Stuff You Missed in History Class · iHeartPodcasts

Elizabeth Fulhame’s Colorful Chemistry

March 25, 2026·36 min·3 clips

Fulhame wrote that critics of women in science are 'radically stupid and malicious, beasts of prey destined to hunt down unprotected genius, to rot unnoted in the grave of oblivion.'

1. Stuff You Missed in History Class profiles Elizabeth Fulhame, an 18th-century chemist who described catalysis and photosensitivity in a 1794 self-published book, yet remains biographically almost unknown. 2. Hosts Tracy V. Wilson and Holly Fry draw primarily on Fulhame's 1794 book, An Essay on Combustion, and contemporary reviews and citations by other scientists. 3. The episode argues that Fulhame was a genuinely original scientist whose contributions were acknowledged by contemporaries but whose name was eventually displaced from the discoveries she pioneered. 4. Virtually nothing is known about Fulhame's personal biography: no birth date, no maiden name, no death date, and scholars disagree even on whether she was born in Scotland or Ireland; she published under the name 'Mrs. Fulhame.' 5. Her husband Thomas Fulhame studied medicine and chemistry at the University of Edinburgh under Joseph Black, whose public chemistry lectures attracted paying audiences of three guineas per person. 6. In 1780 Fulhame conceived the idea of dyeing cloth with precipitated metals, shared it with her husband and friends, was dismissed, and then spent 14 years conducting experiments at home largely without access to a proper laboratory. 7. She worked with a noose apparatus — glass chambers used for carbonating water, developed by John Mervin Nooth — to expose cloth samples to various gases, metals, and chemicals. 8. Over those 14 years she produced small samples of silk dyed with gold and silver, including one described as 'a beautiful purple color with gold beaming through it,' replicating a color she had seen on fabric made for the late king of Spain. 9. She also described applying her metal-precipitation techniques to maps, representing rivers in silver and cities in gold, noting that silver rivers had 'a most pleasing effect on the sight and relieve the eye of that painful search for the course and origin of rivers.' 10. In October 1793, chemist Joseph Priestley — then a Fellow of the Royal Society — offered to present her work to the Royal Society, but Fulhame chose to publish it independently in 1794 through bookseller Joseph Johnson, who also published Mary Wollstonecraft. 11. Her 1794 book, whose full title runs to a complete sentence addressing the phlogiston debate, covered 127 experiments selected from a larger body of work and grouped to illustrate general principles. 12. In her experiments Fulhame observed that certain metal-reduction reactions required water to proceed at room temperature and that the water was not consumed, describing it as regenerating 'like the phoenix from her ashes' — an observation that constitutes an early description of catalysis. 13. She also observed that silk impregnated with silver salts turned dark when exposed to sunlight but not in the dark, and speculated that the reaction could be used to write or imprint text — an early photographic process that historians have linked to the path toward daguerreotypes. 14. The discovery of catalysis is conventionally credited to Jans Jacob Berzelius, who coined the term in 1836, 42 years after Fulhame's book; the hosts note she was the first to frame this class of reactions as a unified phenomenon. 15. Benjamin Thompson, who co-founded the Royal Institution of Great Britain in 1799, wrote in 1798 that Fulhame's book had inspired his own experiments on gold, calling her 'ingenious and lively' and noting in a footnote that 'most of the foregoing experiments were suggested' by her work. 16. Joseph Priestley, who had encouraged Fulhame to publish, later issued a point-by-point rebuttal of her conclusions, and Irish chemist William Higgins implied she had appropriated his earlier observation about water in iron rusting. 17. The Philadelphia Chemical Society named Fulhame a corresponding member, and a German edition of her book was published in Göttingen in 1798; a favorable review appeared in the French Annales de Chimie. 18. The episode is delivered as a two-host conversation with long verbatim readings from Fulhame's book and contemporary reviews, with audible enthusiasm from the hosts when reading Fulhame's preface. 19. This episode suits listeners interested in the history of chemistry, overlooked women in science, or 18th-century scientific publishing culture. 20. Listeners looking for an episode focused on experimental science in detail or on Fulhame's personal life will find both areas thin — the biography is nearly a blank and the chemistry is treated accessibly rather than rigorously.

As heard by us

A sharp, lively portrait of Elizabeth Fulhame as a chemist guarding both her experiments and her credit.

Elizabeth Fulhame comes through as a chemist working with gases, treated cloth, and combustion theory, but also as an author who understood how easily credit could be stolen.

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