April 27, 2019 • 21 mins
We're revisiting an episode from Sarah and Deblina from 2011. 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 why don't we call chemistry alchemy?
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. This week, we have an episode coming
up that is related to alchemy, and at first I thought,
as I was researching it that I would want to
spend the first part of the episode talking a little
bit about alchemy's overall history. But it turns out Sarah
and Bablina did a whole episode on alchemy back in
October as one of their Halloween episodes that year, so
(00:23):
we've pulled that one out of the archive for listeners
who want to brush up on their alchemy knowledge. Enjoy
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chocolate Boarding,
(00:46):
and today we're going to do something we rarely do.
We're gonna talk about chemistry a little bit and more
generally the history of science and more 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
(01:08):
may not have let something on fire. Maybe a French book.
You know, I got a good grade, but I don't
know if i'm why did you? Guys? Why did you
get a good grade after you sent on fire? Maybe
we shouldn't go into that too much. Let's let's leave that.
My beginnings in chemistry were not illustrious either, although I
(01:30):
did almost minor in chemistry. That's an interesting choice. Yeah,
I did. I was one class short of a chemistry minor,
and 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
(01:51):
class that I would have taken to maybe it would
have been just as difficult. But reading and writing would
you get to the higher levels, and studying a foreign language,
it's 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. Understandable. I definitely remember
(02:13):
people in college complaining about that one. So, as we're
gonna find out today, chemistry and alchemy are pretty closely related.
But 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, was an
astrologist and a spy and quite a few other things
too as a talented man. But we've also been getting
(02:36):
repeat listeners suggestions for other alchemists like Nicola Flamel and Paracelsus.
So all of this really got me wondering, though, what
exactly is alchemy. I mean, I know most people understand
the crystopia aspect, so that idea that bass metals could
be transmuted into gold, and many many people have probably
(02:57):
heard of the Philosopher's Stone through here Ry Potter Deplina.
You're probably just learning that now. But aside from that,
there's a 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
(03:19):
slave over a hot fire, making packs with the devil
and combining alchemy with necromancy and magic, or those broken
down old men who waste their intelligence and fortunes laboring
to carry out hopeless experiments and dank dungeons. Those are
the alchemy stereotypes we think of, yeah exactly, or I mean,
worst of all, there are those, as we saw on
(03:40):
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 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 Dog, which
(04:01):
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 gold marks from each, promising to multipletum.
He dropped the coins in a crucible filled with acids, mercury, lead, salt, eggshells,
and horse stung and set to fanning the fire. But
(04:24):
before he could get the bellows going, there was a
huge explosion, a cloud of fumes, and then sure enough,
a missing alchemists. So that's just an example. Yeah, so,
I mean there were these charlatans, but to only look
at alchemy as a quack's pursuit or a charlatan's game
really isn't fair. And it turns out that much of
(04:45):
modern chemistry really does, as we mentioned, have roots and alchemy.
It's just that the real scientists I'm making air quotes
right now didn't always 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 beginnings. Yes,
(05:07):
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 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, sick to healthy,
(05:30):
earthly to heavenly. Chinese alchemy, for instance, was really very
medicine focused and 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 Hung who
lived in the fourth century and Sunsum Yao who lived
in the seventh century, provided these elixirs of life. And
(05:54):
I really love this detail that the British historian Joseph
Needham has even a m to 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, it reasons
that eventually, uh, it might not work out in your favor.
(06:15):
Indian alchemy was also more akin to what we might
see as early medicine today, also really elixir based, although
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
(06:39):
from Hellenistic Egypt. The earliest known Western alchemist is Sasimos
of Panopolis, who lived around three 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.
(07:00):
Almost feel like that needs to be a scary voice,
like the stone that was not a stone, is not
a stone? Should have told me at the time, a
Harry Potter kind of voice. But also around this time,
Alexander the Great was said to have discovered the Emerald tablet,
(07:22):
which itself contained thirteen cryptic axioms related to alchemy, in
the tomb of Hermes thrice Great in Egypt, and alchemists
really ran with this distinction, this connection to Hermes and
deeing themselves the sons of Hermes or hermetic philosophers. And
just one thing to keep in mind, and we're going
to talk about this kind of a lot later, but
(07:44):
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 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
(08:06):
tight knit closed community, so Arab scholars further honed the
alchemical texts in the ninth century, in the tenth century,
and from there it eventually spread to Europe during the
Scholastic Renaissance of the 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
(08:28):
really a well known um doctor and writer of medical
text By later medieval Europeans he had a whole different name,
whole different identity for that, but among alchemists he was
best known for his Book of Secrets, which was really straightforward,
very clearly written, essentially a catalog of lab procedures concerned
(08:49):
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 safe and repeatability, and his
easy instructions make the Book of Secrets a proto laboratory manual.
So we're going to talk a little bit more about
that line of thinking later. So, okay, we've got a
(09:10):
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 elements and compounds that we
need to go over really quick. Okay, So Aristotle had
(09:31):
proposed the existence of five elements, and those were air, earth, fire, water,
and quintessence. Then in the thirteenth century, a new text
appeared by the mysterious alchemist Pseudo Jieber. While Gibra was
often associated with eighth century Arab alchemist Jabber Ebben High
In Indiana University professor William Newman has ideed Giber as
(09:52):
Paul of Tarantou, a Franciscan monk. Newman has also traced
a direct line of descent from Al Rozzie's Book of
Secrets to Jeebers some 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 were varying combinations of mercury
(10:14):
and sulfur. So it kind of sounds like a recipe
for gold making than to ingredients exactly. You just got
to figure out the right ratio. So Paracelsus, 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 that there
(10:35):
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 Paracelsus
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, and
(10:57):
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 think
(11:18):
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
I don't know, if you've ever grown your own crystals
(11:41):
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,
because sometimes metal veins under the earth really do look
(12:04):
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
rapidly and wasn't anything special, at least to the sixteenth
(12:26):
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 perfect form. So one idea was that the
material that gold passed through on its way up from
the low regions of the earth. Was the Philosopher's stone,
(12:49):
something that was around us but essentially unknown. So if
you could figure out what the philosopher's stone was, you
can 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.
So it wasn't all about making gold for the sake
(13:10):
of having lots of money. It had that other aspect,
that perfect desire for perfection aspect to it as well.
And alchemist 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,
and gold making wasn't the only goal of alchemy either.
(13:32):
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.
So that one sounds a little bit out there, but
(13:53):
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
be completely in the game. Essentially. In the History Today
(14:13):
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
the way you should have been. But just because experiments
(14:34):
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,
precipitation from solution, and the refining of metals. They also
(14:56):
created new alloys conceived of atoms long before atomic theory,
and repeated experiments, also making sure that they were repeatable.
Of the basic requirement for lab experiments like the scientific method.
(15:18):
They also began to shift in medicine away from plants
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.
(15:42):
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 Die, as we
talked about in the recent podcast, who was living in
the sixteenth and seventeenth century, referred from his later dabbling
in alchemy and conversations with angels that really kind of
(16:05):
ruined 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
(16:28):
into enthusiasm. 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, thus alchemy's obscure
texts and strange metaphors for chemicals or experiments like Babylonian dragons,
(16:53):
green lions, toads that decompose and turned 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 to out with the other guys, so they,
you know, on the assumption that you can do it.
(17:15):
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. In one
Thomas Thompson called alchemy the quote rude and disgraceful beginnings
of chemistry. Robert Boyle, who is a founder of modern chemistry,
(17:38):
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 in you keep
(18:00):
doing the same old things. So Boile and other respectable
types started calling themselves chemists chemist spelled with a Y,
and according to Lawrence Princeipe, who is a chemist and
a historian of science at John's Hopkins and a colleague
of Dr Newman's, over the next few decades after Boyle
was working in in chemistry, these chemists distanced themselves almost
(18:23):
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 Hip 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 sixty
(18:45):
and in Johns Hopkins magazine, Dr Prince HiPE 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 Pa and Newman have both worked to recreate some
of the old alchemists experiments. I think this is so interesting.
(19:05):
It kind of reminded me of our old um episode
on Historical Beer historical Bruise. And they've used recreations of
fifteenth century lab ware 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 have
(19:26):
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 Tree of Diana is described by
(19:48):
Newman as sounding like this quote. If you immerse a
solid amalgam of silver and mercury and nitric acid with
dissolved silver and mercury, you produce tiny twig like ranches
a 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
(20:11):
closer to the way we understand them today. Cool. Thank
you so much for joining us on this Saturday. If
you have heard an email address or a Facebook you
are l or something similar over the course of today's episode,
since it is from the archive that might be out
(20:32):
of date now, you can email us at History podcast
at how Stuff Works dot com, and you can find
us all over social media at missed in History, and
you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts,
the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen
to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History classes a production
(20:54):
of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts
for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
Happy Saturday, everybody. This week, we have an episode coming
up that is related to alchemy, and at first I thought,
as I was researching it that I would want to
spend the first part of the episode talking a little
bit about alchemy's overall history. But it turns out Sarah
and Bablina did a whole episode on alchemy back in
October as one of their Halloween episodes that year, so
(00:23):
we've pulled that one out of the archive for listeners
who want to brush up on their alchemy knowledge. Enjoy
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chocolate Boarding,
(00:46):
and today we're going to do something we rarely do.
We're gonna talk about chemistry a little bit and more
generally the history of science and more 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
(01:08):
may not have let something on fire. Maybe a French book.
You know, I got a good grade, but I don't
know if i'm why did you? Guys? Why did you
get a good grade after you sent on fire? Maybe
we shouldn't go into that too much. Let's let's leave that.
My beginnings in chemistry were not illustrious either, although I
(01:30):
did almost minor in chemistry. That's an interesting choice. Yeah,
I did. I was one class short of a chemistry minor,
and 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
(01:51):
class that I would have taken to maybe it would
have been just as difficult. But reading and writing would
you get to the higher levels, and studying a foreign language,
it's 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. Understandable. I definitely remember
(02:13):
people in college complaining about that one. So, as we're
gonna find out today, chemistry and alchemy are pretty closely related.
But 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, was an
astrologist and a spy and quite a few other things
too as a talented man. But we've also been getting
(02:36):
repeat listeners suggestions for other alchemists like Nicola Flamel and Paracelsus.
So all of this really got me wondering, though, what
exactly is alchemy. I mean, I know most people understand
the crystopia aspect, so that idea that bass metals could
be transmuted into gold, and many many people have probably
(02:57):
heard of the Philosopher's Stone through here Ry Potter Deplina.
You're probably just learning that now. But aside from that,
there's a 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
(03:19):
slave over a hot fire, making packs with the devil
and combining alchemy with necromancy and magic, or those broken
down old men who waste their intelligence and fortunes laboring
to carry out hopeless experiments and dank dungeons. Those are
the alchemy stereotypes we think of, yeah exactly, or I mean,
worst of all, there are those, as we saw on
(03:40):
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 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 Dog, which
(04:01):
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 gold marks from each, promising to multipletum.
He dropped the coins in a crucible filled with acids, mercury, lead, salt, eggshells,
and horse stung and set to fanning the fire. But
(04:24):
before he could get the bellows going, there was a
huge explosion, a cloud of fumes, and then sure enough,
a missing alchemists. So that's just an example. Yeah, so,
I mean there were these charlatans, but to only look
at alchemy as a quack's pursuit or a charlatan's game
really isn't fair. And it turns out that much of
(04:45):
modern chemistry really does, as we mentioned, have roots and alchemy.
It's just that the real scientists I'm making air quotes
right now didn't always 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 beginnings. Yes,
(05:07):
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 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, sick to healthy,
(05:30):
earthly to heavenly. Chinese alchemy, for instance, was really very
medicine focused and 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 Hung who
lived in the fourth century and Sunsum Yao who lived
in the seventh century, provided these elixirs of life. And
(05:54):
I really love this detail that the British historian Joseph
Needham has even a m to 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, it reasons
that eventually, uh, it might not work out in your favor.
(06:15):
Indian alchemy was also more akin to what we might
see as early medicine today, also really elixir based, although
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
(06:39):
from Hellenistic Egypt. The earliest known Western alchemist is Sasimos
of Panopolis, who lived around three 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.
(07:00):
Almost feel like that needs to be a scary voice,
like the stone that was not a stone, is not
a stone? Should have told me at the time, a
Harry Potter kind of voice. But also around this time,
Alexander the Great was said to have discovered the Emerald tablet,
(07:22):
which itself contained thirteen cryptic axioms related to alchemy, in
the tomb of Hermes thrice Great in Egypt, and alchemists
really ran with this distinction, this connection to Hermes and
deeing themselves the sons of Hermes or hermetic philosophers. And
just one thing to keep in mind, and we're going
to talk about this kind of a lot later, but
(07:44):
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 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
(08:06):
tight knit closed community, so Arab scholars further honed the
alchemical texts in the ninth century, in the tenth century,
and from there it eventually spread to Europe during the
Scholastic Renaissance of the 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
(08:28):
really a well known um doctor and writer of medical
text By later medieval Europeans he had a whole different name,
whole different identity for that, but among alchemists he was
best known for his Book of Secrets, which was really straightforward,
very clearly written, essentially a catalog of lab procedures concerned
(08:49):
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 safe and repeatability, and his
easy instructions make the Book of Secrets a proto laboratory manual.
So we're going to talk a little bit more about
that line of thinking later. So, okay, we've got a
(09:10):
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 elements and compounds that we
need to go over really quick. Okay, So Aristotle had
(09:31):
proposed the existence of five elements, and those were air, earth, fire, water,
and quintessence. Then in the thirteenth century, a new text
appeared by the mysterious alchemist Pseudo Jieber. While Gibra was
often associated with eighth century Arab alchemist Jabber Ebben High
In Indiana University professor William Newman has ideed Giber as
(09:52):
Paul of Tarantou, a Franciscan monk. Newman has also traced
a direct line of descent from Al Rozzie's Book of
Secrets to Jeebers some 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 were varying combinations of mercury
(10:14):
and sulfur. So it kind of sounds like a recipe
for gold making than to ingredients exactly. You just got
to figure out the right ratio. So Paracelsus, 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 that there
(10:35):
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 Paracelsus
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, and
(10:57):
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 think
(11:18):
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
I don't know, if you've ever grown your own crystals
(11:41):
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,
because sometimes metal veins under the earth really do look
(12:04):
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
rapidly and wasn't anything special, at least to the sixteenth
(12:26):
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 perfect form. So one idea was that the
material that gold passed through on its way up from
the low regions of the earth. Was the Philosopher's stone,
(12:49):
something that was around us but essentially unknown. So if
you could figure out what the philosopher's stone was, you
can 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.
So it wasn't all about making gold for the sake
(13:10):
of having lots of money. It had that other aspect,
that perfect desire for perfection aspect to it as well.
And alchemist 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,
and gold making wasn't the only goal of alchemy either.
(13:32):
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.
So that one sounds a little bit out there, but
(13:53):
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
be completely in the game. Essentially. In the History Today
(14:13):
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
the way you should have been. But just because experiments
(14:34):
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,
precipitation from solution, and the refining of metals. They also
(14:56):
created new alloys conceived of atoms long before atomic theory,
and repeated experiments, also making sure that they were repeatable.
Of the basic requirement for lab experiments like the scientific method.
(15:18):
They also began to shift in medicine away from plants
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.
(15:42):
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 Die, as we
talked about in the recent podcast, who was living in
the sixteenth and seventeenth century, referred from his later dabbling
in alchemy and conversations with angels that really kind of
(16:05):
ruined 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
(16:28):
into enthusiasm. 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, thus alchemy's obscure
texts and strange metaphors for chemicals or experiments like Babylonian dragons,
(16:53):
green lions, toads that decompose and turned 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 to out with the other guys, so they,
you know, on the assumption that you can do it.
(17:15):
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. In one
Thomas Thompson called alchemy the quote rude and disgraceful beginnings
of chemistry. Robert Boyle, who is a founder of modern chemistry,
(17:38):
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 in you keep
(18:00):
doing the same old things. So Boile and other respectable
types started calling themselves chemists chemist spelled with a Y,
and according to Lawrence Princeipe, who is a chemist and
a historian of science at John's Hopkins and a colleague
of Dr Newman's, over the next few decades after Boyle
was working in in chemistry, these chemists distanced themselves almost
(18:23):
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 Hip 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 sixty
(18:45):
and in Johns Hopkins magazine, Dr Prince HiPE 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 Pa and Newman have both worked to recreate some
of the old alchemists experiments. I think this is so interesting.
(19:05):
It kind of reminded me of our old um episode
on Historical Beer historical Bruise. And they've used recreations of
fifteenth century lab ware 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 have
(19:26):
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 Tree of Diana is described by
(19:48):
Newman as sounding like this quote. If you immerse a
solid amalgam of silver and mercury and nitric acid with
dissolved silver and mercury, you produce tiny twig like ranches
a 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
(20:11):
closer to the way we understand them today. Cool. Thank
you so much for joining us on this Saturday. If
you have heard an email address or a Facebook you
are l or something similar over the course of today's episode,
since it is from the archive that might be out
(20:32):
of date now, you can email us at History podcast
at how Stuff Works dot com, and you can find
us all over social media at missed in History, and
you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts,
the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen
to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History classes a production
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