BULLETIN FOR THE HISTORY OF CHEMISTRY
Volume 50, 2025
Heimann, Robert B., “The German Polymath Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus (1651-1708) and His Pursuit of the European Hard-Paste Porcelain Formula,”Bull. Hist. Chem., 2025, 50, 80-92.
https://doi.org/10.70359/bhc2025v050p080
Abstract/Description: For more than two hundred years, historians of science and the arts have argued about who the genuine inventor of European hard-paste porcelain may have been, Johann Friedrich Böttger or Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus. This article attempts to highlight the inventive achievements of Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus (1651-1708) and pay tribute to him as the true creator of European hard-paste porcelain. For too long a time, this fame was undeservedly attributed to his charge, the alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger (1682-1719). Although contemporary accounts on the development of porcelain are often contradictory or incomplete, there are written documents and historical research reports showing that Tschirnhaus discovered the decisive fundamental and guiding principle to make European hard-paste porcelain. He demonstrably was the first to shape and fire a real, albeit still unglazed, porcelain vessel from local raw materials, thus creating the solid technological basis that enabled Böttger to develop the ceramic we now know as Meissen porcelain into a marketable product.