The Fontana History of Chemistry. William Brock J.
when challenged to repeat his transmutation claims before Sir Joseph Banks and other Fellows of the Society. By then, chemists had come to share Boerhaave’s disbelief in alchemy as expressed in his New Method of Chemistry (1724). Alchemy had become history, and they happily accepted Boerhaave’s allegory of the dying farmer who had told his sons that he had buried treasure in the fields surrounding their home. The sons worked so energetically that they achieved prosperity even though they failed totally to find what they had originally sought.
The absorption of the experimental findings of exoteric alchemy by chemistry left esoteric alchemy to those who continued to believe that there ‘was more to Heaven and earth’ than particles and forces. Incredible stories of transmutations continued to surface periodically during the eighteenth century. Indeed, legends concerning the ‘immortal’ adventurer, the Comte de Saint-Germain, continue into the twentieth century. In Germany, in particular, the Masonic order of Gold- und Rosenkreuz, which was patronized by King Frederick William II of Prussia, combined a mystical form of Christianity with practical work in alchemy based upon the study of collections of alchemical manuscripts. All of this increasingly ran against the rationalism and enlightenment of the age, and we know that at least one member, the naturalist, Georg Forster, left the movement a disillusioned man. Other alchemical echoes were to be heard in the speculative Naturphilosophie that swept through the German universities at the beginning of the nineteenth century and in the modified Paracelsianism of Samuel Hahnemann’s homeopathic system, which he launched in 1810.
Modern alchemical esotericism dates from 1850 when Mary Ann South, whose father had encouraged her interest in the history of religions and in mysticism, published A Suggestive Enquiry into the Hermetic Mystery. This argued that alchemical literature provided the mystic religious contemplative with a direct link to the secret knowledge of ancient mystery religions. After selling only a hundred copies of the book, father and daughter burned the remaining copies. Later, after she had married the Rev. A. T. Atwood, she claimed that the bonfire had taken place to prevent the teachings from falling into the wrong hands. Whatever one makes of this curious affair, her insight that alchemists had been really searching for spiritual enlightenment and not a material stone, supported by the translation of various alchemical texts into English, proved influential on Carl Jung when, in old age, Mrs Atwood republished her study in 1920. It also inspired Eugène Canseliet in France to devote his career to the symbolic interpretation of the statuary and frescoes of Christian churches and chateaux, as a result of the publication in 1928 of Le Mystère des Cathedrals by the mysterious adept ‘Fulcanelli’. The ability of the human mind to read anything into symbols has been mercilessly exposed by Umberto Eco in his novel, Foucault’s Pendulum (1988). In counterbalance, Patrick Harpur’s Mercurius (1990) paints a vividly sympathetic portrait of the esoteric mind.
Ironically, the growth of nineteenth-century chemistry encouraged a revival of alchemical speculation. Dalton’s reintroduction of atomism, the scepticism expressed towards the growing number of chemical elements (chapter 4), the discoveries of spectroscopists and the regularities of the periodic table (chapter 9), all suggested the possibility of transmutation. Although the possibility was given respectability by Rutherford’s and Soddy’s work on radioactivity at the beginning of the twentieth century and physically realized on an atomic scale in the 1930s, it had earlier led in the 1860s to ‘hyperchemistry’. We must not be surprised, therefore, to find gold transmutation stories occurring during even the most positivistic periods of Victorian science. During the 1860s, Chemical News (chapter 12) attributed the high price of bismuth on the metal market to a vogue for transmutation experiments. This was connected to a daring swindle perpetrated on the London stock-market by a Hungarian refugee, Nicholas Papaffy. Papaffy duped large numbers of investors into promoting a method for transforming bismuth and aluminium (then a new and expensive metal) into silver. This followed from a successful public demonstration at a bullion works in the classic tradition of Jonson’s Subtle. Needless to say, after trading offices were opened in Leadenhall Street, Papaffy decamped with an advance of £40 000 from the company. Nor was the American government less gullible. In 1897 an Irish – American metallurgist, Stephen Emmens, sold gold ingots to the US Assay Office that he claimed to have made from silver by his ‘Argentaurum Process’.
In France during the same period, hyperchemistry enjoyed the support of an Association Alchimique de France to which the Swedish playwright, August Strindberg, subscribed, and which influenced Madame Blavatsky’s ‘scientific’ writings for the theosophists and inspired the English composer, Cyril Scott (1879–1970), to compose the opera The Alchemist in 1925. The occult interest in alchemy has continued to the present day and has been given academic respectability since 1985 through the publication of the international scholarly review, Aries, a biannual devoted to the review of the history of esotericism, Hermeticism, theosophy, freemasonry, the Kabbalah and alchemy. Today, booksellers catalogue alchemy under ‘Occultism’ and not ‘History of Science’, while Ambix, the academic mouthpiece of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry (founded 1937) continues to receive occultist literature for review, as well as the occasional letter pressing its editor for ‘the secret of secrets’.
In 1980, at the phenomenal cost of $10 000, a bismuth sample was transmuted into one-billionth of a cent’s worth of gold by means of a particle accelerator at the Lawrence Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley. The ‘value’ of the experiment is underlined in Frederick Soddy’s ironic remark some sixty years before9:
If man ever achieves this further control over Nature, it is quite certain that the last thing he would want to do would be to turn lead or mercury into gold – for the sake of gold. The energy that would be liberated, if the control of these sub-atomic processes were possible as in the control of ordinary chemical changes, such as combustion, would far exceed in importance and value the gold.
I see not why we must needs believe that there are any primogeneal and simple bodies, of which, as of pre-existent elements, nature is obliged to compound all others. Nor do I see why we may not conceive that she may produce the bodies accounted mixt out of one another by variously altering and contriving their minute parts, without resolving the matter into any such simple and homogeneous substances as are pretended.
(ROBERT BOYLE, The Sceptical Chymist, 1661)
The phrase ‘The Scientific Revolution’ conjures up a rebellion against Greek authority in astronomy and dynamics, and physics in general. It reminds us of names like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Harvey, Descartes, Bacon and Newton. Chemists’ names are missing. Indeed, a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century revolution in chemical understanding does not readily spring to mind. What was there to rebel against or to revolutionize? Was there a new chemical way of looking at substances in the seventeenth century that in any way paralleled the new physical way?
The historian’s reply has usually been a negative one, with the rider that chemistry developed much later than either astronomy or physics or anatomy and physiology; and that chemistry did not become a science until the eighteenth century. Its revolution was carried out by Lavoisier.
Whether or not this was the case, it can be agreed that chemistry presented the early natural philosopher with peculiarly difficult problems. The sheer complexity of most of the chemical materials with which chemists commonly worked can be seen, with hindsight, to have inevitably made generalizations extremely difficult. Chemists were considering with equal ardour the chemical components of the human and animal body, and of plants and minerals, the procedures of metallurgy, pottery, vinegar, acid and glass manufacture, as well as, in some quarters, abstractions like the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life. There was no universally agreed chemical language, no convenient compartmentalization of substances into organic and inorganic, into solids, liquids and gases, or into acids, bases and salts; and no concept of purity. For example, when Wilhelm Homberg (1652–1715) ‘analysed’ ordinary sulphur in 1703, he obtained an acid salt, an earth, some fatty