Early Works

Smith assembled a great deal of material relating to alchemy and Renaissance alchemists. He collected many alchemical manuscripts, including an English translation of Alexander von Suchten's De secretis antimonii, which purportedly contains annotations in the hand of an early American alchemist, John Winthrop, Jr., the first colonial Governor of Connecticut. Among the printed alchemical works is a copy of Elias Ashmole's Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652), presented to Smith by friends at Columbia University, that was originally owned by Sir Isaac Newton (and contains his autograph notes).

The collection has representatives of early pharmacology, including many works, both printed and manuscript, of receipts (recipes) for various medical ailments. One German manuscript, written in 1683, is a pharmacopoeia, or medical miscellany, containing remedies and treatments for various diseases, probably copied into a single volume for the use of an early physician.

The works of both Robert Boyle (1626-1691) and Joseph Priestley (1743-1794) are well represented in the Smith Collection, with the Boyle imprints comprising the most comprehensive collection in North America. Boyle, among whose works was The Sceptical Chymist (1661), is perhaps best known for his experiments with early air pumps, which led to the eponymous Boyle's Law, an expression of the inverse relationship between the pressure and the volume of air.

Priestley, best remembered for the discovery of oxygen (which he knew as "dephlogisticated air"), was sympathetic to the French Revolution, and these sympathies forced him to leave his home in Birmingham, England. Eventually he went into exile in America, where he continued his work, "giv[ing] inspiration and impetus to a host of young Americans to press forward in chemistry." Among the Priestley manuscripts in the Smith Collection are letters written by him to the National Assembly of France accepting citizenship but declining the invitation to join the Assembly. A copy of the law conferring French citizenship upon Priestley and others can be found with the printed Priestley materials.

Practical Applications

The practical application of chemistry is represented by numerous texts on topics such as soap making and dyes, perfumes and cosmetics. Works on the production of beer, wine, and liquors also abound, including the German translation of Hieronymus Brunschwig's Kleines Distillierbuch (1500), William Y-Worth's The Compleat Distiller (1705), and Friedrich Accum's A Treatise on the Art of Brewing (1820).

The collection acquired another dimension with the 1950 acquisition of Massachusetts Institute of Technology chemist and explosives expert Tenney L. Davis's library of pyrotechnical literature. However, Smith's colleague, Walter Taggert, was the source of the Venice 1550 edition of Pirotechnia, by Vannoccio Biringucci. First published in 1540, Biringucci's book may well be the earliest printed work to mention the subject. It is also important as one of the first systematic texts on mining and metallurgy, preceding Agricola's more famous De Re Metallica by 16 years.

Science in Early America

The collection is exceptionally rich with print and manuscript resources from early America, when Philadelphia was the center of scientific activity. The first chair of chemistry in North America was established at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in 1769. Benjamin Rush, a leading American physician and political activist, was the first to hold this chair, serving as professor of chemistry from 1769 to 1789. Manuscript lecture notes, both by Rush and by some of his students, can be found in the collection. Although it disbanded between 1805 and 1810, the celebrated Chemical Society of Philadelphia, founded in 1792, was very active at the turn of the century. The Smith Collection holds a copy of the society's Annual Oration Delivered Before the Chemical Society of Philadelphia, January 31st, 1801, published in 1802 and reprinted by Smith in his Chemistry in America (1914). Robert Hare's "aqueous sliding rod hydro-oxygen eudiometer," an instrument for measuring and analyzing gases, illustrated and described in Hare's Compendium of the Course of Chemical Instruction in the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania (1827), is probably the most important apparatus in the collection.

According to Smith, "one of the most delightful chemical texts which circulated abroad and in America in the first half of the nineteenth century" was Jane Marcet's Conversations on Chymistry. This work was enormously influential in developing interest in chemistry among the young, and more than 160,000 copies were sold in this country before 1853. The Smith Collection holds more than 30 copies printed before 1850, in both London and American editions, including the first American edition of 1806.

The Collection Today

The Smith Collection is an active and growing collection, used by a wide variety of patrons in a multitude of ways. It is a source for conservators restoring old paintings who are interested in the chemical composition of the early paints and varnishes with which they are working, and for brewers, vintners, and distillers who are interested in recovering old recipes and in learning about the history of their crafts. Historians of science find a wealth of material having to do not only with chemistry, but also with physics and alchemy.

New acquisitions of older materials on chemistry and its historical antecedents are made regularly, with funding from the two Smith Collection endowments established through the generous foresight of Smith's widow, Margie Gruel Smith. Among recent additions are Pharmacologia Anti-empirica, or, A Rational Discourse of Remedies both Chymical and Galenical (1683), by Walter Harris; L'Art du Distillateur Liquoriste (1775), by Jacques-Francois Demachy; two eighteenth-century medical manuscripts; and a small cache of books dealing with animal magnetism. The collection is also the beneficiary of gifts of books, manuscripts, and images from myriad donors.