Speaker 1: Happy Saturday, everybody. This week, we have an episode coming
Speaker 1: up that is related to alchemy, and at first I thought,
Speaker 1: as I was researching it that I would want to
Speaker 1: spend the first part of the episode talking a little
Speaker 1: bit about alchemy's overall history. But it turns out Sarah
Speaker 1: and Bablina did a whole episode on alchemy back in
Speaker 1: October as one of their Halloween episodes that year, so
Speaker 1: we've pulled that one out of the archive for listeners
Speaker 1: who want to brush up on their alchemy knowledge. Enjoy
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
Speaker 1: to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chocolate Boarding,
Speaker 1: and today we're going to do something we rarely do.
Speaker 1: We're gonna talk about chemistry a little bit and more
Speaker 1: generally the history of science and more specifically the history
Speaker 1: of alchemy. And I thought it might be fun to
Speaker 1: just maybe kick it off with our own experiences in
Speaker 1: chemistry mine or maybe not so illustrious. I don't think
Speaker 1: I've taken chemistry since eleventh grade, and I may or
Speaker 1: may not have let something on fire. Maybe a French book.
Speaker 1: You know, I got a good grade, but I don't
Speaker 1: know if i'm why did you? Guys? Why did you
Speaker 1: get a good grade after you sent on fire? Maybe
Speaker 1: we shouldn't go into that too much. Let's let's leave that.
Speaker 1: My beginnings in chemistry were not illustrious either, although I
Speaker 1: did almost minor in chemistry. That's an interesting choice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I did. I was one class short of a chemistry minor,
Speaker 1: and then I chose to minor in German instead because
Speaker 1: I was also one class away from a German miner,
Speaker 1: and I thought that would be easier. Big mistake. That
Speaker 1: was not easy. German was not easier than chemistry. Well,
Speaker 1: I don't know, because I didn't take the final chemistry
Speaker 1: class that I would have taken to maybe it would
Speaker 1: have been just as difficult. But reading and writing would
Speaker 1: you get to the higher levels, and studying a foreign language,
Speaker 1: it's pretty difficult. I was actually one class short of
Speaker 1: a French major, so I know where you're coming from.
Speaker 1: I'm just curious. What was the last chemistry class? Organic
Speaker 1: chemistry one, which was kind of my downfall. I preferred
Speaker 1: in organic chemistry to organic chemistry. Understandable. I definitely remember
Speaker 1: people in college complaining about that one. So, as we're
Speaker 1: gonna find out today, chemistry and alchemy are pretty closely related.
Speaker 1: But we've seen alchemy pop up quite a bit lately
Speaker 1: in the podcast, most recently with the episode on John
Speaker 1: d who, in addition to being an alchemist, was an
Speaker 1: astrologist and a spy and quite a few other things
Speaker 1: too as a talented man. But we've also been getting
Speaker 1: repeat listeners suggestions for other alchemists like Nicola Flamel and Paracelsus.
Speaker 1: So all of this really got me wondering, though, what
Speaker 1: exactly is alchemy. I mean, I know most people understand
Speaker 1: the crystopia aspect, so that idea that bass metals could
Speaker 1: be transmuted into gold, and many many people have probably
Speaker 1: heard of the Philosopher's Stone through here Ry Potter Deplina.
Speaker 1: You're probably just learning that now. But aside from that,
Speaker 1: there's a really unsavory aspect about the whole science of
Speaker 1: alchemy really, and I mean that was what honestly got
Speaker 1: my attention with the subject in the first place. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it really calls to mind those dangerous Merlin types who
Speaker 1: slave over a hot fire, making packs with the devil
Speaker 1: and combining alchemy with necromancy and magic, or those broken
Speaker 1: down old men who waste their intelligence and fortunes laboring
Speaker 1: to carry out hopeless experiments and dank dungeons. Those are
Speaker 1: the alchemy stereotypes we think of, yeah exactly, or I mean,
Speaker 1: worst of all, there are those, as we saw on
Speaker 1: the John d podcast, there are those Charlatans who prey
Speaker 1: off people's desire for wealth and try to get wealth
Speaker 1: for themselves. Not that those aren't sometimes, or that they
Speaker 1: weren't sometimes legitimate scenarios. Alchemy was often illegal. Charlatan alchemists
Speaker 1: were sometimes hanged. In the fifteen nineties and Dog, which
Speaker 1: was kind of the center of alchemy in Europe at
Speaker 1: the time, a mystery alchemist of Arabic origin showed up,
Speaker 1: gathered the richest merchants and bankers of the city together,
Speaker 1: and took one hundred gold marks from each, promising to multipletum.
Speaker 1: He dropped 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 alchemists. So that's just an example. Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: I mean there were these charlatans, but to only look
Speaker 1: at alchemy as a quack's pursuit or a charlatan's game
Speaker 1: really isn't fair. And it turns out that much of
Speaker 1: modern chemistry really does, as we mentioned, have roots and alchemy.
Speaker 1: It's just that the real scientists I'm making air quotes
Speaker 1: right now didn't always own up to it. So we
Speaker 1: decided it is time for a Halloween makeover for the
Speaker 1: science or the art of alchemy. Of course, though something
Speaker 1: like alchemy is going to have really obscure beginnings. Yes,
Speaker 1: it is old. It's likely that it sprang up independently
Speaker 1: in different spots around the world, influenced by older arts
Speaker 1: like metallurgy, medicine, and almost always closely connected to religion, prophecy,
Speaker 1: or philosophy. It often had the same goal to no
Speaker 1: matter what part of the world we're talking about, transmutation
Speaker 1: for the better, so lead to gold, sick to healthy,
Speaker 1: earthly to heavenly. Chinese alchemy, for instance, was really very
Speaker 1: medicine focused and influenced by Daoist beliefs, the idea that
Speaker 1: immortality could be obtainable went back as far as the
Speaker 1: fourth century BC. Yeah, so Chinese alchemists like Hung who
Speaker 1: lived in the fourth century and Sunsum Yao who lived
Speaker 1: in the seventh century, provided these elixirs of life. And
Speaker 1: I really love this detail that the British historian Joseph
Speaker 1: Needham has even a m to to determine which Chinese
Speaker 1: emperors might have died from elixir poisoning, because if you
Speaker 1: are on this quest for uh immortality, and you're willing
Speaker 1: to drink just about anything to get it, it reasons
Speaker 1: that eventually, uh, 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 elixir 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 Sasimos
Speaker 1: of Panopolis, who lived around three a d. And his
Speaker 1: theory was that there was a magical substance that could
Speaker 1: transform things. He called it a tincture, and it had
Speaker 1: a few varieties. This tincture eventually became associated with the
Speaker 1: philosopher's stone, or the quote stone that is not a stone.
Speaker 1: Almost feel like that needs to be a scary voice,
Speaker 1: like the stone that was not a stone, is not
Speaker 1: a stone? Should have told me at the time, a
Speaker 1: Harry Potter kind of voice. But also around this time,
Speaker 1: Alexander the Great was said to have discovered the Emerald tablet,
Speaker 1: which itself contained thirteen cryptic axioms related to alchemy, in
Speaker 1: the tomb of Hermes thrice Great in Egypt, and alchemists
Speaker 1: really ran with this distinction, this connection to Hermes and
Speaker 1: deeing themselves the sons of Hermes or hermetic philosophers. And
Speaker 1: just one thing to keep in mind, and we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about this kind of a lot later, but
Speaker 1: the number one rule of this brotherhood was to keep
Speaker 1: it in the brotherhood. Don't go telling your secrets of
Speaker 1: alchemy to people who don't understand it. It was understood
Speaker 1: that if you devoted your lifetime to studying something like this,
Speaker 1: you could talk to your fellows, you could share experiments.
Speaker 1: Maybe not even then, but it was all a very
Speaker 1: tight knit closed community, so Arab scholars further honed the
Speaker 1: alchemical texts in the ninth century, in the tenth century,
Speaker 1: and from there it eventually spread to Europe during the
Speaker 1: Scholastic Renaissance of the twelfth century, and probably the most
Speaker 1: famous of the Arab alchemists was the Persian al Rozzie,
Speaker 1: who was the director of the Baghdad Hospital and also
Speaker 1: really a well known um doctor and writer of medical
Speaker 1: text By later medieval Europeans he had a whole different name,
Speaker 1: whole different identity for that, but among alchemists he was
Speaker 1: best known for his Book of Secrets, which was really straightforward,
Speaker 1: very clearly written, essentially a catalog of lab procedures concerned
Speaker 1: with transmitting gold and silver. So, in an article for
Speaker 1: Arab Studies Quarterly, Gail Taylor writes that al Rozzie's methodologies,
Speaker 1: his attention to details like safe and repeatability, and his
Speaker 1: easy instructions make the Book of Secrets a proto laboratory manual.
Speaker 1: So we're going to talk a little bit more about
Speaker 1: that line of thinking later. So, okay, we've got a
Speaker 1: sense of alchemy's progression through world history, but what was
Speaker 1: it all about besides elixirs? And the Philosopher's Stone. What
Speaker 1: science background made the work alchemist did actually seem possible? Well, first,
Speaker 1: there's a fundamental confusion between elements and compounds that we
Speaker 1: need to go over really quick. Okay, So Aristotle had
Speaker 1: proposed the existence of five elements, and those were air, earth, fire, water,
Speaker 1: and quintessence. Then in the thirteenth century, a new text
Speaker 1: appeared by the mysterious alchemist Pseudo Jieber. While Gibra was
Speaker 1: often associated with eighth century Arab alchemist Jabber Ebben High
Speaker 1: In Indiana University professor William Newman has ideed Giber as
Speaker 1: Paul of Tarantou, a Franciscan monk. Newman has also traced
Speaker 1: a direct line of descent from Al Rozzie's Book of
Speaker 1: Secrets to Jeebers some Perfection in the Sum of Perfection,
Speaker 1: which subsequently became pretty much like the Bible for medieval
Speaker 1: European alchemists. Geeber honed down this idea of elements to
Speaker 1: include just two. All medals were varying combinations of mercury
Speaker 1: and sulfur. So it kind of sounds like a recipe
Speaker 1: for gold making than to ingredients exactly. You just got
Speaker 1: to figure out the right ratio. So Paracelsus, who we
Speaker 1: mentioned in the beginning, was a Swiss physician who lived
Speaker 1: between fourteen ninety three and fifteen forty one, and he
Speaker 1: further developed the ideas of Geeber. He proposed that there
Speaker 1: were actually three basic substances sulfur, mercury, and salt. But still,
Speaker 1: you know, you're working with a limited quantity of things
Speaker 1: and trying to make gold out of that. Because Paracelsus
Speaker 1: was a prominent physician, one who believed in observation as
Speaker 1: the best way of learning, a new type of medical
Speaker 1: alchemy really rose up around him and his style, and
Speaker 1: many doctors alchemist scientists worked in Prague in the court
Speaker 1: of Rudolph the second sort of striving to um to
Speaker 1: do experiments based on Paracelsis ideas. But alchemy wasn't all
Speaker 1: about mixing gold from scratch from these base elements. It
Speaker 1: eventually became about growing gold too, And I really think
Speaker 1: 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: I don't know, if you've ever grown your own crystals
Speaker 1: and a crystal kit when you were a kid, you
Speaker 1: can 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 perfect form. So one idea was that the
Speaker 1: material that gold passed through on its way up from
Speaker 1: 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: can 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: And alchemist 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 the 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 Die, as we
Speaker 1: talked about in the recent podcast, who was living in
Speaker 1: the sixteenth and seventeenth century, referred from his later dabbling
Speaker 1: in alchemy and conversations with angels that really kind of
Speaker 1: ruined his career in a way. Later scientific geniuses like
Speaker 1: Isaac Newton spent thirty years working on alchemy, more than
Speaker 1: he did on physics and mathematics combined, but he tried
Speaker 1: to keep his interest secret. Again, according to Dr Newman,
Speaker 1: who has extensively studied Newton's secret notebooks, he says, quote
Speaker 1: alchemy became a danger to one's reputation when interest bled
Speaker 1: into enthusiasm. There were just a few fundamental problems with
Speaker 1: alchemy that were kind of hard to overcome. Yeah, one
Speaker 1: was that the quest for gold brought in swindlers. We
Speaker 1: mentioned Charlatan's in the beginning and how they were hanged
Speaker 1: for alchemy. Alchemists were also very secretive, thus alchemy's obscure
Speaker 1: texts and strange metaphors for chemicals or experiments like Babylonian dragons,
Speaker 1: green lions, toads that decompose and turned into ravens, neptunes tried,
Speaker 1: and we're going to talk a little more about that
Speaker 1: stuff too. And finally, authorities didn't want anyone to make
Speaker 1: gold and devalue the currency. Lots of countries made it
Speaker 1: illegal to transmitt metals, though they'd often secretly patronize their
Speaker 1: own alchemists to 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. In 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 in 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 Princeipe, who is a chemist and
Speaker 1: a historian of science at John's Hopkins and a colleague
Speaker 1: of Dr Newman's, over the next few decades after Boyle
Speaker 1: was working in in chemistry, these chemists distanced themselves almost
Speaker 1: entirely from alchemy. They had a new name and a
Speaker 1: new outlook on science. But it's not that they weren't
Speaker 1: doing the same work. Prince Hip A can't find written
Speaker 1: evidence that the new breed of chemists tried to refute
Speaker 1: the idea of metallic transmutation. Some were still looking to
Speaker 1: create gold from base metals as late as seventeen sixty
Speaker 1: and in Johns Hopkins magazine, Dr Prince HiPE 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 Pa 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: fifteenth century lab ware and really gone to a lot
Speaker 1: of trouble to get the right kind of chemicals, um,
Speaker 1: right minerals and things that would have been available at
Speaker 1: the time. And the experiments, the old alchemy experiments have
Speaker 1: cool names like the Star of Regulus of Antimony, or
Speaker 1: 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 Tree 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 and nitric acid with
Speaker 1: dissolved silver and mercury, you produce tiny twig like ranches
Speaker 1: a 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. Cool. Thank
Speaker 1: you so much for joining us on this Saturday. If
Speaker 1: you have heard an email address or a Facebook you
Speaker 1: are l or something similar over the course of today's episode,
Speaker 1: since it is from the archive that might be out
Speaker 1: of date now, you can email us at History podcast
Speaker 1: at how Stuff Works dot com, and you can find
Speaker 1: us all over social media at missed in History, and
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