Summary The life and works of John Mercer (1791–1866), a calico-printer from Lancashire, is a good example to illustrate the complexity of the process of printing cottons with natural colours, and the different skills required to obtain a final product able to be sold in the markets in the early years of the nineteenth century. A subtle combination of entrepreneurial dynamism, chemical knowledge, and expertise in the workshop provided a very special sort of ‘artisan-chemist’, who played a key role in (...) the industrial prosperity of the coloured textiles in the early Victorian years. The paper tries to show how, apart from the traditional ‘great luminaries’ of the period (Gay-Lussac, Berzelius, Davy, or Dalton), self-educated provincial chemists such as Mercer also made significant practical and theoretical contributions. (shrink)

In Éléments de l'art de la teinture, Claude-Louis Berthollet organized and described knowledge of a chemical craft in terms of contemporary chemical science. The resulting intellectual structure of his treatise established a programme and method for the subsequent improvement of dyeing. Berthollet's descriptive and hierarchical systematization of knowledge rendered problems intelligible and isolated them so that they could be attacked and solved by methodical experimentation. This double-edged processes of solving practical problems, first cognitively and then experimentally, provides a key to (...) understanding the way science has contributed to rapid and systematic technological change. (shrink)