eighteenth century added considerably to Kunckel’s reputation.
When the elector of Brandenburg sent a copy of the controversial Chymischer Probierstein to the Royal Society, to which it was dedicated, in 1684, the Society asked Boyle to have a Latin abstract made; and it listened to a summary by Frederick Slare, which was perhaps what was printed in the Philosophical Transactions. But Boyle obviously thought poorly of it and delivered its author a stinging rebuke, declaring that the Society had not yet got to “framing systems.” The only other work of Kunckel’s to be translated into English is the short and rational Chymische Anmerckungen.
Johann Kunckel went down in history as an able chemist whose works had considerable appeal to his Germanic contemporaries. His most famous work was probably his translation of Christopher Merret’s Latin edition of Antonio Neri’s L’arte vetraria, which was highly regarded for almost a century.
He was ennobled as Baron von Loewenstern in 1693.
Kunckel claimed to be a follower of the experimental method, and his work that was best known outside Germany was his Chymische Anmerckungen of 1677, which received the Latin title Philosophia chemica experimenti confirmata, a name carried into its English title. His works are filled with chemical facts, discoveries, and observations, if not always with true experiments. His greatest theoretical interest was in promulgating the view that all fixed salts are the same, an opinion he carried over into his treatment of the manufacture of glass; he was of course correct in thinking that many plants produce potash but was unaware that seaside plants produce soda. Alkali salt he regarded as “the most universal Salt of all Metals and Minerals.” Thus mercury, he thought, was composed of “a Water and a Salt”; sulfur “first consists in a certain fatness of the Earth, which is a kind of combustible Oil, the like of which is found in all Vegetables; and then in a fix’d and volatile Salt, and a certain gross Earthiness.” He did not think that sulfur was the principle of flame, for “where there is Heat, there is Acid, where there is Flame or Light, there is volatile salt.”
Kunckel’s views are patently a mixture derived from alchemy crossed with some rational natural philosophy and are not very far removed from those of his contemporary Becher. He belongs firmly to the late seventeenth-century German chemical tradition, and he was notable only for the keenness of his interest in practical and preparative chemistry. He evolved or adopted numerous recipes for the preparation of substances and displayed a good deal of common sense in discussing their probable nature. Like many men of his time, he despised the alchemists for their mysticism while inclining to regard their aims as rational. Certainly, he thought highly of aurum potabile as a medicine and believed that although nothing could be created de novo, yet base metals could be transformed or converted into gold. At the same time, he pointed out the fallacy of the universal solvent: it would dissolve the vessel in which it is made. These severer views are found only in the posthumously published Collegium physico-chymicum experimentale and were perhaps the result of a lifetime’s not altogether happy association with alchemists.
Kunckel’s part in the discovery of phosphorus is not altogether clear, but it certainly enhanced his reputation. He described his own view of the affair in his Collegium; in 1678 he published an account of “his” phosphorus and its medical properties, but not of its method of preparation. It seems probable that Kunckel’s statement that he saw Hennig Brand’s phosphorus, got from him the hint that it was made from urine, and then proceeded on his own is true - it is very like the accounts of J. D. Krafft and of Robert Boyle, who was the first to publish the method of preparation. It is interesting that Leibniz, in his Historia inventionis phosphori (1710), thought Kunckel’s experiments more scientifically useful than Boyle’s, presumably because they were more closely related to medicine. Kunckel’s claim for priority was widely accepted on the Continent, and phosphorus was often associated with his name.
In 1693, Kunckel became a member of the Academia Caesarea Leopoldina (now German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina). He was also a member of the French Academy of Sciences.
Kunckel was clearly an able practical chemist, quick to seize upon new discoveries.
