March 19, 2020 • 29 mins
It's a 2019 show about urine! Spoiler alert: Hennig Brand discovered phosphorous by boiling pee. But he was trying to do something else: He thought the secret to the philosopher’s stone might be found in urine.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, everybody, Here is an episode from our ten episode
playlist that we're calling Offbeat History. Yeah, we're adding this
to our our regular publishing schedule as one kind of
big drop all at the same time on March nineteen.
And that is so that you have maybe have a
little bit of extra entertainment options available to you, particularly
(00:23):
if you are self quarantined or sheltering in place. Welcome
to Stuff you missed in History Class a production of
I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Every year, there's
(00:45):
a thing in Cambridge, Massachusetts called bo Fest. It's held
in other places too, but the wedding Cambridge on the
M I. 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 rare, well
(01:07):
argued and sometimes really plausible on top of being so hilarious.
So like, for example, last time, the 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 detailed than that,
because they put videos of all these things online and
(01:28):
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 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
(01:50):
now they get a trophy of hennig Brand discovering phosphorus.
Hennig Brand discovered phosphorus by boiling p 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
(02:12):
to have a lot of your Internet hooray. I love
a p joke. They're very funny to me 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.
(02:34):
And I like remember as a kid, if somebody was
like p P, it would just send everyone into giggles forever. Yeah,
it was very different as a child, 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.
(02:54):
But as a child, if you said something about pe
to sleepover, there would be mortification and like, oh, it's
a very different culture. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, a little
Victorian at my house in that regard. Um to the
matter in hand, phosphorus is a chemical element, and if
you need a quick chemistry refresher, elements are a basic
(03:15):
building block of matter, and elements are made of atoms,
and atoms are made of subatomic particles, but you cannot
take those subatomic particles out of an atom by ordinary
chemical means. A pure piece of an element like phosphorus
is made of phosphorus atoms, and one atom of phosphorus
is the smallest piece of phosphorus that you can get. Yeah,
(03:37):
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, 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
(03:58):
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
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
(04:20):
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
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.
(04:43):
Those compounds are used to produce elemental phosphorus, which is
called white or yellow phosphorus. White phosphorus can then be
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 to
mean carbon dioxide. Phosphates are fundamentally necessary to life on Earth.
(05:08):
They're part of the structure of DNA and RNA. They're
also a component and a denizine triphosphate or a t P,
which 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 squishy. People have also
(05:30):
been intentionally using phosphorus for thousands of years before Brand
discovered it, without knowing that that was what they 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
(05:51):
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 throw. I've 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
(06:14):
off the stubble of last year's crop doesn't just clear
the land for new planting. The ash also contains phosphorus,
which goes back into the soil. People have also fertilized
their crops with things like manure, urine, fish, and oyster shells,
all of which contained phosphorus and other nutrients. Crop rotation
takes advantage of the differences and how different plants use nitrogen, potassium,
(06:38):
and phosphorus to try to keep all three of those
readily available in the soil. People 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
(07:01):
contains urea, which decays into ammonia. When it's left out
for a long time but you're in 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
(07:23):
the at the end of our tour last year, I
went to the book Binder's Museum and uh that that
I had a guided tour of the book Binder'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 inc daubers that
were sort of leather covered things that you would doub
(07:45):
at the ink and you would put that on the
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
(08:06):
thing that I could think of. It would be you know,
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 Hennigbrand was alive,
people did not know what phosphorus was or that it
(08:28):
was connected to all of this, and even after he
made his discovery, people didn't really understand what 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
(08:50):
evolve into the field of chemistry when he lived, and
the definition of elements was just starting to evolve from
those four elements into more like today is 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
(09:10):
few alchemists searching for the fabled Philosopher's Stone, which was
believed to turn base metals into gold and 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
(09:31):
he thought that on how he made his discovery after
a sponsor break. We do not know all that much
about Hennig Brand as a person. Sometimes his name is
spelled Henning instead of Hennig. Sometimes his last name is
(09:52):
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 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
(10:13):
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 with a glass
blower 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
(10:34):
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, 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
(10:57):
himself as a physician, although a into a nineteenth century
history of chemistry, he was quote an uncouth physician who
knew not a word of Latin. As we said 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
(11:17):
to the Philosopher's Stone was somewhere in human bodily fluids,
and the fluid the Brand focused on was p Not
only is urine a bodily fluid, but it is also yellow,
you know, like gold. To be clear. Bread was not
the only person who thought that maybe urine had something
to do with gold. Urine was pretty mysterious at the time.
(11:38):
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 leather and dyeing fabric
and in all kinds of alchemical recipes. Urine was also
used in some methods of making saltpeter, and then the
(12:01):
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 slightly magical liquid
might be yellow because it contained gold. Today, though we
know that the yellow color mostly comes from a substance
(12:23):
called uribilon, which is one of the end products of
the bodies breaking down the iron containing molecule. Heam Brand's
experiments with urine involved boiling it over and over in
a vessel called a retort. 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
(12:43):
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 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.
(13:07):
I'm sorry to laugh, Brand funny though it's like my
fiery garlic glo PI. I don't the thing is very funny.
Brand thought that 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,
(13:30):
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, 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
(13:52):
steps have been changed or added, but this definitely will
give you a sense of what all was involved in this.
So under the headache phosphors element Harus by Dr Brandt
of Hamburg, it reads, quote, take a quantity of urine,
not less for one experiment than fifty or sixty pails full.
(14:13):
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, let some of it boil on
a strong fire, and as it consumes and evaporates, poor
in more, and so on, till at last the whole
(14:35):
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, brand was
leaving urine out in pals for about two weeks and
(14:55):
then boiling it for between two and fourteen days. And
that is not the to 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 strain the
(15:15):
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. This recipe 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 being evaporated in sand,
(15:39):
and then that went into a retort. End 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
(15:59):
with the five and 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
(16:23):
think that might just mean explode. Uh this This recipe
also contains a cautionary tail quote. My author says he
had once wrapped a knob in wax at Hanover, and
it being in his pocket, and he busy near the fire,
the very heat of it let in flame and burned
(16:43):
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 fifteen days and
the skin came off. So don't do that. We should
note that it's possible that Paracelsus used a mimilar process
to produce phosphorus. In the sixteenth century, more than a
(17:03):
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 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
(17:24):
what Brand was doing that these icicles could have been phosphorus.
But we also really don't know it just merits mentioning
as a potential comparative. Paracelsis has been 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
(17:46):
both shows. But now it's been long enough, maybe he
will creep farther up the list. There are also other
accounts that describe Brand's process a little differently than that
recipe that we just went through, And in one of
the um 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
(18:08):
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 seventeen
sixty seven Dictionary of Chemistry described it as more curious
than useful, along with being quote both costly and embarrassing.
(18:29):
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
of light or light bringer. That same term has also
been used to describe a variety of other glowing substances.
(18:52):
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. Hennig Brand's
discovery became public knowledge through a murky series of events
(19:13):
involving two other men named Johann 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 Uncle
had a piece of Bologna stone, and this was a
rock that was first described in sixteen o three by
Vincenzo Cascarolo, and this stone glowed in the dark. Cascarolo
(19:35):
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 in 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
became a curiosity and a source of fascination, as people
wondered whether there was something magical about it and whether
(19:57):
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
in fact Barriam sulfide I love how so many elements
(20:17):
of this story are like what if I baked some rocks?
What if I had distilled p over and over? So
Kunkle was intrigued not only by Bologna stone, but also
by all kinds of other luminescent substances. And so when
he heard that somebody in Hamburg had created something that
glowed indefinitely, he got really excited, and he wrote a
(20:38):
letter to Craft about going to Hamburg to see what
this was all about. In some versions of this 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
him how to make phosphorus, but also to keep that
information from Craft offt Yeah then that version of the story,
(21:02):
Craft 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. Crafts
started traveling around Europe with phosphorus and other glowing substances,
and he did experiments with them before nobles and dignitaries.
This included Friedrich Wilhelm, Duke Collector of Brandenburg, Prussia, on
(21:23):
April sixteen seventy six, and then a year later crafted
the same at the court of Johann Friedrich, Duke of Brunswick,
Lunenburg and Hanover. Kraft's friend Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, was among
other things, the Duke's librarian, and Leibnitz suggested that maybe
phosphorus could be used to light a whole room, but
(21:44):
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
a workforce and started stockpiling lots of firewood and barrels
(22:07):
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
but a little vague. Meanwhile, Gustav Adolf, the Duke of
(22:33):
Mecklenburg Gustrau, also heard about phosphorus and decided that he
also wanted to start a phosphorus factory as well, and
this Deuce representative Yohadwaki Betcher started trying to recruit 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
(22:56):
instead he just came off as kind of cranky and obstinate.
And in the middle of all of this, Craft started
writing to Hanover as well, suggesting that he might actually
be a better manager than Brand for this whole phosphorus
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
(23:19):
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,
who was one of the founders of modern chemistry, heard
about Brand's 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
(23:43):
phosphorus production facility in London. As phosphorus became more available,
demand for its skyrocketed. It went from being a curiosity
that people thought may or may not be the philosopher's
stone to something that had, at least in theory practical uses.
Johan kunk Will figured out how to cast phosphorus into
molds underwater and wrote a treatise on the use of
(24:05):
phosphorus in medicine called Treatise of the Phosphorus Mirabilius and
Its wonderful shining pills. Soon, phosphorus was being marketed as
a cure, all prepared in a variety of pills and
oils and liniments. It was recommended for alcoholism, apoplexy, asthma, cataracts, cholera,
colic depression, epilepsy, fever, glaucoma, gout, impotence, migraines, paralysis, scrawphula, tetanus, toothaches,
(24:29):
and tuberculosis. And that is only to name a few.
Although phosphates have some medical uses, 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 seventeen ten, and about thirty years later, Andreas
Sigismund Magraph discovered phosphorus in edible seeds. He concluded that
(24:49):
people were consuming phosphorus in their food and then excreting
it in their urine, and this was 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
(25:12):
then into sedimentary rock. By the early nineteenth century, phosphorus
was seeing large scale industrial production thanks 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 about in a prior episode on the
London Match Girls Strike. White phosphorus was really dangerous though
(25:34):
it caused a serious medical condition known as Fossey jaw,
and in eighteen forty nine, red phosphorus 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
(25:56):
was guano. Guano itself is rich in phosphates, nitrogen, 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 gram for islands and
caves with lots of guano. In eighteen fifty six, U
S Congress past the Guano Islands Act, which allowed the
(26:17):
United States to claim uninhabited islands to 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 in
calcium phosphate, and about nine of that mined phosphorus is
put to one use and that is back to fertilizer.
(26:39):
Phosphorus is still used for other applications 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
(26:59):
of nation and to be either banned or strictly limited
the use of phosphates and detergent. Phosphorus 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,
(27:24):
the use of phosphorus and weapons is pretty controversial today,
but it's still is used. Phosphate rock is not a
renewable resource. Even though the phosphate cycle does eventually put
phosphates back into rocks, that 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.
(27:47):
Phosphorus itself is not in very short supply. It's one
of the most common elements 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.
(28:08):
It's not totally clear exactly how much available phosphate there
is in rocks that can 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.
(28:30):
And one of the proposed alternatives is urine recycling or
all the way back to just boiling some urine until 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 has weird
(28:51):
urine boiling. Thank you so much for joining us today
for this classic. If you have heard any kind of
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the course of the episode, that might be obsolete. It
might be doubly obsolete because we have changed our email
address again. You can now reach us at History podcast
(29:14):
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(29:35):
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Hey, everybody, Here is an episode from our ten episode
playlist that we're calling Offbeat History. Yeah, we're adding this
to our our regular publishing schedule as one kind of
big drop all at the same time on March nineteen.
And that is so that you have maybe have a
little bit of extra entertainment options available to you, particularly
(00:23):
if you are self quarantined or sheltering in place. Welcome
to Stuff you missed in History Class a production of
I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Every year, there's
(00:45):
a thing in Cambridge, Massachusetts called bo Fest. It's held
in other places too, but the wedding Cambridge on the
M I. 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 rare, well
(01:07):
argued and sometimes really plausible on top of being so hilarious.
So like, for example, last time, the 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 detailed than that,
because they put videos of all these things online and
(01:28):
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 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
(01:50):
now they get a trophy of hennig Brand discovering phosphorus.
Hennig Brand discovered phosphorus by boiling p 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
(02:12):
to have a lot of your Internet hooray. I love
a p joke. They're very funny to me 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.
(02:34):
And I like remember as a kid, if somebody was
like p P, it would just send everyone into giggles forever. Yeah,
it was very different as a child, 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.
(02:54):
But as a child, if you said something about pe
to sleepover, there would be mortification and like, oh, it's
a very different culture. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, a little
Victorian at my house in that regard. Um to the
matter in hand, phosphorus is a chemical element, and if
you need a quick chemistry refresher, elements are a basic
(03:15):
building block of matter, and elements are made of atoms,
and atoms are made of subatomic particles, but you cannot
take those subatomic particles out of an atom by ordinary
chemical means. A pure piece of an element like phosphorus
is made of phosphorus atoms, and one atom of phosphorus
is the smallest piece of phosphorus that you can get. Yeah,
(03:37):
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, 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
(03:58):
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
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
(04:20):
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
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.
(04:43):
Those compounds are used to produce elemental phosphorus, which is
called white or yellow phosphorus. White phosphorus can then be
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 to
mean carbon dioxide. Phosphates are fundamentally necessary to life on Earth.
(05:08):
They're part of the structure of DNA and RNA. They're
also a component and a denizine triphosphate or a t P,
which 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 squishy. People have also
(05:30):
been intentionally using phosphorus for thousands of years before Brand
discovered it, without knowing that that was what they 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
(05:51):
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 throw. I've 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
(06:14):
off the stubble of last year's crop doesn't just clear
the land for new planting. The ash also contains phosphorus,
which goes back into the soil. People have also fertilized
their crops with things like manure, urine, fish, and oyster shells,
all of which contained phosphorus and other nutrients. Crop rotation
takes advantage of the differences and how different plants use nitrogen, potassium,
(06:38):
and phosphorus to try to keep all three of those
readily available in the soil. People 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
(07:01):
contains urea, which decays into ammonia. When it's left out
for a long time but you're in 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
(07:23):
the at the end of our tour last year, I
went to the book Binder's Museum and uh that that
I had a guided tour of the book Binder'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 inc daubers that
were sort of leather covered things that you would doub
(07:45):
at the ink and you would put that on the
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
(08:06):
thing that I could think of. It would be you know,
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 Hennigbrand was alive,
people did not know what phosphorus was or that it
(08:28):
was connected to all of this, and even after he
made his discovery, people didn't really understand what 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
(08:50):
evolve into the field of chemistry when he lived, and
the definition of elements was just starting to evolve from
those four elements into more like today is 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
(09:10):
few alchemists searching for the fabled Philosopher's Stone, which was
believed to turn base metals into gold and 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
(09:31):
he thought that on how he made his discovery after
a sponsor break. We do not know all that much
about Hennig Brand as a person. Sometimes his name is
spelled Henning instead of Hennig. Sometimes his last name is
(09:52):
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 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
(10:13):
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 with a glass
blower 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
(10:34):
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, 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
(10:57):
himself as a physician, although a into a nineteenth century
history of chemistry, he was quote an uncouth physician who
knew not a word of Latin. As we said 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
(11:17):
to the Philosopher's Stone was somewhere in human bodily fluids,
and the fluid the Brand focused on was p Not
only is urine a bodily fluid, but it is also yellow,
you know, like gold. To be clear. Bread was not
the only person who thought that maybe urine had something
to do with gold. Urine was pretty mysterious at the time.
(11:38):
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 leather and dyeing fabric
and in all kinds of alchemical recipes. Urine was also
used in some methods of making saltpeter, and then the
(12:01):
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 slightly magical liquid
might be yellow because it contained gold. Today, though we
know that the yellow color mostly comes from a substance
(12:23):
called uribilon, which is one of the end products of
the bodies breaking down the iron containing molecule. Heam Brand's
experiments with urine involved boiling it over and over in
a vessel called a retort. 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
(12:43):
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 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.
(13:07):
I'm sorry to laugh, Brand funny though it's like my
fiery garlic glo PI. I don't the thing is very funny.
Brand thought that 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,
(13:30):
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, 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
(13:52):
steps have been changed or added, but this definitely will
give you a sense of what all was involved in this.
So under the headache phosphors element Harus by Dr Brandt
of Hamburg, it reads, quote, take a quantity of urine,
not less for one experiment than fifty or sixty pails full.
(14:13):
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, let some of it boil on
a strong fire, and as it consumes and evaporates, poor
in more, and so on, till at last the whole
(14:35):
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, brand was
leaving urine out in pals for about two weeks and
(14:55):
then boiling it for between two and fourteen days. And
that is not the to 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 strain the
(15:15):
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. This recipe 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 being evaporated in sand,
(15:39):
and then that went into a retort. End 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
(15:59):
with the five and 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
(16:23):
think that might just mean explode. Uh this This recipe
also contains a cautionary tail quote. My author says he
had once wrapped a knob in wax at Hanover, and
it being in his pocket, and he busy near the fire,
the very heat of it let in flame and burned
(16:43):
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 fifteen days and
the skin came off. So don't do that. We should
note that it's possible that Paracelsus used a mimilar process
to produce phosphorus. In the sixteenth century, more than a
(17:03):
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 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
(17:24):
what Brand was doing that these icicles could have been phosphorus.
But we also really don't know it just merits mentioning
as a potential comparative. Paracelsis has been 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
(17:46):
both shows. But now it's been long enough, maybe he
will creep farther up the list. There are also other
accounts that describe Brand's process a little differently than that
recipe that we just went through, And in one of
the um 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
(18:08):
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 seventeen
sixty seven Dictionary of Chemistry described it as more curious
than useful, along with being quote both costly and embarrassing.
(18:29):
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
of light or light bringer. That same term has also
been used to describe a variety of other glowing substances.
(18:52):
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. Hennig Brand's
discovery became public knowledge through a murky series of events
(19:13):
involving two other men named Johann 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 Uncle
had a piece of Bologna stone, and this was a
rock that was first described in sixteen o three by
Vincenzo Cascarolo, and this stone glowed in the dark. Cascarolo
(19:35):
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 in 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
became a curiosity and a source of fascination, as people
wondered whether there was something magical about it and whether
(19:57):
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
in fact Barriam sulfide I love how so many elements
(20:17):
of this story are like what if I baked some rocks?
What if I had distilled p over and over? So
Kunkle was intrigued not only by Bologna stone, but also
by all kinds of other luminescent substances. And so when
he heard that somebody in Hamburg had created something that
glowed indefinitely, he got really excited, and he wrote a
(20:38):
letter to Craft about going to Hamburg to see what
this was all about. In some versions of this 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
him how to make phosphorus, but also to keep that
information from Craft offt Yeah then that version of the story,
(21:02):
Craft 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. Crafts
started traveling around Europe with phosphorus and other glowing substances,
and he did experiments with them before nobles and dignitaries.
This included Friedrich Wilhelm, Duke Collector of Brandenburg, Prussia, on
(21:23):
April sixteen seventy six, and then a year later crafted
the same at the court of Johann Friedrich, Duke of Brunswick,
Lunenburg and Hanover. Kraft's friend Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, was among
other things, the Duke's librarian, and Leibnitz suggested that maybe
phosphorus could be used to light a whole room, but
(21:44):
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
a workforce and started stockpiling lots of firewood and barrels
(22:07):
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
but a little vague. Meanwhile, Gustav Adolf, the Duke of
(22:33):
Mecklenburg Gustrau, also heard about phosphorus and decided that he
also wanted to start a phosphorus factory as well, and
this Deuce representative Yohadwaki Betcher started trying to recruit 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
(22:56):
instead he just came off as kind of cranky and obstinate.
And in the middle of all of this, Craft started
writing to Hanover as well, suggesting that he might actually
be a better manager than Brand for this whole phosphorus
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
(23:19):
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,
who was one of the founders of modern chemistry, heard
about Brand's 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
(23:43):
phosphorus production facility in London. As phosphorus became more available,
demand for its skyrocketed. It went from being a curiosity
that people thought may or may not be the philosopher's
stone to something that had, at least in theory practical uses.
Johan kunk Will figured out how to cast phosphorus into
molds underwater and wrote a treatise on the use of
(24:05):
phosphorus in medicine called Treatise of the Phosphorus Mirabilius and
Its wonderful shining pills. Soon, phosphorus was being marketed as
a cure, all prepared in a variety of pills and
oils and liniments. It was recommended for alcoholism, apoplexy, asthma, cataracts, cholera,
colic depression, epilepsy, fever, glaucoma, gout, impotence, migraines, paralysis, scrawphula, tetanus, toothaches,
(24:29):
and tuberculosis. And that is only to name a few.
Although phosphates have some medical uses, 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 seventeen ten, and about thirty years later, Andreas
Sigismund Magraph discovered phosphorus in edible seeds. He concluded that
(24:49):
people were consuming phosphorus in their food and then excreting
it in their urine, and this was 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
(25:12):
then into sedimentary rock. By the early nineteenth century, phosphorus
was seeing large scale industrial production thanks 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 about in a prior episode on the
London Match Girls Strike. White phosphorus was really dangerous though
(25:34):
it caused a serious medical condition known as Fossey jaw,
and in eighteen forty nine, red phosphorus 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
(25:56):
was guano. Guano itself is rich in phosphates, nitrogen, 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 gram for islands and
caves with lots of guano. In eighteen fifty six, U
S Congress past the Guano Islands Act, which allowed the
(26:17):
United States to claim uninhabited islands to 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 in
calcium phosphate, and about nine of that mined phosphorus is
put to one use and that is back to fertilizer.
(26:39):
Phosphorus is still used for other applications 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
(26:59):
of nation and to be either banned or strictly limited
the use of phosphates and detergent. Phosphorus 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,
(27:24):
the use of phosphorus and weapons is pretty controversial today,
but it's still is used. Phosphate rock is not a
renewable resource. Even though the phosphate cycle does eventually put
phosphates back into rocks, that 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.
(27:47):
Phosphorus itself is not in very short supply. It's one
of the most common elements 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.
(28:08):
It's not totally clear exactly how much available phosphate there
is in rocks that can 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.
(28:30):
And one of the proposed alternatives is urine recycling or
all the way back to just boiling some urine until 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 has weird
(28:51):
urine boiling. Thank you so much for joining us today
for this classic. If you have heard any kind of
email address or maybe a Facebook you r l during
the course of the episode, that might be obsolete. It
might be doubly obsolete because we have changed our email
address again. You can now reach us at History podcast
(29:14):
at I heart radio dot com, and we're all over
social media at missed in History and you can subscribe
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heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
Stuffy miss in History Class is a production of I
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