Hennig Brand and the Discovery of Phosphorus

Spoiler alert: Hennig Brand discovered phosphorous by boiling pee. And phosphorous is the first element whose discoverer we can name. But he was really trying to do something else: He thought the secret to the philosopher’s stone might be found in urine. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, the production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
Every year, there's a thing in Cambridge, Massachusetts called bo Fest.
It's held in other places too, but the wedding Cambridge

(00:23):
on the m T campus is the one that I
go to. It's the Festival of bad ad hoc Hypotheses.
It's a place where people present their scientific papers, except
the scientific papers are fake and also funny and very
were well argued and sometimes really plausible on top of
being so hilarious. So like, for example, last time, the

(00:45):
winning talk was all about the role of noise in
the spread of bubonic plague in the fourteenth century, and
it was accompanied by a whole lot of pictures from
illuminated manuscripts. And I don't want to get into more
detail than that, because they put videos of all these
things online, and I want anybody who goes to watch
it to see all the hilarious reveals firsthand. It is
often a very cool blending of science and history and

(01:09):
fakery and hilarity altogether. And the reason I'm talking about
this is that the winners of this very silly, nerdy
thing used to get a three D printed representation of
Darwin looking doubtful, but now they get a trophy of
hennig Brand discovering phosphorus. Hennig Brand discovered phosphorus by boiling p.

(01:32):
So the first time I heard about this at bo Fest,
I was like, we gotta do a podcast on that.
It has has taken me a few years to actually
get to it in case it was not clear, this
episode is going to have a lot of your Internet hooray.
I love a p joke. They're very funny to me

(01:53):
because I'm crass. One of my cousins has a daughter
who's just at the age to be having sleepovers and
and at the age where mentioning of any bodily function
is just instantly hilarious. And I like, remember, as a kid,
if somebody was like pp it would just send everyone
into giggles forever. Yeah, it was very different as a child,

(02:14):
you know, I was raised with a lot of shame
about your body and anything it might do or pretty.
It wasn't until I became a little bit older and
out in the world where I was like, you guys,
urine is really funny. But as a child, if you
said something about pe to sleepover, there would be mortification
and like, oh no, it was a very different culture. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

(02:36):
a little Victorian at my house. In that regard um,
that's to the matter in hand. Bosphorus is a chemical element,
and if you need a quick chemistry refresher, elements are
a basic building block of matter, and elements are made
of atoms, and atoms are made of subatomic particles, but
you cannot take those sub atomic particles out of an
atom by ordinary chemical means. A pure piece of an

(03:00):
element like phosphorus is made of phosphorus atoms, and one
atom of phosphorus is the smallest piece of phosphorus that
you can get. Yeah, I'll take one phosphorus please. When
I wrote that, I made it almost sound like all
elements are made of phosphorus. That's not It's that all
elements are made of atoms of that type of element.

(03:22):
And so several chemical elements were known to the ancient world.
You'll see slightly different lists depending on where you look,
but in general, humans have known about gold, silver, copper, iron, lead, tin, zinc, arsenic, antimony, mercury, sulfur,
and carbon for thousands of years. Pretty much any ancient
culture that has written records names at least some of

(03:43):
these in those records. These elements have all been known
about for so long that we could not really say
who discovered them or who first concluded that there was
anything special about them. Phosphorus, on the other hand, is
the first element who's discoverer we can name, and that
was hennig Brand in about sixteen sixty nine. But unlike

(04:03):
most of the other elements we just listed, phosphorus doesn't
exist in its pure elemental form out in the natural world.
It's extremely reactive, so instead it's found in phosphate compounds.
Those compounds are used to produce elemental phosphorus, which is
called white or yellow phosphorus. White phosphorus can then be

(04:23):
used to make more stable allotropes, including red and black phosphorus.
In casual use, the words phosphorus and phosphates are used
almost interchangeably, sort of like how people say carbon I
mean carbon dioxide. Phosphates are fundamentally necessary to life on Earth.
They're part of the structure of DNA and RNA. They're
also a component and a denizine triphosphate or ATP, which

(04:47):
carries energy within all living cells. Calcium phosphate helps provide
the strength in our bones and teeth. So I mean,
it's just not an exaggeration to say that we would
be dead without phosphorus. Are very s she People have
also been intentionally using phosphorus for thousands of years before
Brand discovered it, without knowing that that was what they

(05:09):
were doing. In some parts of the world, the soil
doesn't contain a lot of phosphorus, and even in places
where the soil starts out phosphate rich, it loses its
phosphates and other nutrients over time through farming. For as
long as people have deliberately cultivated crops, they've also understood
that there was something about the soil that needed to
be replenished in order for crops to continue to thrive.

(05:32):
There a lot of the strategies people have used to
try to make their crops grow better have really been
adding phosphorus, along with the other essential nutrients of nitrogen
and potassium, back into the soil. As examples, the practice
of burning off the stubble of last year's crop doesn't
just clear the land for new planting. The ash also

(05:52):
contains phosphorus, which goes back into the soil. People have
also fertilized their crops with things like manure, urine, fish,
and easter shells, all of which contained phosphorus and other nutrients.
Crop rotation takes advantage of the differences and how different
plants use nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus to try to keep
all three of those readily available in the soil. People

(06:15):
did things like this for centuries without knowing what phosphorus
was or that the crops that they were growing needed it.
Ancient people's use of phosphorus also wasn't limited to agriculture.
As one example, for thousands of years, people have used
stale urine to clean things. A big reason for this
is that urine contains urea, which decays into ammonia when

(06:36):
it's left out for a long time. But urine also
contains a lot of phosphates, and phosphates helped make other
cleaning agents more efficient. Please don't take this as any
sort of household cleaning tip. When we were in San
Francisco at the at the end of our tour last year,

(06:58):
I went to the book Binders Museum and uh that
that I had a guided tour of the Bookbinder's Museum,
and one of the things that I learned about is
how in one element or one part of the book
binding printing process, there were these little ink daubers that
were sort of leather covered things that you would dobb
in the ink and you would put that on the

(07:18):
plate that you were going to print, and uh, if
that dried out, your apprentice had to go and clean
them and start completely over. So part of the apprentice's
job was to keep that nice and moist. And the
tour guide said, do you have any ideas of what
they might have used to clean these things? And I
was like, I bet it's urine, because that was the
thing that I could think of. It would be, you know,

(07:42):
in the early days of book binding, would probably used
to be clean to clean something. And she's specified that
it was stale urine, and that is for the reason
that we just said. So. Of course, when hennig Brand
was alive, people did not know what phosphorus was or
that it was connected to all of this, and even
after he made his discovery, people didn't really understand what

(08:05):
it was he had found. At the time, European scientists
still understood the world in terms of not the chemical
elements that we think about today, but the four elements
of earth, air, fire, and water. The field of alchemy
was just starting to evolve into the field of chemistry
when he lived, and the definition of elements was just

(08:27):
starting to evolve from those four elements into more like
today's definition. And there's more about the shift from alchemy
to chemistry in our most recent Saturday classic, but as
it relates to Hennig Brand. By the sixteen sixties, there
were still a few alchemists searching for the fabled Philosopher's Stone,
which was believed to turn base metals into gold and

(08:48):
produce an elixir that could cure diseases in prolonged life,
and Brand was one of them. Hennig Brand's discovery of
phosphorus came about because he thought the secret to the
Philosopher's Stone might be found in urine. And we'll get
to why he thought that on how he made his
discovery after a sponsor break. We do not know all

(09:15):
that much about Hennig Brand as a person. Sometimes his
name is spelled Henning instead of Hennig. Sometimes his last
name is b R. A. N. T or b R
A n D T instead of b R A n D.
He was probably born in Hamburg and what's now Germany
sometime around sixteen thirty. He seems to have spent some

(09:36):
time as a low level army officer during the Thirty
Years War, and that suggests that he was from a
middle class family because he was an officer, so probably
they were not very poor, but also he was not
of a very high rank, so they probably weren't all
that prominent either. In addition to his army service, Brand
seems to have done at least part of an apprenticeship

(09:56):
with a glassblower before turning his attention to alchemy. This
would have given him the skills to make some of
the glass vessels used in alchemy, and a glassblower's furnace
would have been useful to his alchemical pursuits as well.
At some point in all of this he married a
woman whose dowry was large enough to fund his research.
After Brand's first wife died, he remarried a woman named Margaretta,

(10:19):
who had also been married before. Her son became Brand's
assistant in his workshop, and her family's money continued to
pay for all of his experiments. He may have also
presented himself as a physician, although according to a nineteenth
century history of chemistry, he was quote an uncouth physician
who knew not a word of Latin. As we said

(10:39):
before the break, Brand was looking for the Philosopher's Stone,
which was believed to turn base metals into gold and
produce the elixir of life. Many alchemists believed that the
key to the Philosopher's Stone was somewhere in human bodily fluids,
and the fluid the Brand focused on was p Not
only is your in a bodily fluid, but it is
also yelled low, you know, like gold to be clear.

(11:02):
Bread was not the only person who thought that maybe
urine had something to do with gold. Urine was pretty
mysterious at the time. Nobody knew how the body produced
it or why it was yellow, but they did know
that it did all kinds of fascinating and seemingly magical
things we talked about. It's used as a cleaning agent
before the break, but it was also used in tanning

(11:24):
leather and dyeing fabric, and in all kinds of alchemical recipes.
Urine was also used in some methods of making saltpeter,
and then the saltpeter was used to make gunpowder, so
part of gunpowder was from urine. With all of those
things going on, it wasn't really that much of a
stretch for people to suspect that this strange, potent, seemingly

(11:45):
slightly magical liquid might be yellow because it contained gold. Today,
though we know that the yellow color mostly comes from
a substance called ur a bilon, which is one of
the end products of the bodies breaking down the iron
can painting molecule. Heam Brand's experiments with urine involved boiling
it over and over in a vessel called a retort.

(12:07):
A retort is a spherical vessel with a long, downward
pointing spout. If you heat up something in a retort,
the vapor rises then condenses in that long spout, so
you can use it to distill things. One day, as
Brand was distilling urine and his retort, the fluid dripping
out of the spout started spontaneously bursting into flame, and
it also smelled very strongly of garlic. And he found

(12:30):
if he caught it in a vessel and then stoppard
the vessel up, it would glow regardless of whether it
had been exposed to any light. I'm sorry to laugh, Brand.
It's funny though. It's like my fiery garlic glo pi.
I don't the thing is very funny. Brand thought that

(12:51):
he was onto something, perhaps even the philosopher's stone, so
he kept refining his process, producing this whitish waxy substance
that was very volatile if exposed to air, and it
had a bluish glow if it was kept away from air.
Here is his recipe for making phosphorus, as published in
Philosophical Experiments and Observations of the late eminent Doctor Robert Hook,

(13:13):
which was published in London in seventy. Since this was
almost sixty years after Brand's discovery and recorded by a
different person, it is likely that various steps have been
changed or added, but this definitely will give you a
sense of what always involved in this. So under the
heading phosphorros elementarrus by Dr Brandt of Hamburg, it reads quote,

(13:37):
take a quantity of urine, not less for one experiment
than fifty or sixty pales full. Let it lie steeping
in one or more tubs or an hogshead of oaken
wood until it putrefy and breed worms, as it will
do in fourteen or fifteen days. Then in a large kettle,

(13:58):
let some of it boil on a straw fire, and
as it consumes and evaporates, poor in more and so on,
till at last the whole quantity be reduced to a paste,
or rather a hard coal or crust, which it will resemble.
And this may be done in two or three days,
if the fire well tended, but else it may be
doing a fortnight or more. So. For one batch of phosphorus,

(14:24):
brand was leaving urine out in pails for about two
weeks and then boiling it for between two and fourteen days.
And that is not the end of the process. From
there you powder the previously made coal or crust, and
quote add their to some fair water about fifteen fingers
high or four times as high as the powder, and
boil them together for one quarter of an hour. Then

(14:47):
strain the liquor and all through a woolen cloth. That
which sticks behind may be thrown away, but the liquor
that passes must be taken and boiled till it come
to assault, which will be in a few hours. Let's
rest of peak continues on with adding more ingredients and
steeping them together until the substance became sort of a
pap which left behind a red or reddish salt after

(15:09):
being evaporated in sand. And then that went into a
retort and quote for the first hour began with a
small fire, more the next, a greater the third, and
more the fourth, and then continue it as high as
you can for twenty four hours, sometimes by the force
of fire twelve hours, proud as enough for when you
free the recipient white and shining with the fire, and

(15:32):
there are no more flashes or as it were, blasts
of wind coming from time to time from the retort,
then the work is finished, and you may with a
feather gather the fire together, or scrape it off with
a knife where it sticks. This recipe goes on to
stress the need to preserve this fire in an airtight container,
and how if you put it in the sun it
might quote kindle gunpowder. I think that might just mean explode.

(16:01):
Uh this This recipe also contains a cautionary tale quote.
My author says he had once wrapped a knob in
wax at Hanover, and being in his pocket, and he
busy near the fire, the very heat of it let
in flame and burned all his clothes and his fingers also,
for though he rubbed them in the dirt, nothing would
quench it unless he had water. He was ill for

(16:23):
fifteen days and the skin came off, So don't do that.
We should note that it's possible that Paracelsus used a
similar process to produce phosphorus. In the sixteenth century, more
than a hundred years before Brand's discovery, he wrote about
a process for repeatedly distilling urine, which would cause what
he described as the earth, air, and water to rise

(16:46):
while the fire fell out of it. After doing this
several times, he said there would be quote congealed certain icicles,
which are the element of fire. That sounds close enough
to what Brand was doing that these icicles could have
been phosphorus. But it we also really don't know. It
just merits mentioning as a potential comparative. Paracelsus has been

(17:07):
on my episode list for a very long time, long
enough that I was getting ready to do it, and
then saw Bones did it, and I didn't want to
feel like I was copying saw Bones, even though not
everybody listens to both shows. But now it's been long enough,
maybe he will keep farther up the list. There are
also other accounts that describe Brand's process a little differently

(17:28):
than that recipe that we just went through, and in
one of them, the salts that are produced after the
first round of distilling the urine are discarded. That is
actually where most of the phosphorus would have been at
that point in the process, So if Brand was doing
it that way, he would have been throwing away most
of what he was trying to get. Regardless, though this
was a long, involved, complicated, and frankly gross process. A

(17:52):
seventeen sixty seven Dictionary of Chemistry described it as more
curious than useful, along with being quote both costly and embarrassing.
But Brand was very fond of his costly, embarrassing discovery.
He named it cold fire, or sometimes just my fire.
It's not clear who was the first person to call
it phosphorus, which is from Latin words that mean bringer

(18:15):
of light or light bringer. That same term has also
been used to describe a variety of other glowing substances.
Brand kept his discovery secret for about six years, and
we'll get to what happened when knowledge spread about it.
After we first have a little sponsor break. Henning Brand's

(18:41):
discovery became public knowledge through a murky series of events
involving two other men named Johan Kuncle and Johan Daniel Kraft, who,
like a lot of other people in the story, worked
in both chemistry and alchemy. It seems as though Kuncle
had a piece of Bologna stone, and this was a
rock that was for described in sixteen oh three by

(19:02):
Vincenzo Cascarolo, and this stone glowed in the dark. Cascarolo
was a shoemaker, and like so many other people, he
was hoping to find gold. He had collected a bunch
of interesting rocks from the mountains near his home in
Bologna and what is now Italy, and he discovered that
if you baked them and then left them out in
the sun, they would glow in the dark. Bologna Stone

(19:23):
became a curiosity and a source of fascination as people
wondered whether there was something magical about it and whether
it might have something to do with the Philosopher's Stone.
Galileo described it this way in sixteen twelve quote, it
must be explained how it happens that the light is
conceived into the stone and is given back after some time.
As in Childbirth today we know that Bologna stone was

(19:46):
in fact Baryam sulfide. I love how so many elements
of this story. You're like, what if I baked some rocks?
What if I had distilled p over and over. So
Kuncle was intrigued not only by Bologna's owned, but also
by all kinds of other luminescent substances. And so when
he heard that somebody in Hamburg had created something that

(20:07):
glowed indefinitely, he got really excited, and he wrote a
letter to Craft about going to Hamburg to see what
this was all about. In some versions of the story,
Kunkle and Craft went together and Brand taught them both
how to make phosphorus after Craft paid him to do it.
But in other versions of the story, Craft swooped in
ahead of Kunkle and paid Brand not only to show

(20:27):
him how to make phosphorus, but also to keep that
information from Craft. Yeah, then that version of the Storycraft
had to work it out for himself, And regardless of
which of these is more accurate, both Kuncle and Craft
did wind up knowing how to make phosphorus. Craft started
traveling around Europe with phosphorus and other glowing substances, and
he did experiments with them before nobles and dignitaries. This

(20:51):
included Friedrich Wilhelm, Duke Collector of Brandenburg, Prussia, on April
sixteen seventy six, and then a year later crafted the
same him at the court of Johann Friedrich, Duke of Brunswick,
Luneburg and Hanover. Kraft's friend Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, was, among
other things, the Duke's librarian, and Leibnitz suggested that maybe

(21:13):
phosphorus could be used to light a whole room, but
Kraft said production of that much of it would be
just way too difficult. Even so, the Duke became intrigued
with the idea of setting up a mass production facility
out in the Hearts Mountains, presumably so the smell of
it wouldn't bother people. Leibnitz negotiated with brand to come
to Hanover to work on the project, and he recruited

(21:34):
a workforce and started stockpiling lots of firewood and barrels
full of urine. It's not a hundred percent clear where
all of this urine came from, and these stories like
there's one account that says that Brand had a relationship
with a tavern keeper or a brewer or some other
person who would have a clientele that pete a lot

(21:56):
but a little vague. Meanwhile, Gustav Adolf, the Duke of
Mecklenburg Gustrau, also heard about phosphorus and decided that he
also wanted to start a phosphorus factory as well, and
this Deuce representative Johad Waki Betcher started trying to recruit

(22:17):
Brand away from Hanover. It seems as though Brand tried
to use Betcher's offer to negotiate for more money from Hanover,
but he wasn't really savvy enough to do this, and
instead he just came off as kind of cranky and obstinate.
And in the middle of all of this, Kraft started
writing to Hanover as well, suggesting that he might actually
be a better manager than Brand for this whole phosphorus

(22:39):
production project. Leibnitz persuaded the Duke to keep working with Brand,
and it appears that during all of this Brand did
finally document his methods for making phosphorus. He apparently ran
a mass production facility out in the mountains for a
few months, then in the late sixteen seventies, phosphorus and
the knowledge of how to make it reached England. Robert Boyle,

(23:03):
who was one of the founders of modern chemistry, heard
about brands production of phosphorus from urine, and he independently
worked out his own way to do the same thing.
About ten years later. Boyle then worked to establish a
phosphorus production facility in London. As phosphorus became more available,
demand for its skyrocketed. It went from being a curiosity

(23:24):
that people thought may or may not be the philosopher's
stone to something that had, at least in theory practical uses.
Johan Kunkel figured out how to cast phosphorus into molds
underwater and wrote a treatise on the use of phosphorus
in medicine called Treatise of the Phosphorus Mirabilius and its
Wonderful Shining Pills. Soon, phosphorus was being marketed as a cure,

(23:45):
all prepared in a variety of pills and oils and lineaments.
It was recommended for alcoholism, apoplexy, asthma, cataracts, cholera, colic depression, epilepsy, fever, glaucoma, gout, impotence, migraines, paralysis,
scrawfiel a, tennis, toothaches, and tuberculosis, and that is only
to name a few. Although phosphates have some medical uses,

(24:06):
pure phosphorus does not treat any of these things, and
is in fact highly toxic and can be used as
a poison. Henning Brand died around seen and about thirty
years later Andrea's Sigismund monograph discovered phosphorus in edible seeds.
He concluded that people were consuming phosphorus in their food
and then excreting it in their urine, and this was

(24:27):
the first step in the scientific communities understanding of phosphorus
as a chemical element and of its movement through the
world in the phosphorus cycle. This is a cycle that
begins with phosphate rich rock and moves through water and
soil into plants and animals, then back into the water
and soil, and then into sedimentary rock. By the early
nineteenth century, phosphorus was seeing large scale industrial production thanks

(24:51):
to the discovery that it could be extracted from bone ash,
most notably white phosphorus was used to make matches, which
is something that we talked at about in a prior
episode on the London match Girls Strike. White phosphorus was
really dangerous though it caused a serious medical condition known
as Fossey jaw, and in eighteen forty nine, red phosphorus

(25:11):
was introduced as a less dangerous substitute. By eighteen fifty one,
phosphorus was seeing more practical uses, including in manufactured fertilizers.
This actually led to a supply and demand problem, which
led people to look for new sources of phosphorus. One
of these was guano. Guano itself is rich in phosphates, nitrogen,

(25:31):
and potassium, making it an excellent fertilizer. The sedimentary rocks
that form in places with lots of guano are also
rich in phosphates, and this led to a land graund
for islands and caves with lots of guano. In eighteen
fifty six, U S Congress past the Guano Islands Act,
which allowed the United States to claim uninhabited islands to

(25:52):
mine the guano on them. They were uninhabited by people,
They were inhabited by lots and lots of birds. Today,
the vast majority of phosphorus is mined from rocks that
are rich and calcium phosphate, and about nine of that
mind phosphorus is put to one use and that is
back to fertilizer. Phosphorus is still used for other applications

(26:13):
as well, including plastics, fuel additives, fireworks, rat poison, and
of course it is still used to make matches. It
used to be in a lot of detergents because, like
we said earlier, it helps detergents clean better. But too
much phosphate and bodies of water leads to algae overgrowths,
and so a lot of nations to be either banned
or strictly limited the use of phosphates and detergent. Phosphorus

(26:37):
is also used in weapons, including organophosphates which are chemical
weapons known as nerve gas, as well as incendiary devices
and smoke screens. Ironically, Hamburg, where phosphorus was discovered, was
hit with thousands of phosphorus containing incendiary bombs during Operation
Gomera in World War Two. Yeah, the use of phosphorus
and weapons is pretty controversial today, but it's still is used.

(27:02):
Phosphate rock is not a renewable resource. Even though the
phosphate cycle does eventually put phosphates back into rocks, it
takes a really long time, and over the past few
years there has been some discussion about whether the world
is running out of phosphorus. Phosphorus itself is not in
very short supply. It's one of the most common elements

(27:24):
on the planet, but there's not that much of it
that can be mined without huge environmental damage. Like there's
a lot of phosphorus everywhere, but only a very few
places with phosphorus and a high enough concentration to be
able to efficiently mine it. It's not totally clear exactly
how much available phosphate there is in rocks that can

(27:44):
reasonably be mined, or when we might reach peak phosphorus.
Predictions run anywhere from decades to centuries. Because the vast
majority of phosphorus is used as fertilizer for plants that
directly or indirectly become food, this shortage has the potential
to be a global catastrophe, and one of the proposed
alternatives is urine recycling or all the way back to

(28:07):
just boiling some urine until the exploding. I'm glad I
got this whole Handig brand thing out of my system
after like three years of saying I should do a
podcast on that guy and his weird urine boiling. Do
you have a little bit of listener mail that may

(28:27):
or may not include bodily fluids. It doesn't can include
any any bodily fluids. It's from Heather. Heather says, I'm
delighted to add another topic to the list of places
my podcast has intersected with miss in history. It's one
of the reasons I follow you loyally. Uh. This is
in reference to the Sappho episode, and Heather says, I
wish you had noted with regard to Higginson's translation of

(28:50):
the ode Aphrodite that, like many male translators, he silently
changed Sappho's unambiguously female pronouns for male ones in reference
to the one who flees, refuses gifts, and else to
love Sappho. The program gave the impression that the association
of Sappho with love between women is entirely a later
invention with little basis in her own work. But in
this the most complete poem we have of her, Aphrodite

(29:12):
promises Sappho that her female beloved will return her love. Heather,
who is The podcast referenced earlier in the letter is
the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast. Thank you for this note, Heather.
I read a bunch of translations of Ode to Aphrodite
to try to get one for that episode that seemed
accessible to people who didn't, necessarily, UM, have a huge

(29:35):
love of poetry or a lot of background knowledge to
make the writing makes sense. And all of them translated
it that way. So I was not aware that this
uh that the pronouns and it had been changed, But
I did want to clarify since UM, I'm not sure
how we gave that impression, because some of the other
work that we read in the episode was the opposite. UM.

(29:58):
What we talked more about is that the stigma against
same sex relationships was really a later part of the
response to her work, not that that was something that
wasn't in her work from the beginning. So just in
case other people came away from the episode with the
impression that, UM, there was no like attraction or affection

(30:20):
between women and Sappho's work like that, I would not
describe it that way at all, UM, And I think
the other poem that we read that was a lengthier
chunk was an example of that. UM. So thank you again,
Heather for that note. If you would like to write
to us about this or any other podcast for a
history podcast that how Stuff Works dot com. And then
we're all over social media at missed in History and

(30:42):
that's where you can find our Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter.
You can come to our website which is missing history
dot com and uh find show notes for all the
episodes Holly and I have done together and a searchable
archive of every episode ever. And you can subscribe to
our show on Apple, podcast, the I heart radio app,
or anywhere else you get podcasts. Stuff you Missed in

(31:08):
History Class is a production of I Heart Radio's How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit
the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.