Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, the production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
Speaker 1: to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
Speaker 1: Every year, there's a thing in Cambridge, Massachusetts called bo Fest.
Speaker 1: It's held in other places too, but the wedding Cambridge
Speaker 1: on the m T campus is the one that I
Speaker 1: go to. It's the Festival of bad ad hoc Hypotheses.
Speaker 1: It's a place where people present their scientific papers, except
Speaker 1: the scientific papers are fake and also funny and very
Speaker 1: were well argued and sometimes really plausible on top of
Speaker 1: being so hilarious. So like, for example, last time, the
Speaker 1: winning talk was all about the role of noise in
Speaker 1: the spread of bubonic plague in the fourteenth century, and
Speaker 1: it was accompanied by a whole lot of pictures from
Speaker 1: illuminated manuscripts. And I don't want to get into more
Speaker 1: detail than that, because they put videos of all these
Speaker 1: things online, and I want anybody who goes to watch
Speaker 1: it to see all the hilarious reveals firsthand. It is
Speaker 1: often a very cool blending of science and history and
Speaker 1: fakery and hilarity altogether. And the reason I'm talking about
Speaker 1: this is that the winners of this very silly, nerdy
Speaker 1: thing used to get a three D printed representation of
Speaker 1: Darwin looking doubtful, but now they get a trophy of
Speaker 1: hennig Brand discovering phosphorus. Hennig Brand discovered phosphorus by boiling p.
Speaker 1: So the first time I heard about this at bo Fest,
Speaker 1: I was like, we gotta do a podcast on that.
Speaker 1: It has has taken me a few years to actually
Speaker 1: get to it in case it was not clear, this
Speaker 1: episode is going to have a lot of your Internet hooray.
Speaker 1: I love a p joke. They're very funny to me
Speaker 1: because I'm crass. One of my cousins has a daughter
Speaker 1: who's just at the age to be having sleepovers and
Speaker 1: and at the age where mentioning of any bodily function
Speaker 1: is just instantly hilarious. And I like, remember, as a kid,
Speaker 1: if somebody was like pp it would just send everyone
Speaker 1: into giggles forever. Yeah, it was very different as a child,
Speaker 1: you know, I was raised with a lot of shame
Speaker 1: about your body and anything it might do or pretty.
Speaker 1: It wasn't until I became a little bit older and
Speaker 1: out in the world where I was like, you guys,
Speaker 1: urine is really funny. But as a child, if you
Speaker 1: said something about pe to sleepover, there would be mortification
Speaker 1: and like, oh no, it was a very different culture. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: a little Victorian at my house. In that regard um,
Speaker 1: that's to the matter in hand. Bosphorus is a chemical element,
Speaker 1: and if you need a quick chemistry refresher, elements are
Speaker 1: a basic building block of matter, and elements are made
Speaker 1: of atoms, and atoms are made of subatomic particles, but
Speaker 1: you cannot take those sub atomic particles out of an
Speaker 1: atom by ordinary chemical means. A pure piece of an
Speaker 1: element like phosphorus is made of phosphorus atoms, and one
Speaker 1: atom of phosphorus is the smallest piece of phosphorus that
Speaker 1: you can get. Yeah, I'll take one phosphorus please. When
Speaker 1: I wrote that, I made it almost sound like all
Speaker 1: elements are made of phosphorus. That's not It's that all
Speaker 1: elements are made of atoms of that type of element.
Speaker 1: And so several chemical elements were known to the ancient world.
Speaker 1: You'll see slightly different lists depending on where you look,
Speaker 1: but in general, humans have known about gold, silver, copper, iron, lead, tin, zinc, arsenic, antimony, mercury, sulfur,
Speaker 1: and carbon for thousands of years. Pretty much any ancient
Speaker 1: culture that has written records names at least some of
Speaker 1: these in those records. These elements have all been known
Speaker 1: about for so long that we could not really say
Speaker 1: who discovered them or who first concluded that there was
Speaker 1: anything special about them. Phosphorus, on the other hand, is
Speaker 1: the first element who's discoverer we can name, and that
Speaker 1: was hennig Brand in about sixteen sixty nine. But unlike
Speaker 1: most of the other elements we just listed, phosphorus doesn't
Speaker 1: exist in its pure elemental form out in the natural world.
Speaker 1: It's extremely reactive, so instead it's found in phosphate compounds.
Speaker 1: Those compounds are used to produce elemental phosphorus, which is
Speaker 1: called white or yellow phosphorus. White phosphorus can then be
Speaker 1: used to make more stable allotropes, including red and black phosphorus.
Speaker 1: In casual use, the words phosphorus and phosphates are used
Speaker 1: almost interchangeably, sort of like how people say carbon I
Speaker 1: mean carbon dioxide. Phosphates are fundamentally necessary to life on Earth.
Speaker 1: They're part of the structure of DNA and RNA. They're
Speaker 1: also a component and a denizine triphosphate or ATP, which
Speaker 1: carries energy within all living cells. Calcium phosphate helps provide
Speaker 1: the strength in our bones and teeth. So I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just not an exaggeration to say that we would
Speaker 1: be dead without phosphorus. Are very s she People have
Speaker 1: also been intentionally using phosphorus for thousands of years before
Speaker 1: Brand discovered it, without knowing that that was what they
Speaker 1: were doing. In some parts of the world, the soil
Speaker 1: doesn't contain a lot of phosphorus, and even in places
Speaker 1: where the soil starts out phosphate rich, it loses its
Speaker 1: phosphates and other nutrients over time through farming. For as
Speaker 1: long as people have deliberately cultivated crops, they've also understood
Speaker 1: that there was something about the soil that needed to
Speaker 1: be replenished in order for crops to continue to thrive.
Speaker 1: There a lot of the strategies people have used to
Speaker 1: try to make their crops grow better have really been
Speaker 1: adding phosphorus, along with the other essential nutrients of nitrogen
Speaker 1: and potassium, back into the soil. As examples, the practice
Speaker 1: of burning off the stubble of last year's crop doesn't
Speaker 1: just clear the land for new planting. The ash also
Speaker 1: contains phosphorus, which goes back into the soil. People have
Speaker 1: also fertilized their crops with things like manure, urine, fish,
Speaker 1: and easter shells, all of which contained phosphorus and other nutrients.
Speaker 1: Crop rotation takes advantage of the differences and how different
Speaker 1: plants use nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus to try to keep
Speaker 1: all three of those readily available in the soil. People
Speaker 1: did things like this for centuries without knowing what phosphorus
Speaker 1: was or that the crops that they were growing needed it.
Speaker 1: Ancient people's use of phosphorus also wasn't limited to agriculture.
Speaker 1: As one example, for thousands of years, people have used
Speaker 1: stale urine to clean things. A big reason for this
Speaker 1: is that urine contains urea, which decays into ammonia when
Speaker 1: it's left out for a long time. But urine also
Speaker 1: contains a lot of phosphates, and phosphates helped make other
Speaker 1: cleaning agents more efficient. Please don't take this as any
Speaker 1: sort of household cleaning tip. When we were in San
Speaker 1: Francisco at the at the end of our tour last year,
Speaker 1: I went to the book Binders Museum and uh that
Speaker 1: that I had a guided tour of the Bookbinder's Museum,
Speaker 1: and one of the things that I learned about is
Speaker 1: how in one element or one part of the book
Speaker 1: binding printing process, there were these little ink daubers that
Speaker 1: were sort of leather covered things that you would dobb
Speaker 1: in the ink and you would put that on the
Speaker 1: plate that you were going to print, and uh, if
Speaker 1: that dried out, your apprentice had to go and clean
Speaker 1: them and start completely over. So part of the apprentice's
Speaker 1: job was to keep that nice and moist. And the
Speaker 1: tour guide said, do you have any ideas of what
Speaker 1: they might have used to clean these things? And I
Speaker 1: was like, I bet it's urine, because that was the
Speaker 1: thing that I could think of. It would be, you know,
Speaker 1: in the early days of book binding, would probably used
Speaker 1: to be clean to clean something. And she's specified that
Speaker 1: it was stale urine, and that is for the reason
Speaker 1: that we just said. So. Of course, when hennig Brand
Speaker 1: was alive, people did not know what phosphorus was or
Speaker 1: that it was connected to all of this, and even
Speaker 1: after he made his discovery, people didn't really understand what
Speaker 1: it was he had found. At the time, European scientists
Speaker 1: still understood the world in terms of not the chemical
Speaker 1: elements that we think about today, but the four elements
Speaker 1: of earth, air, fire, and water. The field of alchemy
Speaker 1: was just starting to evolve into the field of chemistry
Speaker 1: when he lived, and the definition of elements was just
Speaker 1: starting to evolve from those four elements into more like
Speaker 1: today's definition. And there's more about the shift from alchemy
Speaker 1: to chemistry in our most recent Saturday classic, but as
Speaker 1: it relates to Hennig Brand. By the sixteen sixties, there
Speaker 1: were still a few alchemists searching for the fabled Philosopher's Stone,
Speaker 1: which was believed to turn base metals into gold and
Speaker 1: produce an elixir that could cure diseases in prolonged life,
Speaker 1: and Brand was one of them. Hennig Brand's discovery of
Speaker 1: phosphorus came about because he thought the secret to the
Speaker 1: Philosopher's Stone might be found in urine. And we'll get
Speaker 1: to why he thought that on how he made his
Speaker 1: discovery after a sponsor break. We do not know all
Speaker 1: that much about Hennig Brand as a person. Sometimes his
Speaker 1: name is spelled Henning instead of Hennig. Sometimes his last
Speaker 1: name is b R. A. N. T or b R
Speaker 1: A n D T instead of b R A n D.
Speaker 1: He was probably born in Hamburg and what's now Germany
Speaker 1: sometime around sixteen thirty. He seems to have spent some
Speaker 1: time as a low level army officer during the Thirty
Speaker 1: Years War, and that suggests that he was from a
Speaker 1: middle class family because he was an officer, so probably
Speaker 1: they were not very poor, but also he was not
Speaker 1: of a very high rank, so they probably weren't all
Speaker 1: that prominent either. In addition to his army service, Brand
Speaker 1: seems to have done at least part of an apprenticeship
Speaker 1: with a glassblower before turning his attention to alchemy. This
Speaker 1: would have given him the skills to make some of
Speaker 1: the glass vessels used in alchemy, and a glassblower's furnace
Speaker 1: would have been useful to his alchemical pursuits as well.
Speaker 1: At some point in all of this he married a
Speaker 1: woman whose dowry was large enough to fund his research.
Speaker 1: After Brand's first wife died, he remarried a woman named Margaretta,
Speaker 1: who had also been married before. Her son became Brand's
Speaker 1: assistant in his workshop, and her family's money continued to
Speaker 1: pay for all of his experiments. He may have also
Speaker 1: presented himself as a physician, although according to a nineteenth
Speaker 1: century history of chemistry, he was quote an uncouth physician
Speaker 1: who knew not a word of Latin. As we said
Speaker 1: before the break, Brand was looking for the Philosopher's Stone,
Speaker 1: which was believed to turn base metals into gold and
Speaker 1: produce the elixir of life. Many alchemists believed that the
Speaker 1: key to the Philosopher's Stone was somewhere in human bodily fluids,
Speaker 1: and the fluid the Brand focused on was p Not
Speaker 1: only is your in a bodily fluid, but it is
Speaker 1: also yelled low, you know, like gold to be clear.
Speaker 1: Bread was not the only person who thought that maybe
Speaker 1: urine had something to do with gold. Urine was pretty
Speaker 1: mysterious at the time. Nobody knew how the body produced
Speaker 1: it or why it was yellow, but they did know
Speaker 1: that it did all kinds of fascinating and seemingly magical
Speaker 1: things we talked about. It's used as a cleaning agent
Speaker 1: before the break, but it was also used in tanning
Speaker 1: leather and dyeing fabric, and in all kinds of alchemical recipes.
Speaker 1: Urine was also used in some methods of making saltpeter,
Speaker 1: and then the saltpeter was used to make gunpowder, so
Speaker 1: part of gunpowder was from urine. With all of those
Speaker 1: things going on, it wasn't really that much of a
Speaker 1: stretch for people to suspect that this strange, potent, seemingly
Speaker 1: slightly magical liquid might be yellow because it contained gold. Today,
Speaker 1: though we know that the yellow color mostly comes from
Speaker 1: a substance called ur a bilon, which is one of
Speaker 1: the end products of the bodies breaking down the iron
Speaker 1: can painting molecule. Heam Brand's experiments with urine involved boiling
Speaker 1: it over and over in a vessel called a retort.
Speaker 1: A retort is a spherical vessel with a long, downward
Speaker 1: pointing spout. If you heat up something in a retort,
Speaker 1: the vapor rises then condenses in that long spout, so
Speaker 1: you can use it to distill things. One day, as
Speaker 1: Brand was distilling urine and his retort, the fluid dripping
Speaker 1: out of the spout started spontaneously bursting into flame, and
Speaker 1: it also smelled very strongly of garlic. And he found
Speaker 1: if he caught it in a vessel and then stoppard
Speaker 1: the vessel up, it would glow regardless of whether it
Speaker 1: had been exposed to any light. I'm sorry to laugh, Brand.
Speaker 1: It's funny though. It's like my fiery garlic glo pi.
Speaker 1: I don't the thing is very funny. Brand thought that
Speaker 1: he was onto something, perhaps even the philosopher's stone, so
Speaker 1: he kept refining his process, producing this whitish waxy substance
Speaker 1: that was very volatile if exposed to air, and it
Speaker 1: had a bluish glow if it was kept away from air.
Speaker 1: Here is his recipe for making phosphorus, as published in
Speaker 1: Philosophical Experiments and Observations of the late eminent Doctor Robert Hook,
Speaker 1: which was published in London in seventy. Since this was
Speaker 1: almost sixty years after Brand's discovery and recorded by a
Speaker 1: different person, it is likely that various steps have been
Speaker 1: changed or added, but this definitely will give you a
Speaker 1: sense of what always involved in this. So under the
Speaker 1: heading phosphorros elementarrus by Dr Brandt of Hamburg, it reads quote,
Speaker 1: take a quantity of urine, not less for one experiment
Speaker 1: than fifty or sixty pales full. Let it lie steeping
Speaker 1: in one or more tubs or an hogshead of oaken
Speaker 1: wood until it putrefy and breed worms, as it will
Speaker 1: do in fourteen or fifteen days. Then in a large kettle,
Speaker 1: let some of it boil on a straw fire, and
Speaker 1: as it consumes and evaporates, poor in more and so on,
Speaker 1: till at last the whole quantity be reduced to a paste,
Speaker 1: or rather a hard coal or crust, which it will resemble.
Speaker 1: And this may be done in two or three days,
Speaker 1: if the fire well tended, but else it may be
Speaker 1: doing a fortnight or more. So. For one batch of phosphorus,
Speaker 1: brand was leaving urine out in pails for about two
Speaker 1: weeks and then boiling it for between two and fourteen days.
Speaker 1: And that is not the end of the process. From
Speaker 1: there you powder the previously made coal or crust, and
Speaker 1: quote add their to some fair water about fifteen fingers
Speaker 1: high or four times as high as the powder, and
Speaker 1: boil them together for one quarter of an hour. Then
Speaker 1: strain the liquor and all through a woolen cloth. That
Speaker 1: which sticks behind may be thrown away, but the liquor
Speaker 1: that passes must be taken and boiled till it come
Speaker 1: to assault, which will be in a few hours. Let's
Speaker 1: rest of peak continues on with adding more ingredients and
Speaker 1: steeping them together until the substance became sort of a
Speaker 1: pap which left behind a red or reddish salt after
Speaker 1: being evaporated in sand. And then that went into a
Speaker 1: retort and quote for the first hour began with a
Speaker 1: small fire, more the next, a greater the third, and
Speaker 1: more the fourth, and then continue it as high as
Speaker 1: you can for twenty four hours, sometimes by the force
Speaker 1: of fire twelve hours, proud as enough for when you
Speaker 1: free the recipient white and shining with the fire, and
Speaker 1: there are no more flashes or as it were, blasts
Speaker 1: of wind coming from time to time from the retort,
Speaker 1: then the work is finished, and you may with a
Speaker 1: feather gather the fire together, or scrape it off with
Speaker 1: a knife where it sticks. This recipe goes on to
Speaker 1: stress the need to preserve this fire in an airtight container,
Speaker 1: and how if you put it in the sun it
Speaker 1: might quote kindle gunpowder. I think that might just mean explode.
Speaker 1: Uh this This recipe also contains a cautionary tale quote.
Speaker 1: My author says he had once wrapped a knob in
Speaker 1: wax at Hanover, and being in his pocket, and he
Speaker 1: busy near the fire, the very heat of it let
Speaker 1: in flame and burned all his clothes and his fingers also,
Speaker 1: for though he rubbed them in the dirt, nothing would
Speaker 1: quench it unless he had water. He was ill for
Speaker 1: fifteen days and the skin came off, So don't do that.
Speaker 1: We should note that it's possible that Paracelsus used a
Speaker 1: similar process to produce phosphorus. In the sixteenth century, more
Speaker 1: than a hundred years before Brand's discovery, he wrote about
Speaker 1: a process for repeatedly distilling urine, which would cause what
Speaker 1: he described as the earth, air, and water to rise
Speaker 1: while the fire fell out of it. After doing this
Speaker 1: several times, he said there would be quote congealed certain icicles,
Speaker 1: which are the element of fire. That sounds close enough
Speaker 1: to what Brand was doing that these icicles could have
Speaker 1: been phosphorus. But it we also really don't know. It
Speaker 1: just merits mentioning as a potential comparative. Paracelsus has been
Speaker 1: on my episode list for a very long time, long
Speaker 1: enough that I was getting ready to do it, and
Speaker 1: then saw Bones did it, and I didn't want to
Speaker 1: feel like I was copying saw Bones, even though not
Speaker 1: everybody listens to both shows. But now it's been long enough,
Speaker 1: maybe he will keep farther up the list. There are
Speaker 1: also other accounts that describe Brand's process a little differently
Speaker 1: than that recipe that we just went through, and in
Speaker 1: one of them, the salts that are produced after the
Speaker 1: first round of distilling the urine are discarded. That is
Speaker 1: actually where most of the phosphorus would have been at
Speaker 1: that point in the process, So if Brand was doing
Speaker 1: it that way, he would have been throwing away most
Speaker 1: of what he was trying to get. Regardless, though this
Speaker 1: was a long, involved, complicated, and frankly gross process. A
Speaker 1: seventeen sixty seven Dictionary of Chemistry described it as more
Speaker 1: curious than useful, along with being quote both costly and embarrassing.
Speaker 1: But Brand was very fond of his costly, embarrassing discovery.
Speaker 1: He named it cold fire, or sometimes just my fire.
Speaker 1: It's not clear who was the first person to call
Speaker 1: it phosphorus, which is from Latin words that mean bringer
Speaker 1: of light or light bringer. That same term has also
Speaker 1: been used to describe a variety of other glowing substances.
Speaker 1: Brand kept his discovery secret for about six years, and
Speaker 1: we'll get to what happened when knowledge spread about it.
Speaker 1: After we first have a little sponsor break. Henning Brand's
Speaker 1: discovery became public knowledge through a murky series of events
Speaker 1: involving two other men named Johan Kuncle and Johan Daniel Kraft, who,
Speaker 1: like a lot of other people in the story, worked
Speaker 1: in both chemistry and alchemy. It seems as though Kuncle
Speaker 1: had a piece of Bologna stone, and this was a
Speaker 1: rock that was for described in sixteen oh three by
Speaker 1: Vincenzo Cascarolo, and this stone glowed in the dark. Cascarolo
Speaker 1: was a shoemaker, and like so many other people, he
Speaker 1: was hoping to find gold. He had collected a bunch
Speaker 1: of interesting rocks from the mountains near his home in
Speaker 1: Bologna and what is now Italy, and he discovered that
Speaker 1: if you baked them and then left them out in
Speaker 1: the sun, they would glow in the dark. Bologna Stone
Speaker 1: became a curiosity and a source of fascination as people
Speaker 1: wondered whether there was something magical about it and whether
Speaker 1: it might have something to do with the Philosopher's Stone.
Speaker 1: Galileo described it this way in sixteen twelve quote, it
Speaker 1: must be explained how it happens that the light is
Speaker 1: conceived into the stone and is given back after some time.
Speaker 1: As in Childbirth today we know that Bologna stone was
Speaker 1: in fact Baryam sulfide. I love how so many elements
Speaker 1: of this story. You're like, what if I baked some rocks?
Speaker 1: What if I had distilled p over and over. So
Speaker 1: Kuncle was intrigued not only by Bologna's owned, but also
Speaker 1: by all kinds of other luminescent substances. And so when
Speaker 1: he heard that somebody in Hamburg had created something that
Speaker 1: glowed indefinitely, he got really excited, and he wrote a
Speaker 1: letter to Craft about going to Hamburg to see what
Speaker 1: this was all about. In some versions of the story,
Speaker 1: Kunkle and Craft went together and Brand taught them both
Speaker 1: how to make phosphorus after Craft paid him to do it.
Speaker 1: But in other versions of the story, Craft swooped in
Speaker 1: ahead of Kunkle and paid Brand not only to show
Speaker 1: him how to make phosphorus, but also to keep that
Speaker 1: information from Craft. Yeah, then that version of the Storycraft
Speaker 1: had to work it out for himself, And regardless of
Speaker 1: which of these is more accurate, both Kuncle and Craft
Speaker 1: did wind up knowing how to make phosphorus. Craft started
Speaker 1: traveling around Europe with phosphorus and other glowing substances, and
Speaker 1: he did experiments with them before nobles and dignitaries. This
Speaker 1: included Friedrich Wilhelm, Duke Collector of Brandenburg, Prussia, on April
Speaker 1: sixteen seventy six, and then a year later crafted the
Speaker 1: same him at the court of Johann Friedrich, Duke of Brunswick,
Speaker 1: Luneburg and Hanover. Kraft's friend Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, was, among
Speaker 1: other things, the Duke's librarian, and Leibnitz suggested that maybe
Speaker 1: phosphorus could be used to light a whole room, but
Speaker 1: Kraft said production of that much of it would be
Speaker 1: just way too difficult. Even so, the Duke became intrigued
Speaker 1: with the idea of setting up a mass production facility
Speaker 1: out in the Hearts Mountains, presumably so the smell of
Speaker 1: it wouldn't bother people. Leibnitz negotiated with brand to come
Speaker 1: to Hanover to work on the project, and he recruited
Speaker 1: a workforce and started stockpiling lots of firewood and barrels
Speaker 1: full of urine. It's not a hundred percent clear where
Speaker 1: all of this urine came from, and these stories like
Speaker 1: there's one account that says that Brand had a relationship
Speaker 1: with a tavern keeper or a brewer or some other
Speaker 1: person who would have a clientele that pete a lot
Speaker 1: but a little vague. Meanwhile, Gustav Adolf, the Duke of
Speaker 1: Mecklenburg Gustrau, also heard about phosphorus and decided that he
Speaker 1: also wanted to start a phosphorus factory as well, and
Speaker 1: this Deuce representative Johad Waki Betcher started trying to recruit
Speaker 1: Brand away from Hanover. It seems as though Brand tried
Speaker 1: to use Betcher's offer to negotiate for more money from Hanover,
Speaker 1: but he wasn't really savvy enough to do this, and
Speaker 1: instead he just came off as kind of cranky and obstinate.
Speaker 1: And in the middle of all of this, Kraft started
Speaker 1: writing to Hanover as well, suggesting that he might actually
Speaker 1: be a better manager than Brand for this whole phosphorus
Speaker 1: production project. Leibnitz persuaded the Duke to keep working with Brand,
Speaker 1: and it appears that during all of this Brand did
Speaker 1: finally document his methods for making phosphorus. He apparently ran
Speaker 1: a mass production facility out in the mountains for a
Speaker 1: few months, then in the late sixteen seventies, phosphorus and
Speaker 1: the knowledge of how to make it reached England. Robert Boyle,
Speaker 1: who was one of the founders of modern chemistry, heard
Speaker 1: about brands production of phosphorus from urine, and he independently
Speaker 1: worked out his own way to do the same thing.
Speaker 1: About ten years later. Boyle then worked to establish a
Speaker 1: phosphorus production facility in London. As phosphorus became more available,
Speaker 1: demand for its skyrocketed. It went from being a curiosity
Speaker 1: that people thought may or may not be the philosopher's
Speaker 1: stone to something that had, at least in theory practical uses.
Speaker 1: Johan Kunkel figured out how to cast phosphorus into molds
Speaker 1: underwater and wrote a treatise on the use of phosphorus
Speaker 1: in medicine called Treatise of the Phosphorus Mirabilius and its
Speaker 1: Wonderful Shining Pills. Soon, phosphorus was being marketed as a cure,
Speaker 1: all prepared in a variety of pills and oils and lineaments.
Speaker 1: It was recommended for alcoholism, apoplexy, asthma, cataracts, cholera, colic depression, epilepsy, fever, glaucoma, gout, impotence, migraines, paralysis,
Speaker 1: scrawfiel a, tennis, toothaches, and tuberculosis, and that is only
Speaker 1: to name a few. Although phosphates have some medical uses,
Speaker 1: pure phosphorus does not treat any of these things, and
Speaker 1: is in fact highly toxic and can be used as
Speaker 1: a poison. Henning Brand died around seen and about thirty
Speaker 1: years later Andrea's Sigismund monograph discovered phosphorus in edible seeds.
Speaker 1: He concluded that people were consuming phosphorus in their food
Speaker 1: and then excreting it in their urine, and this was
Speaker 1: the first step in the scientific communities understanding of phosphorus
Speaker 1: as a chemical element and of its movement through the
Speaker 1: world in the phosphorus cycle. This is a cycle that
Speaker 1: begins with phosphate rich rock and moves through water and
Speaker 1: soil into plants and animals, then back into the water
Speaker 1: and soil, and then into sedimentary rock. By the early
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, phosphorus was seeing large scale industrial production thanks
Speaker 1: to the discovery that it could be extracted from bone ash,
Speaker 1: most notably white phosphorus was used to make matches, which
Speaker 1: is something that we talked at about in a prior
Speaker 1: episode on the London match Girls Strike. White phosphorus was
Speaker 1: really dangerous though it caused a serious medical condition known
Speaker 1: as Fossey jaw, and in eighteen forty nine, red phosphorus
Speaker 1: was introduced as a less dangerous substitute. By eighteen fifty one,
Speaker 1: phosphorus was seeing more practical uses, including in manufactured fertilizers.
Speaker 1: This actually led to a supply and demand problem, which
Speaker 1: led people to look for new sources of phosphorus. One
Speaker 1: of these was guano. Guano itself is rich in phosphates, nitrogen,
Speaker 1: and potassium, making it an excellent fertilizer. The sedimentary rocks
Speaker 1: that form in places with lots of guano are also
Speaker 1: rich in phosphates, and this led to a land graund
Speaker 1: for islands and caves with lots of guano. In eighteen
Speaker 1: fifty six, U S Congress past the Guano Islands Act,
Speaker 1: which allowed the United States to claim uninhabited islands to
Speaker 1: mine the guano on them. They were uninhabited by people,
Speaker 1: They were inhabited by lots and lots of birds. Today,
Speaker 1: the vast majority of phosphorus is mined from rocks that
Speaker 1: are rich and calcium phosphate, and about nine of that
Speaker 1: mind phosphorus is put to one use and that is
Speaker 1: back to fertilizer. Phosphorus is still used for other applications
Speaker 1: as well, including plastics, fuel additives, fireworks, rat poison, and
Speaker 1: of course it is still used to make matches. It
Speaker 1: used to be in a lot of detergents because, like
Speaker 1: we said earlier, it helps detergents clean better. But too
Speaker 1: much phosphate and bodies of water leads to algae overgrowths,
Speaker 1: and so a lot of nations to be either banned
Speaker 1: or strictly limited the use of phosphates and detergent. Phosphorus
Speaker 1: is also used in weapons, including organophosphates which are chemical
Speaker 1: weapons known as nerve gas, as well as incendiary devices
Speaker 1: and smoke screens. Ironically, Hamburg, where phosphorus was discovered, was
Speaker 1: hit with thousands of phosphorus containing incendiary bombs during Operation
Speaker 1: Gomera in World War Two. Yeah, the use of phosphorus
Speaker 1: and weapons is pretty controversial today, but it's still is used.
Speaker 1: Phosphate rock is not a renewable resource. Even though the
Speaker 1: phosphate cycle does eventually put phosphates back into rocks, it
Speaker 1: takes a really long time, and over the past few
Speaker 1: years there has been some discussion about whether the world
Speaker 1: is running out of phosphorus. Phosphorus itself is not in
Speaker 1: very short supply. It's one of the most common elements
Speaker 1: on the planet, but there's not that much of it
Speaker 1: that can be mined without huge environmental damage. Like there's
Speaker 1: a lot of phosphorus everywhere, but only a very few
Speaker 1: places with phosphorus and a high enough concentration to be
Speaker 1: able to efficiently mine it. It's not totally clear exactly
Speaker 1: how much available phosphate there is in rocks that can
Speaker 1: reasonably be mined, or when we might reach peak phosphorus.
Speaker 1: Predictions run anywhere from decades to centuries. Because the vast
Speaker 1: majority of phosphorus is used as fertilizer for plants that
Speaker 1: directly or indirectly become food, this shortage has the potential
Speaker 1: to be a global catastrophe, and one of the proposed
Speaker 1: alternatives is urine recycling or all the way back to
Speaker 1: just boiling some urine until the exploding. I'm glad I
Speaker 1: got this whole Handig brand thing out of my system
Speaker 1: after like three years of saying I should do a
Speaker 1: podcast on that guy and his weird urine boiling. Do
Speaker 1: you have a little bit of listener mail that may
Speaker 1: or may not include bodily fluids. It doesn't can include
Speaker 1: any any bodily fluids. It's from Heather. Heather says, I'm
Speaker 1: delighted to add another topic to the list of places
Speaker 1: my podcast has intersected with miss in history. It's one
Speaker 1: of the reasons I follow you loyally. Uh. This is
Speaker 1: in reference to the Sappho episode, and Heather says, I
Speaker 1: wish you had noted with regard to Higginson's translation of
Speaker 1: the ode Aphrodite that, like many male translators, he silently
Speaker 1: changed Sappho's unambiguously female pronouns for male ones in reference
Speaker 1: to the one who flees, refuses gifts, and else to
Speaker 1: love Sappho. The program gave the impression that the association
Speaker 1: of Sappho with love between women is entirely a later
Speaker 1: invention with little basis in her own work. But in
Speaker 1: this the most complete poem we have of her, Aphrodite
Speaker 1: promises Sappho that her female beloved will return her love. Heather,
Speaker 1: who is The podcast referenced earlier in the letter is
Speaker 1: the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast. Thank you for this note, Heather.
Speaker 1: I read a bunch of translations of Ode to Aphrodite
Speaker 1: to try to get one for that episode that seemed
Speaker 1: accessible to people who didn't, necessarily, UM, have a huge
Speaker 1: love of poetry or a lot of background knowledge to
Speaker 1: make the writing makes sense. And all of them translated
Speaker 1: it that way. So I was not aware that this
Speaker 1: uh that the pronouns and it had been changed, But
Speaker 1: I did want to clarify since UM, I'm not sure
Speaker 1: how we gave that impression, because some of the other
Speaker 1: work that we read in the episode was the opposite. UM.
Speaker 1: What we talked more about is that the stigma against
Speaker 1: same sex relationships was really a later part of the
Speaker 1: response to her work, not that that was something that
Speaker 1: wasn't in her work from the beginning. So just in
Speaker 1: case other people came away from the episode with the
Speaker 1: impression that, UM, there was no like attraction or affection
Speaker 1: between women and Sappho's work like that, I would not
Speaker 1: describe it that way at all, UM, And I think
Speaker 1: the other poem that we read that was a lengthier
Speaker 1: chunk was an example of that. UM. So thank you again,
Speaker 1: Heather for that note. If you would like to write
Speaker 1: to us about this or any other podcast for a
Speaker 1: history podcast that how Stuff Works dot com. And then
Speaker 1: we're all over social media at missed in History and
Speaker 1: that's where you can find our Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter.
Speaker 1: You can come to our website which is missing history
Speaker 1: dot com and uh find show notes for all the
Speaker 1: episodes Holly and I have done together and a searchable
Speaker 1: archive of every episode ever. And you can subscribe to
Speaker 1: our show on Apple, podcast, the I heart radio app,
Speaker 1: or anywhere else you get podcasts. Stuff you Missed in
Speaker 1: History Class is a production of I Heart Radio's How
Speaker 1: Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit
Speaker 1: the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to your favorite shows.