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