The Chemistry of Alchemy Read online

  But, between now and then, we still have many fine adventures to share.

  There is in the Aire a hidden food of life.

  Sir Kenelm Digby, alchemist and bon vivant, ca. 1650*

  In this chapter we look at the lives of two early moderns, Kenelm Digby and Cornelius Drebble. Our criterion for selection? Some stories just have to be told.

  The history of our first hero, Kenelm Digby—alchemist, adventurer, pirate—is astounding. Admittedly biographers base many details of Kenelm Digby's life on his memoirs, a glorious story that no doubt gained glory in the retelling; yet, the dates and events are real. After all, it was the seventeenth century.

  KENELM DIGBY

  Kenelm Digby was born with a past to contend with. When Digby was three years old, his father, Everard Digby was hanged and then cut down while still conscious, castrated, eviscerated, and quartered. His crime: conspiracy to kill the king. His motive: he was Catholic.1

  To be a Jesuit in England was a capital crime during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Though not keenly religious, Elizabeth meant to keep the kingdom, and that required independence from Rome. Elizabeth structured her policies accordingly, though the anti-Catholic laws were not enforced to the point of turning over every rock to ferret out priests, but the response was swift for troublesome clergy.

  On the death of Elizabeth, her successor, Protestant James I, received support from Catholics. They hoped he would relax restrictions further—but the changes did not come quickly enough. Thinking they could speed the process, a group of Catholics conspired to murder King James. They set kegs of gunpowder in the basement of the parliament building and prepared to set them off while Parliament was in session and James in attendance.

  They were caught.

  At the executions, Sir Everard Digby was the first to die, sparing him the agony of watching the others, perhaps because he was a pitiable character, if a person contemplating mass murder can be pitied.

  Everard Digby was raised Protestant and had been a page to Queen Elizabeth, but he and his young wife were converted by Jesuits, she by conscience and he by hope for better health. How and to what extent Everard Digby became involved in the plot to murder the king is uncertain, but he was caught in the net when the conspiracy imploded. He confessed his guilt without being put to torture.

  In confinement he was said to have written to his wife in lemon juice on papers smuggled out of the prison. If this is true, then it only adds to the portrait of a sad simpleton, as this trick was known by many and had been published by his contemporary, della Porta (see demonstration 7). If the letters were allowed to reach their destination unmolested, it can only be for lack of interest in their content.

  Sir Everard Digby was the only one to plead guilty and the only conspirator with knighthood. Emboldened by this status (though such things could be purchased at the time), he asked to be beheaded instead of drawn and quartered. He also asked to be forgiven and to have his estate left intact for his nascent family. They forgave him, confiscated only some of his estate, but postponed the beheading until after the execution described above. He was in his twenties at the time of his death.

  Brought up Catholic, Kenelm Digby (1603–1665),2 Everard Digby's son, seemed largely indifferent to religion, perhaps because of the sadness of the lives of his parents. At his father's request, his family had been spared destitution, so Kenelm Digby was not without means. Though his education was described as “that of a dilettante,”3 he spent two years at Oxford, where he may have become acquainted with alchemy. He might have expanded on these studies at the time, if not for another bump in his road: his love for learning was supplanted by another love, and her name was Venetia.

  Three years older than Digby, Venetia Anastasia Stanley (1600–1633) was a former childhood friend and now a great beauty. Although she returned his affection, Venetia was of a higher social stratum. Cooler minds (Venetia's mother) sent Kenelm off on a tour of the continent to distract him. At seventeen, he was by all accounts a tall, robust, powerful man with accompanying love of good life.4 He later wrote a cookbook, The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened, in which his affection for good meat and mead is apparent.5

  On his continental tour, Marie de Medici found him entertaining, he dined with Prince Charles and the Duke of Buckingham, and, in Florence, he met a Carmelite friar who gave him the secret for making a “Powder of Sympathy,” which, like Paracelsus's weapons salve, could heal a wound from a distance. (More on this later.)

  In his travels, Digby could not have been innocent, but he was discreet and had only one recognized attachment to a Spanish woman, Donna Anna Maria Manrique. Venetia, however, kept from knowing Digby's whereabouts or condition by her mother, believed him dead at one point, and availed herself of the opportunities her beauty afforded her, which included an affair of record with Sir Edward Sackville. Yet on Digby's return, finding him sound, she willingly transferred allegiance. Digby challenged Sackville to a duel, but Sir Edward declined, swearing Venetia was guilt-free. Digby and Venetia married in secret, but after their second child, the marriage was announced and acknowledged by all, including Venetia's mother.

  Because of the pleas of Digby's father, enough money was spared to support his son but not his son's family, too. Digby found himself in need of an income, so, at the age of twenty-four, he became a pirate.

  The venture was speculation on Digby's part because King James indicated he would support the mission, but the funds were not forthcoming. Nonetheless, Digby proceeded as though he were on commission from the king. According to biographers, he had two ships, the Eagle and the George and Elizabeth, and his objective was to disrupt the Venetian trade routes to the Eastern Mediterranean and open the way for English trade. He captured some French and Spanish ships near Gibraltar and ransomed some Christian slaves held by Algerians, as he recorded in his journal. In Alexandretta, on the southern coast of Turkey, he was fired on by French and Venetians. He returned fire and took the day. Unfortunately this triumph for Digby was a diplomatic embarrassment for England, so the victory was disavowed. On his return, he was given a low-rank position in the navy, and, being in need of funds (he had not been reimbursed for his ransom of the Christian slaves), he took it.

  Digby's family grew to five children, and his financial responsibilities kept pace. He briefly converted to Anglicanism in an effort to gain English patronage, but when his beloved wife died in 1633, he returned to Catholicism and retired to an expatriate's life in France. There were murmurs that Digby caused his wife's death with the viper wine he gave her for her complexion. But whether to escape the rumors or the truth, Digby buried himself in a life of study.

  Digby was no doubt interested in the learning he encountered, which included Galileo's new theories as well as the mathematics of Descartes; yet there is little evidence of deep comprehension. He learned enough alchemy to perform some standard tricks, one of which we will see in the demonstration that accompanies this chapter, but he didn't advance the art. An appraisal by a visitor was that he was a mountebank, a charlatan, though he remained convincing enough to offer lectures and write books on alchemical topics.6 He reported repeating the demonstration of du Chesne (simulated in demonstration 8), in which burned nettles were reassembled into a nettle plant in ice, which we know as palingenesis, the vegetarian version of a homunculus. He reported witnessing transmutations and gave a recipe in which silver could be colored to a yellow metal and declared it the purest gold. He reproduced the experiments of Sendivogius on saltpeter and saw the association of saltpeter with a life-granting component of air, but Digby, likewise, did not make the intellectual leap to isolating oxygen.

  During the English Civil War (1642–1651), Digby attempted to stay on the continent, but England was his home. He is said to have killed a Frenchman in a duel because the latter insulted the English king. Afterward, as a measure of prudence, he decided to visit England for a spell but was arrested as soon as he set foot on his native shores. Luckily his initial i
mprovised holding cell was in a pub, “where his conversation made the prison a place of delight.”7 When moved to a private residence for the duration of his sentence, Digby was allowed to perform experiments and to write to while away the time.

  The laxness of his restrictions soon turned into no restrictions at all. On future trips, he seemed to come and go at will. At the time, he served Henrietta Maria, the widow of the beheaded Charles I, as chancellor, which may have afforded him some protection, but he was wise not to trust it too far and stayed mostly in France.

  He was sent on various diplomatic missions by Queen Henrietta, which could not have provided much in the way of income: as soon as her husband was beheaded, Henrietta was cut off from her source of support. Accordingly Digby continued to lecture and promote his books.

  The books included opinions he developed by observation, mostly unsupported by fact, and some descriptions of his powder of sympathy. He actively promoted the use of the powder, and if he did not sell it outright, he certainly gained some consideration because of its use.

  In 1653, while England was under Cromwell's protection, Digby was officially allowed to return, given his promise (probably based on his ancestor's history) not to plot against the protector. He agreed and indeed maintained an amiable association with Cromwell and performed diplomatic errands for him. Digby believed in “universal passive obedience to any species of government that had obtained an establishment,”8 which was disliked by Royalist and Puritan alike, but which kept him working and solvent.

  In 1658, when he began to suffer what would be his final illness, he opted to go back to the continent and limit his activities somewhat.9 But when he heard of a friend who had been wounded while trying to stop a duel, he rushed to his aid with his powder of sympathy.

  Whether acting through knowledge, instinct, or imitation, Digby performed a classic Paracelsian cure. He removed the bandage that was binding the wound and soaked the bandage in water saturated with his powder of sympathy. On removal of the tightly cinched bandage, the patient reported a “pleasing kind of freshnesse, as it were a wet cold napkin did spread over my hand.”10 This sensation, of course, was credited to the powder of sympathy rather than the restoration of circulation in his wounded limb. Digby then commanded the wound be kept clean but otherwise uncovered and turned everyone's attention to the bandage to make sure the patient remained unmolested.

  The bandage was washed and hung up by a fire to dry, but when the patient developed a fever, the cloth was removed from the fire and plunged again into cold water. While they were so engaged, the fever passed, the patient recovered, and the powder was praised. Considering that without the powder, the tourniquet would have remained, the wound would have festered, and amputation would have been attempted, the praise was well earned.

  The actual powder of the powder of sympathy is said have been a crude precipitate of copper vitriol, a common salt, which Digby could have made in his kitchen if he had the notion. How did Digby explain the power of the powder? He said it was a case of “like to like,”11 which sounded suspiciously like Paracelsian similars. The powder of sympathy provided a conduit through which the missing part of the body contained in the bandage could find its way back to the wound.

  At the death of Cromwell and the restoration of the English monarchy, Digby returned to England. He had once written a medical tract that suggested a human could live for three hundred to five hundred years, but this was not to be the case for Digby. The new monarch barred Digby from court on the basis of his friendship with Cromwell, but Digby remained close to the widow of Charles I, his erstwhile poor patron, Henrietta Maria. He enjoyed cooking and visits from philosophers, experimentalists, and mystics. He installed a laboratory in his home in London. In 1665, he died there and was buried next to Venetia. The next year, notes his biographer, came the Great Fire of London. “The Great Fire destroyed the tomb,” she records, “and scattered their ashes.”12

  The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, more commonly known as the Royal Society, was in its early stages of formation at the time of Digby's death. This association of scholars and experimenters, knowledgeable and curious, would be instrumental in the development of western-European science. Digby's “Discourse concerning the Vegetation of Plants” was read into their records in 1661, and his name appears in the rolls many times thereafter. In the “Discourse,” he discussed the role of saltpeter in the growth of plants and pronounced the quote with which this chapter begins. He knew, as did others, there was something in the air, “a hidden food of life…benign fire…the food of the Lungs…”13

  In fact, he knew of our next hero's attempts to capture this air—and turn it loose—in a submarine.

  CORNELIUS DREBBLE

  Like Digby and Sendivogius, Cornelius Drebble (1572–1633)14 was, at times, judged a charlatan. However, in these cases, we would like to suggest a better term: survivor. People do what they must to stay alive and pursue their dreams. If this means producing a coin with a sleight of hand, selling a healing potion of flavored water, or exaggerating their accomplishments to heighten their fame, then we forgive them. They acted with a purpose: they knew what they were looking for and hoped to find it before the world took them to account.

  Cornelius Drebble was born in the Netherlands to a farming family. As a boy he was apprenticed to an engraver who also practiced alchemy, and he learned both skills. He married at the age of twenty-three and set up an engraving business, selling pictures and maps. Moreover, good with machinery and inventive, he had a patent for a pump and a “perpetual motion” clock by the time he was twenty-six. By the age of thirty he had a patent for a new style of chimney, and by the age of thirty-two he moved to England, hired by Henry, Prince of Wales. Such was his skill that he was invited to the court of Rudolf II in Prague, and he moved there with his family in 1610.

  Figure 16.1. Kenelm Digby. (Gift of Fisher Scientific International. Image courtesy of the Chemical Heritage Foundation Collections.)

  The source of his fame was the quantity and breadth of his inventions. In addition to the mechanisms mentioned above, he developed a thermal switch based on mercury (such as we suggested for viewing in demonstration 2) and used it to design an incubator for chicken eggs. He styled a telescope and a thermometer. However, as Partington pointed out, he also touted a machine for producing thunder, lighting, and extreme cold. This one was not so well received.

  Unfortunately the heyday of Rudolf was nearing an end by the time Drebble arrived. The mad emperor was forced to relinquish his crown the next year and was dead within two. Yet in the two years before the death of his patron, Drebble impressed the court with his perpetual-motion machinery (the mechanic's equivalent of the alchemist's golden transmutation) while he learned what he could from the alchemists at court. After the emperor's death, he returned to England, briefly, then Ferdinand II, the Holy Roman emperor who followed Rudolf II, called him back to tutor his son. There, unfortunately, caught in the maelstrom of the Thirty Years’ War, he was captured and put in prison when Prague was overrun. He was finally freed but returned to England penniless.

  Over the next several years, Drebble labored to restore his fortune. He wrote books on alchemical transmutations, accidentally discovered a scarlet dye and mordant that became fashionable, had a thriving business in instruments such as microscopes, and worked for a time in the Royal Navy—which was where he might have gotten his idea. In 1620, at the age of forty-eight, he began building his submarine.

  The submarine Drebble built has been compared to a diving bell. It was guided by an operator in a boat at the surface with the submarine tethered below the boat. There were no apparent air hoses leading to the submarine, so Drebble was supposed to have some source of oxygen in the submarine and some way of removing the carbon dioxide built up by breathing. Both of these processes were possible, and Drebble should have been familiar with them. Drebble's stay at Rudolf's court overlapped with that of Sendivogius, and the Polish alchemis
t may have shared his idea of the life-giving spirit of the Earth. Perhaps. We know of no record of such an interaction.

  It also must be acknowledged that we have no complete description of the submarine either. We don't know the dimensions, the shape, or the design. Drebble, it was said, was very secretive. There are eyewitness reports of the trials of the submarine in the Thames, with several passengers, but the trials did not convince the Royal Navy to invest in further development. So any speculations as to the operation and the oxygen supply are just that—speculations. But it's fun to speculate.

  If the submarine had some way of providing oxygen, it could have come from heating saltpeter, as we did in demonstration 14. But this would mean a fire or at least hot coals down in the submarine with the mariners. Reportedly the submarine rested several meters below the surface, and, at that depth, water pressure would prevent an escape hatch from opening outward. If the hatch opened inward, that would take care of the fire but would require large lung capacity and extreme courtesy to have everyone exit safely.

  In addition to providing oxygen, the carbon dioxide exhaled by the passengers would have to be removed. This type of chemical solution exists, as we will show in the demonstration that accompanies this chapter, but again, there would have to be a mechanism for circulating the air through the solution for it to be efficient. The resulting setup—with closely packed people, blowers, tubes, and fires—seems doubtful. Perhaps the passengers got by with the limited air in the interior, which would restrict the time of the trip, or, if the boat was tethered as reported, maybe there actually was an air hose that Drebble failed to mention in his description to his potential patrons.

  Nonetheless, by his late fifties, Drebble was reduced to poverty and ran a pub for sustenance. He had invested in a scheme to drain marshland around London to create usable land, but the plan had not gone well. Atmospheric pressure and the limitations it set on pumps was just beginning to be understood at that time,15 so he may have come up against this invisible foe. Regardless, we envision Drebble in the pub, discussing the problem with farmers and workers, waiting for his next big idea.