The Chemistry of Alchemy Page 29

  For this demonstration you need purple cabbage, a pot, distilled water, a beaker, around 20 clear plastic cups, and as many of these as you have handy: baking soda, lemon juice, cream of tartar, table salt, aspirin tablet, vitamin-C tablet, vinegar, household ammonia, clear lemon-lime soda, club soda, borax, egg white, bleach, sugar, ammonium chloride (sal ammoniac), sodium nitrate (saltpeter), water, and leftover sodium hydroxide (NaOH) solution saved from demonstration 11.

  Okay, so purple cabbage juice will probably not put out your eyes, but boiling water could—so humor us one last time and put on your safety glasses.

  Chop up about a cup (250 milliliters) of purple cabbage and put it in the pot with enough water to cover the cabbage, but not much more. Warm the cabbage on medium heat for about a half hour and then pour off the liquid into the beaker. It should be a rich, purple color.

  Now set out one cup each for the items on the list you were able to locate, baking soda, vinegar, and so on, and add a little of each sample (baking soda, vinegar, etc.) to each cup, one item per cup. Pour a little cabbage juice in each and you should see dramatic color changes.

  Make certain you have one cup with just distilled water in it, to be your neutral color, that is, not acid and not base. It should appear bluish. The acid substances should be reddish, and the base substances should be yellow/greenish. Group your cups into acid, base, and neutral groups.

  Lemon juice, vinegar, club soda, lemon-lime soda, aspirin, ammonium chloride, and vitamin C should be in the acid group, but your club soda may be nearly neutral. Baking soda, cream of tartar, bleach, borax, egg white, sodium hydroxide solution, and household ammonia should be in the base group, but the color for bleach may be off or fading because the bleach is bleaching the cabbage juice. Borax is a purplish brown, so there may be a slight reaction going on there, too. Water, table salt, saltpeter, and sugar should be in the neutral group.

  Findings like this allowed Boyle to announce three tribes (his word) of salts: acid salts, base salts, and neutral salts, and this method for deciding which was which.

  When an acid reacts with a base, the product is generally a salt and water, and if the salt formed is a neutral salt, the solution will be neutral. Check this by pouring your vinegar solution into your household ammonia solution. Be careful, some ammonia fumes will be released, but if you do it on your stove top with the exhaust fan on and don't lean directly over the cups, you should be fine. Compare your mixed solutions with the cup with just water and cabbage juice. The vinegar-ammonia mixture may not be exactly the color of purple-cabbage-juice water (the ratio has to be just right for complete neutralization), but it should be closer than the unmixed solutions.

  BLACK AND WHITE

  Another demonstration Boyle performed in connection with his study of color was to lay out a black and a white tile on snow. He found black tiles melted the snow quicker. The color black results from the absorption of visible light while the color white results from the reflection of visible light. Light carries energy, so black material will warm up more quickly. Boyle, however, did not understand all the subtleties involved, but he was on the track.

  You can test this easily for yourself if you have a black tile, a white tile. and some snow, but this will also work with a black piece of paper and a white piece of paper laid over crushed ice on a sunny day. No safety glasses required, only sunglasses and a cool beverage.

  JUST A BIT MORE

  This is the end of the demonstrations, but we've had fun and we hope you did, too. We also hope you'll stick around for our conclusion: it doesn't have a demonstration, but we clear up a little unfinished business…

  Plate 1. We made this sample of alchemical gold using our procedure from demonstration 3. No wonder the alchemists thought they were getting close!

  Plate 2. In demonstration 6, our search for the philosophers’ stone, we found this manifestation of the alchemists’ legendary peacock's tail.

  Plate 3. In the gold parting of demonstration 7, a nitrated acid treatment of a gold alloy dissolved the non-gold metals, such as copper and silver, into a separate blue solution. A second acid treatment, this time with aqua regia, dissolved the remaining gold into a lovely yellow solution.

  Plate 4. In demonstration 8 we grew a Tree of Diana: a sparkly bark of silver metal deposited from silver solution onto copper wire. The tip of the copper can be seen rising from the solution, above the silver tree.

  Plate 5. The alum crystals of demonstration 13 require the patience of an alchemist to grow, but the result, we discovered, was really quite rewarding.

  Plate 6. The alchemists knew certain minerals could add color to flame. In demonstration 17 we ignited the green flame of verdigris.

  Plate 7. In demonstration 18 we grew the ghostly golden gardens that fascinated the alchemist Glauber and his contemporaries. Orange tendrils of our bloodred mass grew in the rear garden, and in the foreground our green mass tree displayed a black trunk, green boughs, and, at the very top, a layer of rusty iron oxides that Glauber would have seen as golden foliage.

  Plate 8. The process of reduction to the pristine state—dissolving a metal, filtering the solution, and recovering the metal in its original metallic state—was offered by the alchemist Sennert as evidence for the corpuscular nature of materials. In our rendition of the experiment in demonstration 19, we dissolved gold, filtered it, and then recovered it as gold metal by allowing it to plate out onto a silver dime. The gold deposited in a finely divided layer so it isn't everywhere shiny, but here and there the gold gleams through.

  The chymists are a strange class of mortals who seek their pleasures among soot and flame, poisons and poverty…yet among all these evils I seem to live so sweetly…may I die if I should change places with the Persian King.

  John Joachim Becher, alchemist, ca. 1650*

  We left one story unfinished, and now is the time to finish it: the tale of the alchemist who discovered the secret of porcelain—lovely, translucent, dainty, and strong—the white gold of the European alchemist's quest.

  JOHANN BÖTTGER

  As recounted by his biographer, Janet Gleeson,1 our hero Johann Frederick Böttger (1682–1719) was born into a Germany still impoverished by the Thirty Years’ War. As a child of a family of goldworkers and apprenticed to an apothecary by the age of twelve,2 he was well positioned for a comfortable life as an artisan. But then at some point the teenager made friends with Johann Kunckel, an older alchemist. The alchemist and the boy often talked into the night about the philosophers’ stone and transmutation, and soon Böttger began after-hours experimentation in the apothecary's back-room lab.

  Böttger, it seems, had a talent for alchemy—and chicanery. After five years of apprenticeship, formally as an apothecary and informally as an alchemist, Böttger began doing back-alley transmutations.

  Böttger's routine was classic. He met, his story went, a mysterious Greek monk, Laskaris, who had given him a small parcel of powder that could change lead into gold. When his audience's curiosity was peaked and they plied him with sufficient food and drink, the evening was dark, the shadows cast, and the yellow candlelight flickering, he would offer to do a demonstration. With appropriate complexity and care he would load a crucible with lead and stoke a fire. When the fire was sufficient to make the lead molten, he would cast in his powder of projection and pour, with great fanfare, his gold into a waiting metal mold.

  There would be much anticipation as the mold cooled, during which time he would entertain them with stories and occasionally check the progress of the cooling. By the time the melt had cooled (and he'd had a chance to switch the phony metal for a gold ingot formed in the same mold), he would turn out the sample and it would, of course, pass any test.

  If they begged him to do it again, he would demur, saying the Greek monk had given him only a small amount of powder and he didn't want to waste it before he could analyze it and make more. For these investigations, of course, he would need investors…and so the swindle would go. The audien
ce no doubt would be glad to give a little money for an evening's entertainment if nothing more, and Böttger would have money to have a little fun, buy more materials, and take time to do a few more experiments, because, in his heart, he knew he was clever, and maybe it would be him. Maybe he would be the one to really find the secret—the secret to making gold.

  A youngster at the time, Böttger was honing his skills and not careful about covering his trail, so his master, the apothecary, was aware of his activities and in a friendly way advised him to desist. Böttger would be ready to be a journeyman soon, the apothecary told him, which meant earning a wage, so why not forget the tomfoolery and settle down?

  He may as well have told the phoenix not to fly, but Böttger should have listened.

  As part of Böttger's routine, he would beg his viewers not to tell anyone of his transmutations, but of course they did (which he counted on for advertisement), and unfortunately word of his skills made it all the way to Frederick I, King of Prussia.

  This, Böttger knew, was a bad thing.

  The Rumpelstiltskinian legend of being locked in a tower until one produced gold was less fairytale than reality for the alchemist. Böttger decided to run. In a cloak-and-dagger operation, he finagled to be smuggled across the border to Saxony—only to find Augustus II, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, could use some gold, too. In 1701, at the age of nineteen, Böttger was taken prisoner in Dresden and told he would not be released until he made gold.

  It occurred to Böttger the prison sentence might be limited. He knew he couldn't make gold, at least not yet, and when this was discovered Böttger might be tortured and made to take a long fall from a short rope. So, taking the only avenue open, he decided to give it a try. Maybe he could keep Augustus bamboozled long enough to figure a way out, or maybe, who knew…? He gave Augustus a list of the equipment he needed and dug in to dig his way out.

  Though inadvertently, perhaps, this move turned out to be the best one Böttger could have made. After Augustus made the sizable investment in equipment and supplies and put Böttger up in comfortable (though restricted) quarters, the king had two choices if Böttger failed: (1) he could absorb the loss and admit he'd been taken in or (2) be patient. Amazingly, he chose patience. As time and cost mounted, Augustus continued to wait.

  Böttger must have been a very likable sort.

  Likable enough that another employee of Augustus, Ehrenfried Walter von Tschirnhaus (1651–1708), who'd been hired to find mining deposits and develop manufacturing, became Böttger's friend. But companionship wasn't Tschirnhaus's only interest in Böttger. As much as Böttger was an adventurer, Tschirnhaus was a pragmatist. Tschirnhaus watched Böttger in his laboratory and saw Böttger was an exceptionally skilled alchemist. Tschirnhaus was determined to make a name for himself and decided this boy wonder might be the ticket.

  The route to fame Tschirnhaus chose? To make porcelain.

  Europe had hankered after porcelain since the first samples had been introduced shortly after Marco Polo's description of it. In chapter 12 we had a brief view of Palissy's shot at the prize. Porcelain is a beautiful ceramic, strong, yet translucent, and almost magical in the resonant ringing it can produce on tapping. Because the method for manufacture was unknown in Europe, the imported porcelain gained a value similar to the value of gold, hence “white gold.”3

  In the pursuit of porcelain, Tschirnhaus made burning mirrors from copper that worked on the same principle—focusing the sun's rays—as our magnifying glass from demonstration 17. He was able to generate heat intense enough to melt asbestos, but he had no success choosing the right mixture of ingredients. But now with a skilled alchemist at hand, and not going anywhere, he felt he could make progress.

  Tschirnhaus presented his idea to Böttger.

  Böttger did not jump on the bandwagon. Maybe he saw porcelain as another morass, or maybe he saw twice as much trouble if he failed twice. For whatever reason, in1703, after two years of imprisonment, instead of cooperation, Böttger attempted escape.

  His liberty lasted less than a week.

  Back in custody, he knew he faced the worst, but luckily Tschirnhaus talked Augustus into keeping, not killing, Böttger. This talent, said Tschirnhaus, was not to be wasted. Tschirnhaus said he would supervise the young man. He would use Böttger's help with porcelain, and in his downtime, Böttger could keep working on gold. Accordingly, in 1707 Böttger amended his pledge to Augustus: not only would he make gold, he would make white gold, too.

  Promising samples of materials were brought to Böttger for transmutation: clay to porcelain with fire. He systematically separated, purified, and combined—skills perfected by alchemists for eons. Böttger was in his element. The more the heat turned up on Böttger, the hotter he heated his fires.

  He redesigned his furnaces and, at temperatures higher than previously tried, found a kaolin clay that turned white when fired. Yet it retained a rough, stoneware surface while porcelain had a smooth and glass-like quality, so he knew he needed an additive that would fill in the voids in the clay. Tschirnhaus looked to glass to do this, but Böttger decided to try alabaster: a mineral of calcium salts, predominantly calcium sulfate, in a translucent form.

  Calcium sulfate is a common material. We could have formed it by dissolving the seashells in demonstration 10 with sulfuric acid instead of acetic acid. But Böttger saw its less common side and mixed it with his kaolin clay. In a fire of 2650°F (1450°C), more than ten times the heat needed to boil water, the alabaster turned to glass and the kaolin clay hardened into shape: porcelain.4

  Not surprisingly, a controversy remains: Who was really responsible for the rediscovery of porcelain? The sophisticated, university-educated philosopher and polymath, Tschirnhaus, or the soot-coated, charlatan, son of a metalworker?

  There is evidence on either side. Tschirnhaus had been following the trail of porcelain longer than Böttger had been alive. He had suggested many of the materials that Böttger eventually tried, but Böttger reported his winning combination in 1709,5 and Tschirnhaus died in 1708.

  Even if, as some would have it, Böttger was merely a worker, this worker kept a notebook in which he recorded combinations and quantities he systematically tested until he found the right one. In addition, Böttger made further discoveries. He found a method for fired gilding. He found a glaze of the same material as the porcelain so when the piece was fired, the glaze fused to become one with the whole. He combined the artisan's knowledge of materials with the tenacity and confidence of the alchemist. He succeeded where other trained minds had not. He made porcelain from alabaster and clay.

  But instead of expressions of pride, he wrote on a laboratory wall: “God the Creator has made a potter from a gold-maker.”6

  A factory was built and Böttger put in charge, though still under guard as a captive. And if Böttger did not see himself as a potter, nature did not bless him with bookkeeping either. He kept careful records of his recipes, but he couldn't seem to keep careful accounts. Staff took advantage of the lack of oversight and overreported expenditures and privately sold pieces. Skilled workers defected and others went on strike. Böttger descended into alcoholism and, locking his laboratory doors, returned to his quest for gold.

  Why did he do this? Why didn't he hang up his leathers, step away from the fire, wipe the soot from his eyes, and enjoy? Certainly he had done enough to rest on his laurels. Perhaps Augustus pressured him to produce more, but surely a man as clever as Böttger could come up with a story to buy peace. Perhaps buoyed by his success with porcelain, he believed he could solve the problem of gold—but if so, for what reason? Whatever he found belonged to Augustus and whatever he needed came from the same. He could have thrown his efforts into porcelain manufacture and died a comfortable man.

  But he did not. He returned to the pursuit of gold.

  What was the attraction?

  Answers have been hazarded for other alchemists. Boyle was said to study alchemy to advance his reputation. Winthrop sa
w alchemy as a means of reforming the world. Paracelsus and Van Helmont searched for cures, and Rupescissa made preparations for the advent of the Antichrist. Glauber desired to serve his country, Fludd wished for closer union with his god, and each and every one wanted to make gold. All reasons partially right—but then again all wrong.

  We believe they did it because they could do no other.

  Which is why we had to include demonstrations with our stories of the alchemists’ lives. There's no way to communicate the joy, the awe, and the love of alchemy without putting a pot on to boil. The Tree of Diana, the peacock's tail, Erina's gorgeous golden coin, iron-copper transmutation, Glauber's ghostly golden garden, or even Boyle's purple cabbage, these were the fascinations, the motivations, the reasons for the alchemists’ lives.

  Sir Francis Bacon, quoted in the preface of this book, said alchemists were like children told there is gold in the field: they dig up the ground looking for gold and in doing so accomplish a useful task. But we think the venerated Sir Francis missed the point.

  Alchemists didn't have to be tricked into plowing golden ground. They just loved digging in the dirt.

  For money? For medicines? For betterment of humankind? Maybe. But also for the smell, the smoke, the heat, the fire, the colors, the fumes, the foam, and the fizz. If an alchemist ever had discovered a way to make gold, that alchemist would have used the gold to buy more equipment, coal, and ores.

  In 1713, Böttger was finally paroled (he was at liberty but not allowed to leave Saxony), but he still had not lived up to his promise to make gold, so it may have been a compassionate release. He was not well. The smoke and fumes and close confinement took their ultimate toll. Six years later he died in fitful fever at the age of thirty-seven.

  Did he die unhappy? We don't know. Maybe so—but maybe not. Maybe in his fever he imagined he was back at the fires. Blending a new ratio, trying a higher heat. Seeing in that last moment a beautiful bright light, a gleam of glittering gold.