Elizabeth Fulhame, a forgotten chemistry pioneer

In 1794 the London printer J. Cooper published an essay by a woman writing under the name Mrs. Fulhame. Elizabeth Fulhame’s An Essay on Combustion, with a view to a new art of dy[e]ing and painting: wherein the phlogistic and antiphlogistic hypotheses are proved erroneous was a remarkable scientific treatise that postulated the mechanism of catalysis many decades before the term was coined and documented light-induced reactions of metal salts that would later be cited by one of the pioneers of photography.

It wasn’t unusual for women in the 18th and 19th centuries to receive a basic science education, take an interest in the latest scientific advances, and dabble in practical experimentation. But the idea that women could develop new theories and advance the field of science was well beyond societal expectation. A woman—especially one from a modest background like Fulhame—being recognized for her independent scientific contributions was almost unheard of. In the 1998 book Women in Chemistry , Marelene and Geoffrey Rayner-Canham argue that Fulhame was “the first solo woman researcher of modern chemistry.”

In the introduction to her essay, Fulhame anticipated a hostile reception to her work: “For some are so ignorant . . . [they] are chilled with horror at the sight of any thing that bears the semblance of learning . . . and should the spectre appear in the shape of woman, the pangs which they suffer are truly dismal.”

Despite Fulhame’s concerns, contemporaries received her work positively. But interest faded in the decades following the publication of the essay, which is her only known work. Fulhame’s story illustrates that even when contemporaries have acknowledged the contribution of a female scientist, there’s been no guarantee that she would make it into the history books.

Defying expectations

Historians don’t know much about Elizabeth Fulhame’s background, including her birth name. They suspect she was Scottish and that she met her husband, Thomas Fulhame, in Edinburgh. Thomas obtained a degree in Ireland before eventually receiving a medical degree in 1784 with a dissertation on puerperal fever.

In 1779, Thomas had enrolled in chemistry classes at the University of Edinburgh. Chemistry for medical students at Edinburgh was taught by Joseph Black, a well-regarded professor whose lectures often attracted the general public. In his chemistry lectures, Black taught his students the chemical properties of metals. He dissolved metals such as gold into solution with aqua regia (hydrochloric acid and nitric acid), then precipitated the gold chloride salt out with ferrous sulfate, which reduced the gold cations back to the metallic state.

In 1780, during the time Thomas was attending Black’s lectures, Elizabeth got an idea. As she recalled later in her treatise, she wondered if gold and silver could be precipitated onto cloth as a form of dyeing. “I imagined in the beginning that a few experiments would determine the problem,” she wrote in her Essay on Combustion, “but experience soon convinced me that a very great number indeed were necessary, before such an art could be brought to any tolerable degree of perfection.”

In her essay she recalls her husband’s and friends’ skepticism that she could produce gold- and silver-dyed cloths. But such a domestically oriented science project wasn’t itself unusual for a woman to pursue. “For girls, the idea was your goal in life was to be a housewife, and science could be useful for cooking, for dyeing, for gardening, for understanding the world around you,” says Jessica Linker, a historian who studies female practitioners of science in early America. The 18th-century author Maria Edgeworth called chemistry “a science particularly suited to women” in her book Letters for Literary Ladies, assuring her readers that in pursuing chemical studies, “the ingenuity of the most inventive mind may be exercised, [but] there is no danger of inflaming the imagination.”

Despite the tolerance for women practicing science at home, no one expected them to make theoretical contributions to their fields. Fulhame took to her dyeing project with unusual intensity. She dipped small pieces of silk into solutions of metal salts, then treated the silk with a reducing agent in the hope the metal would precipitate onto its surface. In her essay she recorded the results of 127 experiments, a fraction of the total she performed. She ran multiple experiments in parallel over several months, observing that gold dissolved in aqua regia solution was reduced back to its metallic state only in the presence of light. No reaction occurred when gold nitrate solution was left in a dark closet.

Though a few of her experiments yielded silks in lustrous gold and silvery shades, the majority left nothing more than brown stains on the fabric, ranging in hue from “reddish” to “disagreeable.” Amid considerable outside criticism, Fulhame persisted in her experiments, though even she admitted commercial application of her work was unlikely.

During this time her husband remained closely affiliated with the University of Edinburgh and Black. In 1789 Thomas wrote to his former professor from Madrid, where he met with a contact of Black’s. It’s unclear if Fulhame joined her husband on the trip, but she later wrote of seeing a piece of gold and purple cloth “belonging to the late king of Spain” and trying to replicate its appearance with her chemical reagents.

Observation of catalysis

At some point in the course of her investigations, as she systematically varied her reaction conditions, Fulhame noticed some odd trends in her results. She dissolved her metals into solutions of wet ether and alcohol. When she let the silk dry completely before treating it with a reducing agent such as hydrogen gas, sulfur, or phosphorus, no reactions occurred. But there was a color change when she reacted the damp silk immediately with one of those elements. Fulhame realized water was necessary to facilitate her reactions; in fact, water did such a good job that the reactions occurred at room temperature rather than at high-temperature smelting conditions.

The term catalysis doesn’t appear in the literature until 1835, but this is clearly what Fulhame documented. Although a few scientists before her had observed reactions accelerating in the presence of additional reagents, Fulhame was the first to generalize such an observation to a whole class of reactions, in this case the reductions of metals. She was also the first to hypothesize a mechanism in which water dissociated into its ionic form, facilitated the intermediate reaction steps, and was regenerated by the end of the metal reduction. Chemists Derek Davenport and Kathleen Ireland noted in a 1989 paper that Fulhame’s proposed mechanism was flawed: “She seems to claim that two quantities of water appear where only one existed before.” But her overall mechanistic insight, they wrote, was “ahead of its time.”

Fulhame realized her findings had far-reaching implications. At the time, phlogiston, a supposed substance contained within combustible bodies that was released into the air when they burned, was treated as an element as real as oxygen. By the 1770s phlogiston theory had come under scrutiny: Antoine Lavoisier’s experiments had shown that phosphorus, sulfur, and mercury gained mass when they burned instead of losing their portion of phlogiston; he posited that combustion involved the addition of oxygen rather than the loss of phlogiston. Fulhame’s findings also clashed with phlogiston theory because her photoreactions required water; the theory predicted that light reduced metals by enabling them to combine with phlogiston. But Lavoisier believed metal reductions occurred by a direct transfer of atmospheric oxygen to the reducing agent. Since Fulhame’s experiments proved water played the deciding role, her findings didn’t fit with Lavoisier’s theory either.

Around this time, Joseph Priestley—radical theologian, discoverer of oxygen, and a strong proponent of phlogiston theory—enters the story. In 1793 religious persecution and fears for his personal safety pushed him out of Birmingham, England, into London. It was there, before he fled for America, that Fulhame showed him some of her dyed cloths and explained her experimental observations. “I was greatly struck by them,” Priestley wrote later in his 1800 book, Doctrines of Phlogiston. He urged Fulhame to publicize her findings.

Fulhame was skeptical of finding patent protection or patronage for her dyeing process—at the time her husband was struggling to do so for a white lead manufacturing process he had developed—but she worried her ideas would be stolen unless secured in print. As she wrote in her essay introduction: “I published this essay in its present imperfect state, in order to prevent the furacious attempts of the prowling plagiary, and the insidious pretender to chymistry, from arrogating to themselves and assuming my invention in plundering silence; for there are those, who if they cannot by chymical, never fail by stratagem and mechanical means, to deprive industry of the fruits and fame of her labours.”

Recognition and backlash

An Essay on Combustion was published in London in November 1794. It must have taken Fulhame no small measure of confidence to publish an essay that made a point of contradicting both sides of the phlogiston argument: “Combustible bodies do not reduce the metals by giving them phlogiston, as the Phlogistians suppose; nor by uniting with and separating their oxygen, as the Antiphlogistians maintain.” She appears to have sent a copy of her essay to Richard Kirwan, an eccentric Irish chemist who was an ardent supporter of phlogiston, so it seems she wanted her work noticed.

The scientific community responded positively to Fulhame’s essay, which was republished in Germany in 1798 and America in 1810 and received glowing reviews. “Philadelphia pumped out a ton of scientific treatises in the late 18th and early 19th century,” historian Linker says. “I think that’s the only treatise produced by a woman they printed during that period.”

In 1798, long before the American reprint, Fulhame was elected a corresponding member of the Philadelphia Chemical Society, which noted, “Mrs. Fulhame has now laid such bold claims to chemistry that we can no longer deny the sex the privilege of participating in this science also.”

The decision to elect Fulhame to such a society was almost unprecedented. Princess Dashkova, president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, had become an honorary member of the American Philosophical Society in 1789, but that was more an exercise in international diplomacy than a recognition of scientific merit. It’s not clear what prompted members of the Philadelphia Chemical Society to extend Fulhame membership, or whether she benefited personally from the honor.

Modern scholars suggest Priestley introduced Fulhame’s work to the Philadelphian audience after he arrived there in 1794. However, the man Fulhame called “an illustrious friend of science” launched an attack on her in Doctrines of Phlogiston, in which he defended phlogiston theory. He called Fulhame’s ideas “fanciful and fabulous.”

It’s unclear what prompted Priestley’s attack, especially since he first appeared supportive of her work. Linker posits it was a question of “whether or not her work could advance Priestley’s long-term goals.” Perhaps his initial motivation was to use Fulhame’s findings to discredit the antiphlogistonists, only to see the American audience use her findings to discredit him. It says something about Fulhame’s impact on the scientific discourse that a prominent scientist such as Priestley would go out of his way to dispute her work.

Today we know catalysts are essential to many reactions, from biological processes to billion-dollar manufacturing industries. In 1839, when John Herschel presented a paper to the Royal Society discussing improvements to the fledgling photographic process, he cited Fulhame as an early pioneer of metal photoreduction. Early photographs were made on plates coated with silver nitrate, one of the chemicals she had experimented with.

After 1810 Fulhame vanishes from the historical record. We don’t know if she continued experimenting, nor do we know whether she deliberately withdrew from the limelight. Although her contemporaries were impressed with her discoveries, this didn’t translate into sustained attention. Fulhame rarely gets mentioned in scholarly accounts of the phlogiston and antiphlogiston debate, even though many important contemporaries knew about her work. All we have left are the defiant words of her essay, railing against a society that thought so little of its female scientists.