October 24, 2011 • 25 mins
Many think of alchemy as a fool's pursuit, but alchemy has a rich history closely tied to medicine and metallurgy. Additionally, techniques developed by alchemists strongly influenced chemistry. So how come we don't call chemistry alchemy?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Delaine and chocolate boarding, and
today we're gonna do something we rarely do. We're gonna
talk about chemistry a little bit and more generally the
(00:22):
history of science, and we're specifically the history of alchemy.
And I thought it might be fun to just maybe
kick it off with our own experiences in chemistry mine
or maybe not so illustrious. I don't think I've taken
chemistry since eleventh grade, and I may or may not
have lit something on fire, maybe a French book. You know,
(00:44):
I've got a good grade, but I don't know if
I'm why did you, guys, why did you get a
good grade? After or fire? Maybe we shouldn't go into
that too much. Let's let's leave that my beginnings in
chemistry were not illustrious. I either, although I did almost
minor in chemistry. That's an interesting choice. Yeah, I did.
I was one class short of a chemistry miner, and
(01:07):
then I chose to minor in German instead because I
was also one class away from a German miner. And
I thought that would be easier. Big mistake. That was
not easy. German was not easier than chemistry. Well, I
don't know, because I didn't take the final chemistry class
that would have taken to Maybe it would have been
just as difficult. But reading and writing on't you get
to the higher levels, and studying a foreign language, it's
(01:28):
pretty difficult. I was actually one class short of a
French major, so I know where you're coming from. I'm
just curious. What was the last chemistry class? Organic chemistry one,
which was kind of my downfall. I preferred in organic
chemistry to organic chemistry standable. I definitely remember people in
college complaining about that one. So, as we're gonna find
out today, chemistry and alchemy are pretty closely related. But
(01:51):
we've seen alchemy pop up quite a bit lately in
the podcast, most recently with the episode on John d who,
in addition to being an alchemist with an astrologists and
a spy and quite a few other things too as
a talented man. But we've also been getting repeat listeners
suggestions for other alchemists like Nicola Flamel and Paracelsus. So
(02:12):
all of this really got me wondering, though, what exactly
is alchemy? I mean, I know most people understand the
crystopia aspects, so that idea that bass metals could be
transmuted into gold, and many many people have probably heard
of the Philosopher's Stone through Harry Potter Deplina. You're probably
just learning that now. But aside from that, there's a
(02:34):
really unsavory aspect about the whole science of alchemy, really,
and I mean that was what honestly got my attention
with the subject in the first place. Yeah, it really
calls to mind those dangerous Merlin types who slave over
a hot fire, making packs with the devil and combining
alchemy with necromancy and magic, or those broken down old
(02:58):
men who waste there until eligance and fortunes, laboring to
carry out hopeless experiments and dank dungeons, the alchemy stereotypes
we think of, yeah, exactly. Or I mean, worst of all,
there are those, as we saw in the John d podcast,
there are those Charlatans who prey off people's desire for
wealth and try to get wealth for themselves. Not that
(03:19):
those aren't sometimes or that they weren't sometimes legitimate scenarios.
Alchemy was often illegal Charlatan alchemists were sometimes hanged. In
the fifteen nineties and Prague, which was kind of the
center of alchemy in Europe at the time, a mystery
alchemist of Arabic origin showed up, gathered the richest merchants
and bankers of the city together and took one hundred
(03:41):
gold marks from each, promising to multiply them. He dropped
the coins in a crucible filled with acids, mercury, lead, salt, eggshells,
and horse stung and set to fanning the fire. But
before he could get the bellows going, there was a
huge explosion, a cloud of fumes, and then sure enough
(04:02):
a missing alchemist. Old. Yeah, so, I mean, there were
these Charlatans, but to only look at alchemy as a
quack's pursuit or charlottean's game really isn't fair. And it
turns out that much of modern chemistry really does, as
we mentioned, have roots in alchemy. It's just that the
real scientists I'm making air quotes right now didn't always
(04:23):
own up to it. So we decided it is time
for a Halloween makeover for the science or the art
of alchemy. Of course, though something like alchemy is going
to have really obscure beginning. Yes, it is old. It's
likely that it sprang up independently in different spots around
the world, influenced by older arts like metallurgy, medicine, and
(04:46):
almost always closely connected to religion, prophecy, or philosophy. It
often had the same goal to no matter what part
of the world we're talking about, transmutation for the better,
so lead to gold, six to healthy, earthly, to heavenly.
Chinese alchemy, for instance, was really very medicine focused and
(05:06):
influenced by Daoist beliefs. The idea that immortality could be
obtainable went back as far as the fourth century BC. Yeah,
so Chinese alchemists like co Hung who lived in the
fourth century and Sunsum Yao who lived in the seventh century,
provided these elixirs of life. And I really love this
detail that the British historian Joseph Needham has even attempted
(05:30):
to determine which Chinese emperors might have died from elixir poisoning.
Because if you are on this quest for uh immortality
and you're willing to drink just about anything to get it,
reasons that eventually it might not work out In your favor.
Indian alchemy was also more akin to what we might
see as early medicine today, also really elixer based, although
(05:52):
in that case it was elixers as cures for specific
ailments less than elixers as as um solutions for immortality. Yeah,
so it really was kind of like a medical industry there.
Western alchemy, however, took kind of a different route, dating
from Hellenistic Egypt. The earliest known Western alchemist is Sassimos
(06:13):
of Panopolis, who lived around three d a d. And
his theory was that there was a magical substance that
could transform things. He called it a tincture, and it
had a few varieties. This tincture eventually became associated with
the philosopher's stone, or the quote stone that is not
a stone, And I almost feel like that needs to
be a scary voice, like the stone that was not
(06:34):
a stone is not a stone should have told me
at the time, a Harry Potter kind of voice. Also
around this time, Alexander the Great was said to have
discovered the Emerald tablet, which itself contained thirteen cryptic axioms
related to alchemy, in the tomb of Herme's thrice grade
in Egypt, and alchemists really ran with this distinction, this
(06:55):
connection to Hermes and ding themselves the sons of Hermes
or her edic philosophers. And just one thing to keep
in mind, and we're going to talk about this kind
of a lot later, but the number one rule of
this brotherhood was to keep it in the brotherhood. Don't
go telling your secrets of alchemy to people who don't
understand it. It was understood that if you devoted your
(07:18):
lifetime to studying something like this, you could talk to
your fellows, you could share experiments. Maybe not even then,
but it was all a very tight knit, closed community.
So Arab scholars further honed the alchemical texts in the
ninth century and the tenth century, and from there it
eventually spread to Europe during the Scholastic Renaissance of the
(07:41):
twelfth century. And probably the most famous of the Arab
alchemists was the Persian al Rozzie, who was the director
of the Baghdad Hospital and also really a well known
um doctor and writer of medical text By later medieval Europeans,
he had a whole different name hold different identity for that,
but among alchemist he was best known for his Book
(08:02):
of Secrets, which was really straightforward, very clearly written, essentially
a catalog of lab procedures concerned with transmitting gold and silver. So,
in an article for Arab Studies Quarterly, Gail Taylor writes
that al Rozzie's methodologies, his attention to details like safety
and repeatability, and his easy instructions make the Book of
(08:24):
Secrets a proto laboratory manual. So we're gonna talk a
little bit more about that line of thinking later. So, Okay,
we've got a sense of alchemy's progression through world history.
But what was it all about besides elixirs and the
philosopher's stone. What science background made the work alchemist did
actually seem possible? Well, first, there's a fundamental confusion between
(08:47):
elements and compounds that we need to go over really quick. Okay,
So Aristotle had proposed the existence of five elements and
those were air, earth, fire, water, and quintessence. Then in
the thirteenth entry, a new text appeared by the mysterious
alchemist Pseudo Jieber. While Geebra was often associated with eighth
century Arab alchemist Jabber Abben Highen, Indiana University Professor William
(09:12):
Newman has id Gieber as Paul of Taranto, a Franciscan monk.
Newman has also traced a direct line of descent from
Al Rozzie's Book of Secrets to Jeeber's Sum of Perfection.
In the Sum of Perfection, which subsequently became pretty much
like the Bible for medieval European alchemists, Geeber honed down
this idea of elements to include just two. All medals
(09:33):
were varying combinations of mercury and sulfur. So kind of
sounds like a recipe for gold maker ingredients exactly. You
just got to figure out the right ratio. So Paracelsis,
who we mentioned in the beginning, was a Swiss physician
who lived between fourteen ninety three and fifteen forty one,
and he further developed the ideas of Geeber. He proposed
(09:56):
that there were actually three basic substances sulfur, mercury, and salt.
But still, you know, you're working with a limited quantity
of things and trying to make gold out of that.
Because Paracelsis was a prominent physician, one who believed in
observation as the best way of learning a new type
of medical alchemy, really rose up around him and his style,
(10:18):
and many doctors alchemist scientists worked in Prague in the
court of Rudolph the second sort of striving to um
to do experiments based on Paracelsis ideas. But alchemy wasn't
all about mixing gold from scratch from these base elements.
It eventually became about growing gold too, And I really
(10:39):
think this is sort of the most interesting aspect of alchemy,
at least for me. But we need some context for
this as well, because why would anyone think that they
could grow gold. So in the sixteenth century Europe, there
was a belief that everything in the universe was alive,
and not just plants and animals, but minerals too. Like
(11:00):
don't know, if you've ever grown your own crystals and
a crystal kit when you were a kid, you can
kind of understand where they might have been coming from.
But according to a History Today article titled a New
Light on Alchemy, people thought that minerals really grew from
seeds that started out deep below the earth and matured
gradually as they rose. So again, not too too crazy,
(11:22):
because sometimes metal veins under the earth really do look
tree like in the way that they branch off into
different veins. But the key here was the speed in
which the seeds grew and developed and the materials that
the minerals passed through. So, for instance, lava was considered
a lower form because it obviously rose through the ground
(11:43):
rapidly and wasn't anything special, at least to the sixteenth
century Europeans who were thinking about this. Gold, on the
other hand, was believed to rise very very slowly through
the earth, taking its sweet time, and ultimately coming out
in the per ficked form. So one idea was that
the material that gold passed through on its way up
(12:06):
from the low regions of the earth was the philosopher's stone,
something that was around us but essentially unknown. So if
you could figure out what the philosopher's stone was, you
could make gold, and by extension, you'd have the key
to perfection, something that could be applied to other worlds,
to plants, animals. It would basically be the universal cure.
(12:29):
So it wasn't all about making gold for the sake
of having lots of money. It had that other aspect,
that perfect desire for perfection aspect to it as well.
An alchemists theories weren't dumb by any means lead or
does often contain silver, silver or does often contain gold.
They saw these as things that were in process or ripening,
(12:50):
and gold making wasn't the only goal of alchemy either.
Other goals included the quest to find the universal solvent,
the elixir of life or universal medicine, the ability to
reincarnate plants and animals from their ashes, and also the
ability to generate many humans from semen and rotted horse stung.
(13:11):
So that one sounds a little bit out there, but
we should also mention that alchemy was also closely tied
with Christian and Gnostic and neo Platonic ideas, And you
couldn't just perform the experiment, so you couldn't be the
modern um, cool headed chemist working in the lab. You
had to be in the right mindset. You had to
(13:32):
be completely in the game. Essentially. In the History Today
article we mentioned even suggested that that strong belief system
might have come out of the frustration of failed experiments.
If you just realized that you never could make goal
no matter how hard you tried, you might explain that
as something you weren't quite with it. You weren't thinking
(13:52):
the way you should have been. But just because experiments
to turn lead or whatever base metal into gold did
always end in frustration. Sorry, it would have taken a
nuclear reaction to make that work, guys, doesn't mean that
alchemists didn't pick up a trick or two along the way.
Alchemists did figure out things like distillation acid base reactions,
(14:13):
precipitation from solution, and the refining of metals. They also
created new alloys conceived of atoms long before atomic theory,
and repeated experiments, also making sure that they were repeatable,
of a basic requirement for lab experiments like the scientific method.
They also began to shift in medicine away from plants
(14:34):
towards minerals and Discover magazine. Dr Newman says that quote
the goals of eighteenth century chemistry, namely to understand the
material composition of things through analysis and synthesis and to
make useful products such as pharmaceuticals, pigments, porcelain, and various
refined chemicals, were largely inherited from sixteenth and seventeenth century alchemists.
(14:56):
So that makes us have to ask the question, if
alchemy was science based, albeit somewhat mystical, why did it
develop such a bad reputation. Even John Diaz we talked
about in the recent podcast, who was living in the
sixteenth and seventeenth century, suffered from his later dabbling in
alchemy and conversations with angels that really kind of ruined
(15:19):
his career in a way. Later scientific geniuses like Isaac
Newton spent thirty years working on alchemy, more than he
did on physics and mathematics combined, but he tried to
keep his interest secret. Again, according to Dr Newman, who
has extensively studied Newton's secret notebooks, he says, quote, alchemy
became a danger to one's reputation when interest bled into enthusiasm.
(15:44):
There were just a few fundamental problems with alchemy that
were kind of hard to overcome. Yeah. One was that
the quest for gold brought in swindlers. We mentioned Charlatan's
in the beginning and how they were hanged for alchemy.
Alchemists were also very secretive of thus alchemy's obscure texts
and strange metaphors for chemicals or experiments like Babylonian dragons,
(16:06):
green lions, toads that decompose and turn into ravens, neptunes
tried and we're going to talk a little more about
that stuff too. And finally, authorities didn't want anyone to
make gold and devalue the currency. Lots of countries made
it illegal to transmitt metals, though they'd often secretly patronize
their own alchemists out with the other guys, so they,
you know, on the assumption that you can do it.
(16:28):
Please don't, please don't, But just in case, I'm going
to have an insurance policy in my own alchemists. But
despite the eventually obvious connection to chemistry, alchemy was still
seen as a shameful beginning for the science, and one
Thomas Thompson called alchemy the quote rude and disgraceful beginnings
of chemistry. Robert Boyle, who is a founder of modern chemistry,
(16:52):
was embarrassed by his interest in alchemy. He called it
a quote empty, vain and deceitful study. So what do
you do if the science that you want to pursue,
that you want to study is just mired in the
bad imagery of magicians and astrologers and charlatans. You rebrand.
You just create a whole new name, and you keep
(17:14):
doing the same old things. So Boile and other respectable
types started calling themselves chemists chemist spelled with a Y,
and according to Lawrence Prince HiPE, who is a chemist
and a historian of science, that JOHNS. Hopkins and a
colleague of Dr Newman's, over the next few decades after
Boyle was working in in chemistry, these chemists distanced themselves
(17:36):
almost entirely from alchemy. They had a new name and
a new outlook on science. But it's not that they
weren't doing the same work. Prince chop A can't find
written evidence that the new breed of chemists tried to
refute the idea of metallic transmutation. Some were still looking
to create gold from base metals as late as seventeen
(17:58):
sixty and in JOHNS. Hopkins magazine, Dr Princeipe is quoted
as saying, quote, current scholarship is only now revealing how
artificial and contrived the distinction between alchemy and chemistry really was.
So it was seriously just a name change. Yeah, And
Prince pay and Newman have both worked to recreate some
of the old alchemists experiments. I think this is so interesting.
(18:19):
It kind of reminded me of our old Um episode
on historical beer, Historical Bruise and they've used recreations of
fifteen sevent century lab where and really gone to a
lot of trouble to get the right kind of chemicals,
um right minerals and things that would have been available
at the time, and the experiments. The old alchemy experiments
(18:40):
have cool names like the Star of Regulus of antimony,
or the net. The question though, is do they work. Obviously,
the ones that are supposed to turn a base metal
into gold do not end up working, but some of
them really do show interesting kind of chemical experiments. One
recreated experiment called the True of Diana is described by
(19:02):
Newman as sounding like this quote. If you immerse a
solid amalgam of silver and mercury in nitric acid with
dissolved silver and mercury, you produce tiny twig like branches
of solid silver. So it really does look kind of
like a tree. And you can get that idea that
minerals are something that grow from seeds and and not
(19:25):
closer to the way we understand them today. So why
is there so much renewed interest in the history of
alchemy in the first place. It's partly because of the
clandestine interest of major figures like Boil and Newton, Yeah, Newton,
for instance, has these extensive journals loud notebooks on his
(19:45):
experiments in alchemy, and you can look at them, you
can try to decipher all of the code words pieuses.
And I think it must have been kind of a
shock for a lot of people who think of Newton
as just a supremely rational man that he did have
an interest in alchemy, and that it does make sense too.
(20:06):
But that brings us to a very appropriate edition of
Listener Mail. So this email is from Kiley, who wrote
in to tell us a little story that she thought
of after she listened to the old episode on the
Amber Room. She wrote, I remembered a story about how
George Habeshi, a Hungarian scientist who dissolved two Nobel prizes
(20:29):
in a mixture of acids to keep the Nazis from
finding them. The acid turned the gold of the prizes
into liquid, so it appeared to be a chemical solution
in a jar. He then placed the solution on a
shelf in his laboratory at the Neil's Boar Institute and
fled After the war. He found the solution still in
the same spot on the shelf, completely undisturbed. He was
(20:51):
able to turn the gold back into a solid and
contacted the Nobel Society, who, after hearing Habeshi's tail, was
more than happy to read cast the awards. Later on,
Haschi himself went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
I love the story because it tells of the ingenious
ways one man kept these prize pieces from the Nazis.
(21:12):
So I looked into the story a little bit more
and it turns out that that solution that can dissolve
gold is called aqua regia and um. It's one of
the things actually that was written about by Pseudo Jeeber.
Interestingly enough, but I also checked out a video by
Dr Prince pay on the Chemical and Engineering News online site,
(21:36):
and he describes the extreme metaphors of alchemists, and he
used the Aqua regia as an example. So, for instance,
ammonium chloride, which is a white volatiles solved, would have
been called the white Eagle by alchemists because it is metaphorical.
It kind of suggests what it is, but it's also
very cryptic. Another one, nitric acid would be called red
(22:00):
dragon because when it's heated, you get a lot of
red vapors and it is um. He described it kind
of almost in a hungry way. It consumes everything, so
it's kind of like a dragon. So if you made aquaregia,
you could mix nitric acid and ammonium chloride together, and
an alchemist might put that as saying, let the red
(22:20):
dragon devour the white eagle, and you wouldn't know what
on earth the alchemist was talking about unless you were
a fellow son of Hermes. Better yet, they could draw
a picture, And that's one of the neatest things about alchemy.
If you just look up pictures of the labs and
the experiments, these gorgeous woodblock prints, and so you could
(22:41):
you could do a picture of the solution by having
a red dragon devouring a white eagle. I just thought
that was so so interesting and so neat that we
can tie it into something that happened during World War
two to see sort of alchemy still being practiced in
a way. Yeah, it's funny that red dragon, white eagle
stuff reminds me of John Dee and his double sort
(23:05):
of double identity as a spy and a sorcerer. For
the creating spy like element, it's very spylight, very sneaky away,
but very cool. So thank you for writing in that
was a very neat story, and if you would like
to share any stories with us, you can write us
always at history podcast at how stuff Works dot com.
(23:26):
You can also suggest ideas for future podcasts there. We
also have a little bit of news that we wanted
to share, and that's that we have been nominated by
you guys, I guess for a podcast award, for a
People's Choice Podcast Award, which were very psyched about, and
voting has opened up. It is open until October. Is
(23:47):
that right, Sarah? I think that's right. You can vote
every single day until then. You can vote once a
day at the Podcast Awards website which is podcast Awards
dot com. And we're in the education category. Yeah, so
please go there if you get a chance. That really
takes few seconds. We'd love it if you guys voted
for us, if you like us, of course, and see
what happens there. Other than that, if you want to
(24:08):
find out a little bit more about the stuff that
we talked about in this podcast, there is a related
episode on Stuff they Don't Want You to Know, one
of our sister podcasts on Alchemy also, and we have
an article on our website called how Isaac Newton worked,
and you can look that up by visiting our homepage
at www dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure
(24:32):
to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join how stuf Work staff as we explore the most
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iPhone app has a rise. Download it today on iTunes
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Delaine and chocolate boarding, and
today we're gonna do something we rarely do. We're gonna
talk about chemistry a little bit and more generally the
(00:22):
history of science, and we're specifically the history of alchemy.
And I thought it might be fun to just maybe
kick it off with our own experiences in chemistry mine
or maybe not so illustrious. I don't think I've taken
chemistry since eleventh grade, and I may or may not
have lit something on fire, maybe a French book. You know,
(00:44):
I've got a good grade, but I don't know if
I'm why did you, guys, why did you get a
good grade? After or fire? Maybe we shouldn't go into
that too much. Let's let's leave that my beginnings in
chemistry were not illustrious. I either, although I did almost
minor in chemistry. That's an interesting choice. Yeah, I did.
I was one class short of a chemistry miner, and
(01:07):
then I chose to minor in German instead because I
was also one class away from a German miner. And
I thought that would be easier. Big mistake. That was
not easy. German was not easier than chemistry. Well, I
don't know, because I didn't take the final chemistry class
that would have taken to Maybe it would have been
just as difficult. But reading and writing on't you get
to the higher levels, and studying a foreign language, it's
(01:28):
pretty difficult. I was actually one class short of a
French major, so I know where you're coming from. I'm
just curious. What was the last chemistry class? Organic chemistry one,
which was kind of my downfall. I preferred in organic
chemistry to organic chemistry standable. I definitely remember people in
college complaining about that one. So, as we're gonna find
out today, chemistry and alchemy are pretty closely related. But
(01:51):
we've seen alchemy pop up quite a bit lately in
the podcast, most recently with the episode on John d who,
in addition to being an alchemist with an astrologists and
a spy and quite a few other things too as
a talented man. But we've also been getting repeat listeners
suggestions for other alchemists like Nicola Flamel and Paracelsus. So
(02:12):
all of this really got me wondering, though, what exactly
is alchemy? I mean, I know most people understand the
crystopia aspects, so that idea that bass metals could be
transmuted into gold, and many many people have probably heard
of the Philosopher's Stone through Harry Potter Deplina. You're probably
just learning that now. But aside from that, there's a
(02:34):
really unsavory aspect about the whole science of alchemy, really,
and I mean that was what honestly got my attention
with the subject in the first place. Yeah, it really
calls to mind those dangerous Merlin types who slave over
a hot fire, making packs with the devil and combining
alchemy with necromancy and magic, or those broken down old
(02:58):
men who waste there until eligance and fortunes, laboring to
carry out hopeless experiments and dank dungeons, the alchemy stereotypes
we think of, yeah, exactly. Or I mean, worst of all,
there are those, as we saw in the John d podcast,
there are those Charlatans who prey off people's desire for
wealth and try to get wealth for themselves. Not that
(03:19):
those aren't sometimes or that they weren't sometimes legitimate scenarios.
Alchemy was often illegal Charlatan alchemists were sometimes hanged. In
the fifteen nineties and Prague, which was kind of the
center of alchemy in Europe at the time, a mystery
alchemist of Arabic origin showed up, gathered the richest merchants
and bankers of the city together and took one hundred
(03:41):
gold marks from each, promising to multiply them. He dropped
the coins in a crucible filled with acids, mercury, lead, salt, eggshells,
and horse stung and set to fanning the fire. But
before he could get the bellows going, there was a
huge explosion, a cloud of fumes, and then sure enough
(04:02):
a missing alchemist. Old. Yeah, so, I mean, there were
these Charlatans, but to only look at alchemy as a
quack's pursuit or charlottean's game really isn't fair. And it
turns out that much of modern chemistry really does, as
we mentioned, have roots in alchemy. It's just that the
real scientists I'm making air quotes right now didn't always
(04:23):
own up to it. So we decided it is time
for a Halloween makeover for the science or the art
of alchemy. Of course, though something like alchemy is going
to have really obscure beginning. Yes, it is old. It's
likely that it sprang up independently in different spots around
the world, influenced by older arts like metallurgy, medicine, and
(04:46):
almost always closely connected to religion, prophecy, or philosophy. It
often had the same goal to no matter what part
of the world we're talking about, transmutation for the better,
so lead to gold, six to healthy, earthly, to heavenly.
Chinese alchemy, for instance, was really very medicine focused and
(05:06):
influenced by Daoist beliefs. The idea that immortality could be
obtainable went back as far as the fourth century BC. Yeah,
so Chinese alchemists like co Hung who lived in the
fourth century and Sunsum Yao who lived in the seventh century,
provided these elixirs of life. And I really love this
detail that the British historian Joseph Needham has even attempted
(05:30):
to determine which Chinese emperors might have died from elixir poisoning.
Because if you are on this quest for uh immortality
and you're willing to drink just about anything to get it,
reasons that eventually it might not work out In your favor.
Indian alchemy was also more akin to what we might
see as early medicine today, also really elixer based, although
(05:52):
in that case it was elixers as cures for specific
ailments less than elixers as as um solutions for immortality. Yeah,
so it really was kind of like a medical industry there.
Western alchemy, however, took kind of a different route, dating
from Hellenistic Egypt. The earliest known Western alchemist is Sassimos
(06:13):
of Panopolis, who lived around three d a d. And
his theory was that there was a magical substance that
could transform things. He called it a tincture, and it
had a few varieties. This tincture eventually became associated with
the philosopher's stone, or the quote stone that is not
a stone, And I almost feel like that needs to
be a scary voice, like the stone that was not
(06:34):
a stone is not a stone should have told me
at the time, a Harry Potter kind of voice. Also
around this time, Alexander the Great was said to have
discovered the Emerald tablet, which itself contained thirteen cryptic axioms
related to alchemy, in the tomb of Herme's thrice grade
in Egypt, and alchemists really ran with this distinction, this
(06:55):
connection to Hermes and ding themselves the sons of Hermes
or her edic philosophers. And just one thing to keep
in mind, and we're going to talk about this kind
of a lot later, but the number one rule of
this brotherhood was to keep it in the brotherhood. Don't
go telling your secrets of alchemy to people who don't
understand it. It was understood that if you devoted your
(07:18):
lifetime to studying something like this, you could talk to
your fellows, you could share experiments. Maybe not even then,
but it was all a very tight knit, closed community.
So Arab scholars further honed the alchemical texts in the
ninth century and the tenth century, and from there it
eventually spread to Europe during the Scholastic Renaissance of the
(07:41):
twelfth century. And probably the most famous of the Arab
alchemists was the Persian al Rozzie, who was the director
of the Baghdad Hospital and also really a well known
um doctor and writer of medical text By later medieval Europeans,
he had a whole different name hold different identity for that,
but among alchemist he was best known for his Book
(08:02):
of Secrets, which was really straightforward, very clearly written, essentially
a catalog of lab procedures concerned with transmitting gold and silver. So,
in an article for Arab Studies Quarterly, Gail Taylor writes
that al Rozzie's methodologies, his attention to details like safety
and repeatability, and his easy instructions make the Book of
(08:24):
Secrets a proto laboratory manual. So we're gonna talk a
little bit more about that line of thinking later. So, Okay,
we've got a sense of alchemy's progression through world history.
But what was it all about besides elixirs and the
philosopher's stone. What science background made the work alchemist did
actually seem possible? Well, first, there's a fundamental confusion between
(08:47):
elements and compounds that we need to go over really quick. Okay,
So Aristotle had proposed the existence of five elements and
those were air, earth, fire, water, and quintessence. Then in
the thirteenth entry, a new text appeared by the mysterious
alchemist Pseudo Jieber. While Geebra was often associated with eighth
century Arab alchemist Jabber Abben Highen, Indiana University Professor William
(09:12):
Newman has id Gieber as Paul of Taranto, a Franciscan monk.
Newman has also traced a direct line of descent from
Al Rozzie's Book of Secrets to Jeeber's Sum of Perfection.
In the Sum of Perfection, which subsequently became pretty much
like the Bible for medieval European alchemists, Geeber honed down
this idea of elements to include just two. All medals
(09:33):
were varying combinations of mercury and sulfur. So kind of
sounds like a recipe for gold maker ingredients exactly. You
just got to figure out the right ratio. So Paracelsis,
who we mentioned in the beginning, was a Swiss physician
who lived between fourteen ninety three and fifteen forty one,
and he further developed the ideas of Geeber. He proposed
(09:56):
that there were actually three basic substances sulfur, mercury, and salt.
But still, you know, you're working with a limited quantity
of things and trying to make gold out of that.
Because Paracelsis was a prominent physician, one who believed in
observation as the best way of learning a new type
of medical alchemy, really rose up around him and his style,
(10:18):
and many doctors alchemist scientists worked in Prague in the
court of Rudolph the second sort of striving to um
to do experiments based on Paracelsis ideas. But alchemy wasn't
all about mixing gold from scratch from these base elements.
It eventually became about growing gold too, And I really
(10:39):
think this is sort of the most interesting aspect of alchemy,
at least for me. But we need some context for
this as well, because why would anyone think that they
could grow gold. So in the sixteenth century Europe, there
was a belief that everything in the universe was alive,
and not just plants and animals, but minerals too. Like
(11:00):
don't know, if you've ever grown your own crystals and
a crystal kit when you were a kid, you can
kind of understand where they might have been coming from.
But according to a History Today article titled a New
Light on Alchemy, people thought that minerals really grew from
seeds that started out deep below the earth and matured
gradually as they rose. So again, not too too crazy,
(11:22):
because sometimes metal veins under the earth really do look
tree like in the way that they branch off into
different veins. But the key here was the speed in
which the seeds grew and developed and the materials that
the minerals passed through. So, for instance, lava was considered
a lower form because it obviously rose through the ground
(11:43):
rapidly and wasn't anything special, at least to the sixteenth
century Europeans who were thinking about this. Gold, on the
other hand, was believed to rise very very slowly through
the earth, taking its sweet time, and ultimately coming out
in the per ficked form. So one idea was that
the material that gold passed through on its way up
(12:06):
from the low regions of the earth was the philosopher's stone,
something that was around us but essentially unknown. So if
you could figure out what the philosopher's stone was, you
could make gold, and by extension, you'd have the key
to perfection, something that could be applied to other worlds,
to plants, animals. It would basically be the universal cure.
(12:29):
So it wasn't all about making gold for the sake
of having lots of money. It had that other aspect,
that perfect desire for perfection aspect to it as well.
An alchemists theories weren't dumb by any means lead or
does often contain silver, silver or does often contain gold.
They saw these as things that were in process or ripening,
(12:50):
and gold making wasn't the only goal of alchemy either.
Other goals included the quest to find the universal solvent,
the elixir of life or universal medicine, the ability to
reincarnate plants and animals from their ashes, and also the
ability to generate many humans from semen and rotted horse stung.
(13:11):
So that one sounds a little bit out there, but
we should also mention that alchemy was also closely tied
with Christian and Gnostic and neo Platonic ideas, And you
couldn't just perform the experiment, so you couldn't be the
modern um, cool headed chemist working in the lab. You
had to be in the right mindset. You had to
(13:32):
be completely in the game. Essentially. In the History Today
article we mentioned even suggested that that strong belief system
might have come out of the frustration of failed experiments.
If you just realized that you never could make goal
no matter how hard you tried, you might explain that
as something you weren't quite with it. You weren't thinking
(13:52):
the way you should have been. But just because experiments
to turn lead or whatever base metal into gold did
always end in frustration. Sorry, it would have taken a
nuclear reaction to make that work, guys, doesn't mean that
alchemists didn't pick up a trick or two along the way.
Alchemists did figure out things like distillation acid base reactions,
(14:13):
precipitation from solution, and the refining of metals. They also
created new alloys conceived of atoms long before atomic theory,
and repeated experiments, also making sure that they were repeatable,
of a basic requirement for lab experiments like the scientific method.
They also began to shift in medicine away from plants
(14:34):
towards minerals and Discover magazine. Dr Newman says that quote
the goals of eighteenth century chemistry, namely to understand the
material composition of things through analysis and synthesis and to
make useful products such as pharmaceuticals, pigments, porcelain, and various
refined chemicals, were largely inherited from sixteenth and seventeenth century alchemists.
(14:56):
So that makes us have to ask the question, if
alchemy was science based, albeit somewhat mystical, why did it
develop such a bad reputation. Even John Diaz we talked
about in the recent podcast, who was living in the
sixteenth and seventeenth century, suffered from his later dabbling in
alchemy and conversations with angels that really kind of ruined
(15:19):
his career in a way. Later scientific geniuses like Isaac
Newton spent thirty years working on alchemy, more than he
did on physics and mathematics combined, but he tried to
keep his interest secret. Again, according to Dr Newman, who
has extensively studied Newton's secret notebooks, he says, quote, alchemy
became a danger to one's reputation when interest bled into enthusiasm.
(15:44):
There were just a few fundamental problems with alchemy that
were kind of hard to overcome. Yeah. One was that
the quest for gold brought in swindlers. We mentioned Charlatan's
in the beginning and how they were hanged for alchemy.
Alchemists were also very secretive of thus alchemy's obscure texts
and strange metaphors for chemicals or experiments like Babylonian dragons,
(16:06):
green lions, toads that decompose and turn into ravens, neptunes
tried and we're going to talk a little more about
that stuff too. And finally, authorities didn't want anyone to
make gold and devalue the currency. Lots of countries made
it illegal to transmitt metals, though they'd often secretly patronize
their own alchemists out with the other guys, so they,
you know, on the assumption that you can do it.
(16:28):
Please don't, please don't, But just in case, I'm going
to have an insurance policy in my own alchemists. But
despite the eventually obvious connection to chemistry, alchemy was still
seen as a shameful beginning for the science, and one
Thomas Thompson called alchemy the quote rude and disgraceful beginnings
of chemistry. Robert Boyle, who is a founder of modern chemistry,
(16:52):
was embarrassed by his interest in alchemy. He called it
a quote empty, vain and deceitful study. So what do
you do if the science that you want to pursue,
that you want to study is just mired in the
bad imagery of magicians and astrologers and charlatans. You rebrand.
You just create a whole new name, and you keep
(17:14):
doing the same old things. So Boile and other respectable
types started calling themselves chemists chemist spelled with a Y,
and according to Lawrence Prince HiPE, who is a chemist
and a historian of science, that JOHNS. Hopkins and a
colleague of Dr Newman's, over the next few decades after
Boyle was working in in chemistry, these chemists distanced themselves
(17:36):
almost entirely from alchemy. They had a new name and
a new outlook on science. But it's not that they
weren't doing the same work. Prince chop A can't find
written evidence that the new breed of chemists tried to
refute the idea of metallic transmutation. Some were still looking
to create gold from base metals as late as seventeen
(17:58):
sixty and in JOHNS. Hopkins magazine, Dr Princeipe is quoted
as saying, quote, current scholarship is only now revealing how
artificial and contrived the distinction between alchemy and chemistry really was.
So it was seriously just a name change. Yeah, And
Prince pay and Newman have both worked to recreate some
of the old alchemists experiments. I think this is so interesting.
(18:19):
It kind of reminded me of our old Um episode
on historical beer, Historical Bruise and they've used recreations of
fifteen sevent century lab where and really gone to a
lot of trouble to get the right kind of chemicals,
um right minerals and things that would have been available
at the time, and the experiments. The old alchemy experiments
(18:40):
have cool names like the Star of Regulus of antimony,
or the net. The question though, is do they work. Obviously,
the ones that are supposed to turn a base metal
into gold do not end up working, but some of
them really do show interesting kind of chemical experiments. One
recreated experiment called the True of Diana is described by
(19:02):
Newman as sounding like this quote. If you immerse a
solid amalgam of silver and mercury in nitric acid with
dissolved silver and mercury, you produce tiny twig like branches
of solid silver. So it really does look kind of
like a tree. And you can get that idea that
minerals are something that grow from seeds and and not
(19:25):
closer to the way we understand them today. So why
is there so much renewed interest in the history of
alchemy in the first place. It's partly because of the
clandestine interest of major figures like Boil and Newton, Yeah, Newton,
for instance, has these extensive journals loud notebooks on his
(19:45):
experiments in alchemy, and you can look at them, you
can try to decipher all of the code words pieuses.
And I think it must have been kind of a
shock for a lot of people who think of Newton
as just a supremely rational man that he did have
an interest in alchemy, and that it does make sense too.
(20:06):
But that brings us to a very appropriate edition of
Listener Mail. So this email is from Kiley, who wrote
in to tell us a little story that she thought
of after she listened to the old episode on the
Amber Room. She wrote, I remembered a story about how
George Habeshi, a Hungarian scientist who dissolved two Nobel prizes
(20:29):
in a mixture of acids to keep the Nazis from
finding them. The acid turned the gold of the prizes
into liquid, so it appeared to be a chemical solution
in a jar. He then placed the solution on a
shelf in his laboratory at the Neil's Boar Institute and
fled After the war. He found the solution still in
the same spot on the shelf, completely undisturbed. He was
(20:51):
able to turn the gold back into a solid and
contacted the Nobel Society, who, after hearing Habeshi's tail, was
more than happy to read cast the awards. Later on,
Haschi himself went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
I love the story because it tells of the ingenious
ways one man kept these prize pieces from the Nazis.
(21:12):
So I looked into the story a little bit more
and it turns out that that solution that can dissolve
gold is called aqua regia and um. It's one of
the things actually that was written about by Pseudo Jeeber.
Interestingly enough, but I also checked out a video by
Dr Prince pay on the Chemical and Engineering News online site,
(21:36):
and he describes the extreme metaphors of alchemists, and he
used the Aqua regia as an example. So, for instance,
ammonium chloride, which is a white volatiles solved, would have
been called the white Eagle by alchemists because it is metaphorical.
It kind of suggests what it is, but it's also
very cryptic. Another one, nitric acid would be called red
(22:00):
dragon because when it's heated, you get a lot of
red vapors and it is um. He described it kind
of almost in a hungry way. It consumes everything, so
it's kind of like a dragon. So if you made aquaregia,
you could mix nitric acid and ammonium chloride together, and
an alchemist might put that as saying, let the red
(22:20):
dragon devour the white eagle, and you wouldn't know what
on earth the alchemist was talking about unless you were
a fellow son of Hermes. Better yet, they could draw
a picture, And that's one of the neatest things about alchemy.
If you just look up pictures of the labs and
the experiments, these gorgeous woodblock prints, and so you could
(22:41):
you could do a picture of the solution by having
a red dragon devouring a white eagle. I just thought
that was so so interesting and so neat that we
can tie it into something that happened during World War
two to see sort of alchemy still being practiced in
a way. Yeah, it's funny that red dragon, white eagle
stuff reminds me of John Dee and his double sort
(23:05):
of double identity as a spy and a sorcerer. For
the creating spy like element, it's very spylight, very sneaky away,
but very cool. So thank you for writing in that
was a very neat story, and if you would like
to share any stories with us, you can write us
always at history podcast at how stuff Works dot com.
(23:26):
You can also suggest ideas for future podcasts there. We
also have a little bit of news that we wanted
to share, and that's that we have been nominated by
you guys, I guess for a podcast award, for a
People's Choice Podcast Award, which were very psyched about, and
voting has opened up. It is open until October. Is
(23:47):
that right, Sarah? I think that's right. You can vote
every single day until then. You can vote once a
day at the Podcast Awards website which is podcast Awards
dot com. And we're in the education category. Yeah, so
please go there if you get a chance. That really
takes few seconds. We'd love it if you guys voted
for us, if you like us, of course, and see
what happens there. Other than that, if you want to
(24:08):
find out a little bit more about the stuff that
we talked about in this podcast, there is a related
episode on Stuff they Don't Want You to Know, one
of our sister podcasts on Alchemy also, and we have
an article on our website called how Isaac Newton worked,
and you can look that up by visiting our homepage
at www dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure
(24:32):
to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join how stuf Work staff as we explore the most
promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House to Works
iPhone app has a rise. Download it today on iTunes
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