MEVER,JOHANN FRIEDRICH

(b. Osnabrück, Hannovcr [now German Federal Republic], 24 October 1705; d. Osnahrück, 2 November 1765)

chemistry.

Meyer is best known for having been wrong. Just a few years after Joseph Black explained that the difference between the mild and the caustic alkalies lies in the presence or absence of “fixed air” (1756), Meyer published his Chymische Versuche zur näheren Erkenntniss des ungelöschten Kalchs (1764). In this work he argued that causticity in alkalies arose from a substance that entered the mild alkalies from the fire. He called this substance acidum pingue and characterized it as a combination of a previously unknown acid substance with the matter of fire or light. It was. Meyer said, responsible for “sharp” properties and thus was found in acids, caustic alkalies, and fire. It was not to be confused with phlogiston, which turned calxes into metals; acidum pingue calcined metals, causing the famous—or notorious—weight gain. Meyer’s peculiar theory of the acidum pingue combined features from the Paracelsian sulfur of metals and Lemery’s “matter of fire.” The theory avoided one set of errors by attributing the “augmented calx” to a gain of matter, but it incurred others by claiming causticity to be a result of an accession of acidum pingue.

Meyer’s father, who died in 1714, was a physician; his mother, the daughter of an apothecary. Meyer was intended for the clergy but, he said, “Providence made me a pharmacist.” He went at age fifteen into his grandmother’s apothecary shop, where he served six years as an apprentice. After working as a journeyman in Leipzig, Nordhausen (where he studied mining and metallurgy), Frankfurt am Main, Trier, and Halle, he returned to Osnabrück and in 1737 inherited his grandmother’s shop. The following year he married a clergyman’s daughter, who died in 1759; they had no children.

Meyer’s work was highly respected on the Continent in the l760’s and early 1770’s; and his theory of causticity was accepted by a number of chemists, including Baumé, Pörner, and Wiegleb. Black took special care to answer point by point this challenge to his own findings. Lavoisier and Guyton de Morveau avowed at different times that Meyer’s writings had considerable merit. But with the explication over the next fifteen years of the role of oxygen in combustion and acidification, and with the recognition that Black’s work had inaugurated this great train of discoveries in pneumatic chemistry, Meyer’s claim to a place among the builders of eighteenth-century chemistry suffered a blow from which it has never recovered.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Chymische Versuche zur näheren Erkenntniss des ungelöschten Kalchs … (Hannover-Leipzig, 1764; 2nd ed., 1770) was translated into French by F. F. Dreux (Paris, 1765). Alchymistische Briefe … Hannover, 1767) is available in a French trans. by Dreux (Paris, 1767). Johann Christian Wiegleb, Kleine chymische Abhandlungen von dem grossen Nutzen der Erkenntniss des Acidi pinguis bey der Erklärung vieler chymischen Erscheinungen (Langensalza, 1767), draws freely and expands upon Meyer’s Versuche, and contains a short autobiographical sketch by Meyer (on which the present article is based), edited by E. G. Baldimger.

II. Secondary Literature. See Henry Guerlac, Lavoisier: The Crucial Year (Ithaca, N. Y., 1961) 48–49, and the literature cited there; and J. R. Partington, A History of Chemistry, (London, l962), 145–146, 152–153, 388–389, 519–520.

Stuart Pierson