Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry
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March 19, - Published on Amazon. Good classic book.
I knew alchemists were crazy but I didn't know the half of it until after I finished the book. I like the fact that he went into detail as to why they thought the world worked as it did. It very thoroughly explains it.
All structured data from the file and property namespaces is available under the Creative Commons CC0 License ; all unstructured text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License ; additional terms may apply. Although he published some It kind of got boring and eventually made me realize that I was not enjoying this book anymore. They show what the little feathered brothers have been to the children of men; how we have come to like some and to dislike others as we do; why the poets have called them by certain nicknames which we ought to know; and why a great many strange things are so, in the minds of childlike people. Taking the everyday burning of a candle as a starting point, Faraday spans the arc from combustion and its products, via the components of water and air oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon , back to the type of combustion that happens in the human body when we breathe.
May 8, - Published on Amazon. Great product thanks. December 19, - Published on Amazon. Go to Amazon. Discover the best of shopping and entertainment with Amazon Prime. It was too diverse a phenomenon, too widespread geographically, socially, and chronologically. The following excerpts provide glimpses of three alchemical practitioners who carried out their researches in widely different periods and cultures, and often for widely different purposes.
In the cosmopolitan crossroads of Greco-Roman Egypt, the two streams of craft traditions and philosophical traditions coexisted. Their merger—probably in the third century AD—gave rise to the independent discipline of alchemy. The intimate mingling of the two traditions is evident in the earliest substantial texts we have about chrysopoeia [gold making].
Zosimos was active around AD. He was born in the Upper Egyptian city of Panopolis, now called Akhmim.
Zosimos is thought to have written twenty-eight books about alchemy; alas, most of what he wrote is now lost. We have only scraps: the prologue to a book titled On Apparatus and Furnaces , several chapters from other works, and scattered excerpts. Despite the fragmentary nature of what survives and the difficulty in interpreting it, these writings provide the best window we have onto Greek alchemy. These early texts establish many concepts and styles that would remain fundamental for much of later alchemy.
He describes a wide array of useful apparatus—for distillation, sublimation, filtration, fixation, and so forth—in great detail. Many of these instruments are adapted from cooking utensils or items used in perfumery or other crafts.
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Zosimos did not devise all these instruments himself, indicating how developed practical chrysopoeia must already have become by the start of the fourth century AD. The writings of his predecessors form a key resource for him, and he cites them frequently. One of the most prominent authorities is named Maria—sometimes called Maria Judaea or Mary the Jew—and Zosimos credits her with the development of a broad range of apparatus and techniques.
It is her name that remains attached to the bain-marie or bagno maria of French and Italian cookery.
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Several of the pieces of apparatus Zosimos describes—for example, one called the kerotakis —are designed to expose one material to the vapors of another. Indeed, he seems particularly interested in the action of vapors on solids.
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This interest is partly grounded on practical observations. Ancient craftsmen knew that the vapors released by heated cadmia or calamine, a zinc-containing earth could turn copper golden by transforming it into brass an alloy of zinc and copper. The vapors of mercury and arsenic whiten copper to a silvery color.
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Perhaps knowledge of these color changes induced Zosimos to seek analogous processes that would bring about true transmutations. Guiding theories are certainly discernible in his writings. Today there is a common misconception that alchemists worked more or less blindly—stumbling about mixing a little of this and a little of that in a random search for gold. This notion is far from the truth; already with Zosimos we can identify theoretical principles that guided his practical work, as well as practical observations that supported or modified his theories.
Many theoretical frameworks for alchemy would develop in various times and places, and these frameworks both supported the possibility of transmutation and suggested avenues for pursuing it practically. In one passage, he notices the disparate effects of sulfur vapor on different substances, and expresses his astonishment that while the vapor is white and whitens most substances, when it is absorbed by mercury, which is itself white, the resulting composition is yellow.
Clearly, Zosimos was a careful observer who thought deeply about what he witnessed experimentally. Follower of David Teniers II. John of Rupescissa or Jean de Roquetaillade was born about in the Auvergne, in central France; he attended the University of Toulouse and then became a Franciscan friar. In doing so he was influenced by the ideas of a branch of the order known as the Spirituals, who opposed the increasing institutionalization of the Franciscan order as it grew, claiming that it had abandoned the ideals and rule of its founder, St.
Francis of Assisi. The Spirituals, who saw themselves as the true followers of St.
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Francis, embraced radical poverty and fiercely criticized church hierarchy and the more mainstream Conventual Franciscans. The Spirituals were also caught up in apocalyptic fervor and a fondness for prophecies, believing that the Antichrist was about to appear. It might seem incongruous that a man so fervently committed to the ideal of poverty would also devote himself to finding the secret of making gold.
Yet at the start of his Book of Light , written about , John states clearly why he studied chrysopoeia and why he decided to write about it. We are assured by many old writers that Adam was the first alchemist, and we are told by one of the initiated that Adam was created on the sixth day, being the 15th of March, of the first year of the world; certainly alchemy had a long life, for chemistry did not begin until about the middle of the 18th century. No branch of science has had so long a period of incubation as chemistry.
There must be some extraordinary difficulty in the way of disentangling the steps of those changes wherein substances of one kind are produced from substances totally unlike them. To inquire how those of acute intellects and much learning regarded such occurrences in the times when man's outlook on the world was very different from what it is now, ought to be interesting, and the results of that inquiry must surely be instructive.