![]() ![]() The better way, Principe says, was to use the shortcut known as the Philosophers’ Stone – “if only you could figure out how to make it.” But it was a laborious process requiring many steps. While today we think of metals like gold and tin and lead as elements, the alchemists believed these metals were compounds, produced underground through the combination of simpler substances – a wet substance, which they called mercury, and a dry one, which they called sulfur.īy combining these simpler substances in the laboratory in just the right ratios, alchemists believed, they could turn base metals like lead into gold. The alchemists, Principe says, had a different theory of matter – one that made the “transmutation” of one element into another seem “absolutely reasonable from their point of view.” But it took many centuries for this concept of the chemical elements to evolve. Thanks to modern science we now know that matter comes in more than 100 varieties, neatly arrayed in the Periodic Table, and that most of these elements (all but the radioactive ones) are fixed and unchanging: Lead is lead, and gold is gold, and you can't turn one into the other. The long and fruitless quest to turn lead into gold seems silly to many people today – a colossal waste of time and effort. Beginning in the 12th century, it spread from Spain to the rest of Europe, reaching its peak in the 16th and 17th centuries, when it commanded the attention of scientific greats like Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. In fact, the very word “alchemy” reveals these origins – “al” is the Arabic word for “the.” From northern Africa, alchemy spread throughout the Islamic world, including Spain. The quest to make gold would occupy thousands of workers for the next 1,500 years, making alchemy the longest laboratory tradition in human history.Īfter its birth in ancient Alexandria, alchemy was embraced by Islamic scholars and became an Arabic science. What had begun as an attempt to create imitations of gold turned into a quest to make real gold from lesser metals. Small wonder this precious substance, a source of wealth and power for those who had it, drew the attention of Egypt's ancient metallurgists.īut around the time the Leyden papyrus was written, an important change took place. For thousands of years, explorers and conquerors crossed oceans, continents, deserts and mountains in pursuit of the yellow metal, sometimes dispatching whole civilizations in the process. Too soft for making tools, gold has been prized instead for its beauty and unfading luster. Of all the metals found on earth, none has so captured the human imagination. So right from its earliest days, the science of chemistry was tied up with the human fascination with gold. One of the most famous, says historian Lawrence Principe of Johns Hopkins University, is for the “water of sulfur,” a liquid that could make silver mimic the appearance of gold. Written in Egypt about 1,700 years ago and found among the wrappings of a mummy in the early 19th century, it includes dozens of metallurgical recipes. Tucked away in a vault in a Dutch museum is the earliest known document about the science of chemistry – an ancient scroll called the Leyden Papyrus. ![]()
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