The Chemistry of Alchemy Page 22

  VAN HELMONT AND MASS

  The conservation of mass is a cornerstone of modern chemistry. The total mass of materials before a reaction must add to the total mass of products and any leftover reactants. A modern cook would expect to recover the same weight of pudding as the weight of the milk, sugar, cornstarch, and cocoa going in, but the medieval-to-Renaissance alchemist might not have thought it obvious at all. However, Van Helmont offered experimental evidence.

  He found a weighed mass of sand fused into glass yielded the same weight of silica when dissolved and precipitated. Then, as a pièce de résistance, he performed his famous willow-tree experiment, evidence both for conservation of mass and for water as a primary element.

  He took dirt, dried it in a furnace, weighed it, and then moistened it with rainwater (their version of distilled water). He weighed a willow tree and planted it in the soil. After five years, he removed the grown willow tree and reweighed it and then dried and reweighed the potting soil. He found he had the same weight of soil, less a little bit, and concluded the weight gain of the willow tree came from the water he'd added over five years.

  There are a number of problems with the experiment, although Van Helmont made efforts to prevent them. For instance, he covered the soil with a tin plate with small holes so only rainwater could enter and only rainwater was used because that was the purest water available. But Van Helmont did not account for the fallen leaves, even though he thought about it and commented that this was an omission. Also, interestingly, he does not mention the possibility of absorbed or released gas, though he'd already taken that step forward. Van Helmont had recognized some gases as different from air and had begun the process of identifying these gases and describing their properties.

  VAN HELMONT AND GAS

  Fire acting on a solid body, said Van Helmont, may become a “windy blast” or a “spirit,” and he invented a word to cover the situation: “I call this spirit, hitherto unknown, by the new name of gas.”5 He then proceeded to identify as many gases as he could find and list their characteristics.

  Carbon dioxide gas, the bubble-making gas in the classic vinegar/baking soda reaction, he named spiritus sylvestre (wild spirit) because of its resistance to condensation and its ability to shatter glass when produced in a sealed container. He identified the fumes of burning charcoal as being different from spiritus sylvestre and nearly poisoned himself, so it's assumed he generated carbon monoxide. He recognized rust-colored nitrogen oxides formed when nitric acid acts on metals as being a separate species of gas. These nitrogen oxides are responsible for the reddish color of smog, a less common experience than it once was, which is a triumph of environmental reclamation. Methane, which he called gas pingue, he found to be produced from dung or the large intestine—and flammable.

  Van Helmont captured the gas from burning sulfur, which we would now identify as a mix of sulfur oxides, which is another pollution problem. Many ores have sulfur in them and, upon burning, they can generate sulfur oxides, which can form sulfuric acid on contact with moist air or water. Industrial stacks can be fitted with sulfur-oxide scrubbers, but the world is still struggling with the problem.

  Some gases that Van Helmont thought were different were really the same gas from different sources. He thought carbon dioxide from caves was different from carbon dioxide from fermentation, and in turn different from carbon dioxide from the baking soda/vinegar reaction or burping. He may be forgiven because he couldn't purify or analyze the gases, which could have had different contaminants, so dissimilar behaviors or smells. He also thought carbon dioxide poisonous, but it's not—although it can be deadly. It's heavier than air and can sink to the ground, which is why vapors from dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) make good theatrical fog but in high concentrations can be suffocating. During this time, dogs were sometimes sent into mines to check for dangerous gases because they are close to the ground. The Renaissance, as we have noted, continued to be hard on dogs.

  Nevertheless, for all his care and observational powers, Van Helmont did not recognize that a gas was given off by saltpeter. Though aware of Sendivogius's writings, he said heated saltpeter gave a little acid water and a salt. Even in gunpowder, which will soon grow in importance to our story, Van Helmont thought sodium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoal exploded because they conflicted and were trying to destroy one another. Then again, the intuitive leap that led him to the concept and characterization of gas would set the stage for the future.

  Yet even with one foot in alchemy's future, part of Van Helmont lingered in the past.

  Case in point, Van Helmont thought he had witnessed transmutation, yet even when dealing with a powder of projection, he diligently recorded the weight.

  For truly, I have divers times seen [the philosophers’ stone] and handled it with my hands, but it was of color, such as is saffron in its powder, yet weighty and shining like unto powdered glass. There was once given unto me one fourth part of one grain (but I call a grain the six hundredth part of one ounce): this quarter of one grain therefore, being rolled up in paper, I projected upon eight ounces of quicksilver made hot in a crucible; and straightway all the quicksilver, with a certain degree of noise, stood still from flowing, and being congealed, settled like unto a yellow lump: but after pouring it out, the bellows blowing, there were found eight ounces and a little less than eleven grains of the purest gold.6

  Van Helmont believed in and said he could make the alkahest, the universal solvent Paracelsus sought. He believed in spontaneous generation and the magnetic cure of wounds…

  And this got him into trouble.

  VAN HELMONT AND THE INQUISITION

  Around 1620, a Belgian wrote a book on the Paracelsian magnetic cure of wounds, which was criticized by Jesuits who said magnetic cures smacked of devil's work. Van Helmont, for whatever reason, for his own amusement or the amusement of his friends, wrote a satirical commentary that said both the Paracelsians and the Jesuits were taking things too seriously.7 He had not intended the work to be published, but it was, and the Jesuits and the inquisitors did not see the humor. Van Helmont, a practicing Catholic, offered to retract and burn all copies, but the dam had been breached.

  The Inquisition considered his case for thirteen years while Van Helmont dangled, and then finally, in 1634, at the age of fifty-four, he was arrested and taken to a Franciscan prison. He was released after a few weeks by the intervention of powerful friends, but as we know from the tale of Rupescissa, even a few weeks in a Franciscan prison could be unpleasant. He was put under house arrest and remained so until his death ten years later.

  Nonetheless, Van Helmont's end was not sad. He was happiest at his pyrotechnic, his art of fire, and they did not take that away. He had time now to sit in contemplation before his furnace, and when he had an idea, he would try it. And ideas he had in abundance, as the sheets of his written records attest.

  His son, Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont, wanted to publish his father's work, but his father would not give his permission. Finally, on his deathbed, Van Helmont told his son he could publish the notes but told him to publish everything, errors and all. Yet Franciscus Mercurius knew something of alchemy, and he edited his father's notes. Was he true to his father's intent? Most probably so.

  The historian J. R. Partington reported Franciscus Mercurius “studied and practiced medicine but apparently not at a university and for a time led an irregular life among gypsies.”8 While such an adventure might see idyllic, it was probably far from it. The gypsy life was harsh. With no borders to wall off invaders and no standing army, their reluctant hosts subjected this wandering nation to slavery, branding, expulsion, and torment. But the younger Van Helmont was emulating his father's exemplar, Paracelsus. He may have also adopted Paracelsus's brashness and assuredness because he, too, ran afoul of the Inquisition. In the 1660s, in his forties, Franciscus van Helmont was arrested, but in an experience different from his father, he was tortured and detained for a year and a half.

  Did the Inqu
isition succeed in suppressing this Van Helmont? Perhaps. Franciscus Mercurius did not have much influence on alchemy on his own, but without him, his father's papers would be unpublished, so in this way his impact was huge. Johannes van Helmont was part of a new breed and a new era, the early modern, which is where we'll soon find ourselves, too.

  But first to the estates of Van Helmont, to see what he has on the fire.

  DEMONSTRATION 15. THE GAS THAT GOT AWAY

  An old man sits at a scarred wooden table, dripping liquid into a narrow-necked flask. Weak light flickers from candles and the glow of a neglected fire. Broken pottery and bottles litter shadowy corners as the flask bubbles over and spills down the sides. The old man waits while the effervescence quiets and then uses a wooden splint to light a flat candle in the bottom of a deep bowl. He lifts the flask and tips it carefully, as though he would pour into the bowl.

  Nothing can be seen coming from the flask. Nothing can be seen going into the bowl.

  Yet—the candle goes out.

  No wonder these guys were mystics.

  DISPOSAL

  Liquids from this demonstration can be rinsed down the sink with cool water, and solids can go into the trash. The gases? Well, they will go where they will…

  DEATH IN THE AIR

  Van Helmont's spiritus sylvestre, his wild gas, is carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide can be a suffocating gas. Anyone who has worked with dry ice knows to stay back from the curling vapors because a lungful of carbon dioxide is a breath with no oxygen, and the body responds with coughing and choking.

  We will not work with concentrations anywhere near that high, so there will be no choking in this demonstration, but we will still see the suffocating power of Van Helmont's wild spirit. Well, actually we won't see it…

  Put on your safety glasses. Take one of the small, flat candles suggested for purchase in “Stores and Ores” (or some other small candle, such as a birthday candle) and secure it with modeling clay in the bottom of a 50-milliliter beaker. The candle must be small enough that the sides of the beaker extend well above the flame of the lit candle, as shown in the drawing at the beginning of this demonstration. Use a wooden taper to light it.

  While the flame is settling, prepare the gas by putting about a teaspoon (5 milliliters) of baking soda in the bottom of a 125-milliliter Erlenmeyer flask. Pour in a splash of vinegar on the baking soda and watch it fizz and foam. It may bubble up and over the mouth of the flask, but the effluence carries only salty water and vinegar, so the worst it can do is leave a crust on the counter—but you won't want to get it in your eyes.

  After the bubbles have stopped, pick up the flask and carefully pour the gas, carbon dioxide, onto the candle without pouring the liquid. You can pour just the gas because it is heavier than air, and, if you could see it, it would appear to be sliding out of the flask onto the candle. But you won't see it. What you will see is the candle go out as though snuffed with a ghostly puff.

  BURNING THE AIR AND ARISTOTLE

  For this demonstration you will need a 250-milliliter beaker, a birthday candle, modeling clay, and a 125-milliliter Erlenmeyer flask.

  Stand the candle up in the bottom of the beaker using modeling clay, as was done in an earlier demonstration. Once the candle is upright in the bowl and secure, pour water in the bowl until it is an inch or so (a couple of centimeters) from the top of the candle. The clay may slowly dissolve, so don't tarry.

  Light the candle.

  As shown in the illustration at the beginning of this demonstration, carefully lower the Erlenmeyer flask over the candle and into the water and wait. The candle should fairly quickly consume the oxygen in the air within the flask and create a vacuum, and the water will flow up into the Erlenmeyer flask to fill the vacuum.

  We are told that Aristotle said, “Nature abhors a vacuum.” But Van Helmont performed this experiment and described his observations as follows.

  There is in the air something that is less than a body, which fills up the vacuities in the air and is wholly annihilated by fire…. The water rises by suction…. The experiment proves that a vacuum, which Aristotle thought impossible, is something quite ordinary.9

  In other words, Van Helmont said Aristotle was wrong—and with this bit of attitude, we enter the early modern age.

  Late seventeenth-century alchemical equipment. (Image used by permission of Edgar Fahs Smith History of Chemistry Collection. Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.)

  Outrageous, courageous, and noble Queen Elizabeth died in 1603. We mark her passing by placing ourselves foursquare in a new age—early-modern western Europe. As we move away from the Renaissance, we see a change in scene. Now there is a New World and an Old World, Protestant Christians and Catholics as well. The alchemists still delve into the past, but now they probe the future, too. Discussions of atoms, corpuscles, and elements evolve and deepen. As we progress through the last part of our story, we see alchemy shift its focus, its identity, and even its name—but through it all, our heroes stay at their fires, still in search of secrets and still seeking the stone.

  Born as the effort to make gold, by 1600, alchemy had matured—and there still was no gold. At least not from metallic transmutation. Instead the alchemists found wealth in distilled alcohols, pigments, perfumes, fertilizers, pesticides, and numerous other products using their crucibles, vats, and stills. Yet these sidelines had always been in the service of metallic transmutation: day jobs to keep the alchemists going for the gold. Now, with the advent of the seventeenth century, the focus begins shift from golden transmutation—slightly.

  At the opening of the century we will see alchemy used for everything from wrinkle creams to submarines by alchemists who still kept chicanery in their back pockets to pull out when necessary. These will share the stage with people of sincere conviction who will study alchemy for its potential good—though sincerity gets them no further than the back-alley adepts. With the transplantation of alchemy to the New World, alchemists appear to be escaping the shadow of the philosophers’ stone and become more focused on medicines instead. Yet, in the face of continued plagues, diseases, and parasites imported from the New World and the East, alchemical medicines pale and other medicines, brought in from the New World and elsewhere, steal the medical scene. Quinine, brewed from the bark of the cinchona tree and learned from native Peruvian pharmacopeia, would be the first effective treatment for the bane of malaria. Coffee and tobacco were likewise introduced and, though not medicines, certainly eased the pain of existence. A turn-of-the-century commentator named Walenty Fontanus (1545–1618) observed:

  These [alchemists] do not cure with normal medicines which have been developed by conventional means by normal people, but they use miraculous cures: the celebrated Elixir, balsam, gold, the heavens and the Philosophers’ Stone. I beg you, please keep the golden remedies for the forthcoming golden age; but for the purposes of our present wooden age, please allow us to assist in human tragedies with simple wood.1

  But you can't talk an alchemist out of alchemy. Passion for the art; the love of the sight, smell, and colors; the fascination in transformations and wondrous reactions—these kept them at their vats, not needing reason for themselves, only to justify themselves to others.

  Some turned to Christian mysticism for their rationale, their raison d’être: the belief that alchemical products were needed to prepare the world for the second coming of Christ. By mid-eighteenth century, mysticism would separate itself from natural philosophy, but in the seventeenth century this separation was just beginning.

  Others believed alchemy to be an essential part of natural philosophy and chose its study to be their contribution to the intellectual resurgence of the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution—and other revolutions, too.

  Gunpowder had been around for a while; an early reference to gunpowder could be found in the writings of an old friend, Roger Bacon, circa 1250—but he knew it only as a “boyish trick.”2 By the Renaissance, Vannoc
cio Biringuccio (ca. 1550) was able to dedicate a major portion of Pirotechnia to methods for making saltpeter and gunpowder. By the seventeenth century, improvements in gunpowder technology, including refinements in Sendivogius's saltpeter, would cause the unprecedented devastation of the seventeenth-century Thirty Years’ War—which backfired on the alchemists. With economies in ruins, less money was available to patronize alchemical speculation, which made alchemical research more of a wealthy person's pursuit—or the pursuit of the self-reliant.

  And among these winds of change blew a subtle breeze. Alchemy had long been known by other names—alchymia, chymia, chemici, or even chymistrey or pyrotechny—for several reasons, probably the most prosaic being that standardized spelling was a thing of the future. Because of this variety of names applied to essentially the same enterprises—practical alchemy as well as the search for the philosophers’ stone—the word chymistry has recently been proposed to cover the activities of this interim age.3

  Yet Christian mystics recognized the prefix al- of alchemy as the Arabic definite article, an uncomfortable reminder of alchemy's pagan past. And while too much cannot be made of this distinction, consciously or not, chymia might have sounded more Christian. In addition, there was a desire by the new Helmontian chymists of the era, who saw themselves as natural philosophers, to distance themselves from the vulgar alchemists, the common alchemists, the tricksters and purveyors of pigments. If rebranding was the intent, however, it wasn't effective. As historian J. R. Partington quoted a resident of the age: “To have the name of a chymist is enough to render a man detestable among honest men.”4

  Eventually, of course, the words alchemy and chemistry would grow to have substantially different meanings. As later moderns, we hope our children's school curriculum will include chemistry, not alchemy, but when differentiation begins, it will be time for us to bow out. Our mission—to show the fascination and productivity of the alchemist—hopefully, by then, will have been accomplished.