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The Roots of Chemistry
| Article
# : |
14648 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1988 |
2,744 Words |
| Author
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B.J.T. Dobbs
B.J.T. Dobbs is professor of history at Northwestern
University, and is the author of two books and a number of
articles on early modern history of science. Currently on
leave from Northwestern, she holds an NEH visiting fellowship
at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. |
"Gold! Gold!"
The cry that sent Americans rushing to California in 1849 has thrilled human beings since prehistoric times. Singularly beautiful among the substances on earth, gold adorned the royalty of antiquity. Uniquely stable in its chemical properties, it became a symbol of the stability of royal power. Philosophers saw in it a state of physical perfection and a symbol of immortality; alchemists, in turn, sought to make it by a thousand different methods.
Gold was probably the first naturally occurring chemical element to be discovered in pure form. It was once widely distributed on earth in surface rocks, and the erosion of less stable materials has also progressively exposed the incorruptible golden grains and nuggets to view or washed them downstream among the sands and pebbles.
By the second or third century A.D., however, the gleaming natural substance became increasingly rare in the ancient world, and about that time efforts to make gold artificially began in the cosmopolitan city of Alexandria--efforts that led to the theory and practice of alchemy. Alchemy flourished in Egyptian Alexandria, later in the great Islamic centers of learning in the tenth through twelfth centuries, and finally in Christian Europe from the twelfth through the seventeenth centuries. Alchemy was essentially a quest for perfection, and since gold was the "perfect" metal, one alchemical goal was to transform base metals into gold. But other forms of perfection were sought as well, such as "the philosopher's stone"--an agent of perfection that would provide for salvation, health, and immortality as well as the transmutation of metals. The alchemical pursuit of perfection ultimately failed, but not before it had yielded a rich harvest of chemical concepts, laboratory equipment, and techniques that nurtured the growth of modern chemistry in the eighteenth century.
The Chemical Elements in Antiquity
With the discovery of gold began the saga of the discovery and characterization of the several building blocks, called chemical elements, that make up the many different materials of the world. Fewer than one hundred chemical elements occur naturally yet some three thousand years of laborious experimentation and theorizing were required before that simple fact was fully understood. That laborious work was to a great extent done under the rubric of alchemy.
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