The University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague (UCT Prague) is a university based in Prague, whose history, according to its own website, traces back to the earliest beginnings of chemistry teaching in the Czech lands.
The University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague (UCT Prague) is a university based in Prague. According to its own website, the school's history traces back to the earliest beginnings of chemistry teaching in the Czech lands[1].
Beginnings of natural science teaching in Prague
After the founding of the Prague university by Charles IV in 1348, the natural sciences taught at the Faculty of Liberal Arts, later the Faculty of Arts, were mainly mathematics and astronomy, along with the basic knowledge of alchemy[1]. According to the same source, alchemy was linked with astrology and expressed its findings through parables and myths, yet it is credited with methods of isolating substances that are still used today, such as sublimation, distillation or crystallisation, and with the discovery of a number of substances and elements[1]. Among figures connected with the later period, the source mentions Georgius Agricola, who in the first half of the 16th century summed up the experience of mining and metallurgy in the work De re metallica and took a critical stance towards alchemy[1], and also alchemists active at the court of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries[1].
Decline and revival of natural science teaching
According to the source, the teaching of natural sciences at the Charles-Ferdinand University was suppressed under Jesuit control, the exception being the professor of medicine Jan Marek Marci, personal physician to the emperors Ferdinand III and Leopold I[1]. Only at the end of the 18th century, as part of the Enlightenment reforms and after the university came under state administration, was the training of physicians introduced with an emphasis on the study of natural sciences[1].
Founding of the Prague Polytechnic
The development of manufactories and the beginnings of industry in the Czech lands in the second half of the 18th century gave rise, according to the source, to the need to found another institution of higher learning, the Prague Polytechnic[1]. The Bohemian Estates engineering school was founded in Prague as early as 1707[1]. On the basis of a project by František Josef Gerstner, drawing on the model of the Paris polytechnic, this school was transformed in 1806 into the Bohemian Estates Polytechnic Institute, the so-called Prague Polytechnic[1]. According to the source, the Prague Polytechnic originally consisted of a mathematics and a chemistry department and from its founding until 1870 was housed in the building of the St. Wenceslas Seminary in what is today Husova Street[1]. In the course of the 19th century, chemistry at the Prague university became, according to the source, an important field of teaching[1].
Sources
- VŠCHT Praha — 30 June 2025