the earliest chemists--10/2/24

02 Oct 2024

the earliest chemists--10/2/24

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Today's selection--from To Boldly Go Where No Book Has Gone Before by Luke O'Neill. From Jabir ibn Hayyan to Paracelsus:

“Chemistry as an experimental science can be dated back to the alchemists. The earliest was Jabir ibn Hayyan, and the word 'alchemy' comes from Arabic. Jabir is thought to have lived in the eighth century CE. He had read about the four elements but added two more: sulphur (known as 'the stone that burns') and mercury. Jabir was a prodigious writer, completing more than 3,000 treatises. For the time this was astonishing, as not a lot of new stuff was being written — especially in Europe, where monks were mostly copying the Bible. Jabir's work cites a number of other alchemists who were working in Greece and the Middle East, including those with the interesting names of Pseudo-Democritus, Mary the Jewess and Zosimos of Panopolis.

“Mary lived somewhere between the first and third centuries in Alexandria. She invented various pieces of laboratory equipment, notably the tribikos, a three-legged glass vessel; the kerotakis, which is a device for distillation; and the famous bain-marie, named after her, which involves a pan placed in boiling water and is still used in cooking today. Jabir used all of these in his studies. He wrote about getting substances from organic matter (ammonia from plants) as well as a book about poisons. He recorded how to make many different types of elixirs, with all kinds of properties, many of which had medicinal properties. One of his books contains 30 different chapters on processes using mercury. Jabir was a big fan of mercury. The book on mercury was preceded by descriptions of laboratory equipment. Not unlike the scientific protocols we use today.

An alchemical balneum Mariae, or Maria’s bath, from Coelum philosophorum, Philip Ulstad, 1528, Science History Institute

“Jabir, like subsequent alchemists, had two main goals: to turn 'base metals' such as lead into gold (transmutation) and to create an elixir of immortality. Good to have a mission. This sounds a lot like anti-science and more in the realm of magic, and yet the processes used to study alchemy were important precursors to the science of chemistry. Inexorably the magic strand and the science strand that we read about in the first chapter would wind together more and more tightly when it came to chemistry.

“We can date exactly when alchemy came to Europe with the publication of the Latin translation of the Arabic Book of the Composition of Alchemy in 1144, at a time when Europe was just coming out of the Dark Ages. It was translated by one Robertus Castrensis. This name might sound like someone who has had some unfortunate surgery, but it translates as Robert of Chester. Perhaps because of their surnames (step forward Francois Hotman, Frederick Clod and Paphnutia the Virgin), alchemists were often made fun of, with the English poet Chaucer accusing them of being thieves and liars. Pope John XXII banned the practice of transmutation, thinking it was a type of sorcery — which is perhaps a bit rich given Jesus had turned water into wine.

“Things got a bit more respectable in the 1500s with the arrival of Paracelsus. He moved away from transmutation to using chemistry to make medicines, saying: 'Many have said of Alchemy, that it is for the making of gold and silver. For me such is not the aim, but to consider only what virtue and power may lie in medicine.'

“Paracelsus was born in the wonderfully named village of Egg (but unfortunately, as far as we know, he never analysed the chemistry of eggs). His father educated him in botany, medicine, mineralogy, mining and philosophy. At the age of 16 he began studying medicine at the University of Basel in Switzerland, and obtained his medical degree in 1516 from the University of Ferrara in Italy.”