The Chemistry of Alchemy Read online

  Nonetheless, for whatever reason, this then was the Zosimos effect: future alchemists would be of many stripes but one belief—the secret for making gold was out there, and, if they searched hard enough, they would find it. We'll follow their journey, through many twists and sundry places, but first—let the gold making begin!

  To the workshops of the Egyptian artisan.

  DEMONSTRATION 1. CALCINATION, DISTILLATION, TRANSMUTATION!

  DISPOSAL

  The liquids from this demonstration can be disposed of down the sink, but you'll want to keep the golden penny taped inside your notebook.

  TRANSMUTATION

  For our first demonstration, we perform a transmutation! Or at least that's how the future alchemists would see it. The Alexandrian artisans saw it as making false gold, but, as it has been pointed out, the practical artificer and the alchemist often interpreted the exact same chemistry in quite different ways.24

  So here we go.

  First, please put on the safety glasses we recommended in “X-Rated Alchemy” and please read “X-Rated Alchemy,” if you haven't already.

  Find a new US penny, one with a shield on the reverse side (tails) instead of the Lincoln memorial; that is, from 2010 or later. It's best if your penny is shiny and new, but even if it looks clean, clean it by soaking it in a salt-and-vinegar solution. If you can't find a post-2009 penny, a post-1982 penny will do, but they are a harder to clean and don't seem to work quite as well.

  Set out a shallow bowl of water to slide the penny into when you take it off the heat. The coin will be hot enough to make a fine sizzle when it hits the water. Check to see that your exhaust fan is providing adequate ventilation by boiling water and making sure the steam is being pulled away from you, as discussed in “X-Rated Alchemy.”

  Take the cast-iron skillet we recommended for purchase in “Stores and Ores” (found as an appendix in the back of the book), put it on a burner, and set the burner to two notches below the maximum setting. Please note we don't recommend a stainless-steel skillet (it may warp with continued strong heating), and we don't recommend a nonstick skillet because the high heat may degrade the coating into unfriendly chemicals you don't want to breathe. In addition, please realize this is a sacrificial skillet: after you have used it for demonstrations, you can't use it to cook food.

  But we think it's worth the sacrifice.

  After the skillet has warmed on the burner for around one to two minutes, drop the penny into the center of the pan and wait. After about five minutes, you will see a wave of purplish color creep over the surface of the penny. Keep waiting. After another two to three minutes, the purple color should give way to a spreading golden sheen. Wait until the golden color has spread over the entire surface (about another half minute) and then slide the penny off into the water. The entire time for the penny on the burner should be seven to eight minutes. If the burner is too hot or you wait too long, you may ruin the penny and an upcoming demonstration.

  Turn off the burner and set the skillet on a heat-resistant surface (a cooled stovetop burner or an inverted pan).

  If all has gone well, the surface of the penny should have a beautiful golden sheen. Compare it with an untreated penny for full effect.

  If you saw the purple wave but the penny didn't turn gold, you need to leave it on the heat longer after the wave. If you didn't get a purple wave, you need to try a slightly higher heat.

  What's going on?

  It turns out zinc and copper, when heated at a high temperature, fuse to make an alloy, brass, that is golden in color.25 The Egyptian artisans obviously didn't have pennies, but they did know about an ore that colored the copper, which we now know contains zinc. Post-1982 pennies, it turns out, contain 97.5 percent zinc and 2.5 percent copper,26 which is perfect for our purposes.

  But this isn't a very authentic demonstration. We can make it a bit more authentic by using zinc and copper samples. If you look at our supply list (in the appendix, “Stores and Ores”), you'll see we've suggested ways of securing pure zinc. Alternatively you can use the zinc-coated fasteners found in hardware stores, as long as they are truly zinc-coated (check the package).

  If you have bare copper wire (no insulation), your copper sample is ready. If your wire has insulation, remove the insulation with wire strippers or by shaving it off with a small, sharp knife. Use work gloves and shave away from your body. Put a few chunks of zinc or the zinc-coated fasteners into your crucible (also suggested in “Stores and Ores”) and nest a small coil of copper wire in with the zinc (it should touch the zinc). Add a few chunks more of zinc on top. If your crucible has a cover, put the cover on or use a watch glass as a cover. Place the entire assembly (covered crucible with the zinc-surrounded copper wire) in the cast-iron skillet and set the burner on whatever heat worked for the penny. Give the material in the crucible about six minutes to form the alloy and then take the cast-iron skillet with the crucible off the burner and place it on a heat-resistant surface. Allow about fifteen minutes to cool. When you carefully uncover the copper in the crucible, you should find it has a golden surface.

  Does it look exactly like gold? No. But most people the artisans served had never seen real gold up close, so it probably looked fine to them. In addition, a short trip to the jewelry store will demonstrate that not all gold looks alike. White gold is different from 24-karat gold, and there are alloys called rose gold and yellow gold, too. And they all glitter.

  CALCINATION

  The name the old alchemists would have used for the above process, besides transmutation, would have been calcination. Calcination usually means to heat something strongly in air, but unfortunately most alchemists didn't walk around with a dictionary of alchemy, and, as far as we know, there was no international meeting to standardize alchemical terminology, so calcination meant other things, too. For instance, dissolving a substance could be called calcination. And while calcination generally results in a reaction, simple melting or evaporation can also be the outcome. So there you have it: one word; many meanings.

  Welcome to alchemy.

  DISTILLATION

  The alchemists loved distillation, and for good reason. Distillation is a method for separation, one of the alchemists’ primary goals: they strove to separate and isolate the “spirit” or the “essence” of a substance so it could be recombined with a body that would result in gold. They had many other methods for separation, as we will see in future chapters, but distillation was the workhorse of alchemy.

  Distillation accomplishes separation based on a difference in boiling points or volatilization temperatures for different substances. In distillation, a mixture is heated until some part of it goes into the gas phase. The gas phase is then separated from the rest of the mixture by means of a tube or an arm that leads the gas away. Imagine a still you've seen in movies or cartoons for making moonshine, and you'll know what we mean. Still stands for distill, and in this demonstration you will build a still and test it with the problem of the ancient Alexandrian Egyptians: extracting fresh water from salty.

  You'll need a large beaker or a cooking pot to use as the still pot (the bottom of the still), a clay flowerpot, a 5-foot length of copper tubing, modeling clay, and two receptacles (jars or cups will do). The tops of the still pot and the flowerpot should match in size, if possible, but if not, the still pot should be a bit larger than the flowerpot. The copper tubing has to be able to fit through the hole in the bottom of the flowerpot.

  Fill the still pot about half-full with water, add about two tablespoons salt, stir, and then use swimming-pool salt test strips (see “Stores and Ores”) to measure the salinity of the water.

  The test strips are marked off in units of ppm, which stands for parts per million, and is a measure of how concentrated, how salty, the water is. The saltwater we made measured between 3,000 and 4,000 ppm salt on the test strip, but you don't have to match this exactly. As long as the water is fairly salty and you know the beginning concentration, you are fine. After measur
ing the salinity, place the still pot in the cast-iron skillet on the stove, as shown in the picture at the beginning of this demonstration.

  Next, invert the flowerpot and attach it to the still pot with modeling clay. Form an angle in the top and bottom of the copper tubing so it will fit into the top of the inverted flowerpot and curve down into the receiving vessel, again as shown in the picture at the beginning. Seal the flowerpot to the copper tubing with modeling clay, make sure your setup is stable, turn the heat to a couple of notches above medium, and then wait.

  As the saltwater heats up in the still pot, the copper tubing will heat up, too, and, in fact, can become quite warm, so be careful. The tubing heats up because the steam entering the tubing gives up its heat to the copper as the steam condenses, which is one reason copper is a good choice for tubing.

  Eventually the condensed water will begin dripping into the receiving flask. When you have collected a reasonable amount of water, swap the filling receptacle with an empty one and test the salinity of the water you've collected with your pool test strips. When we tested our distilled saltwater, there was no change in the test strip; in other words, any remaining salt was below detectable limits. You will probably see the same thing, that is, no salt left in the water, but if any salt is left, it will be well below the amount present at the beginning of the distillation.

  Fresh water for Alexandria, and onward to the East!

  The most subtle, pure, and balanced sulfur is the sulfur of gold. This sulfur coagulates quicksilver with itself in a complete and balanced manner.

  Jabirian Islamic author*

  Let the artificers of alchemy know that the species of metals cannot be transmuted.

  Avicenna, Islamic author†

  For Zosimos, the opening centuries of the Christian era were a time of relative peace…but peace didn't last. Refugees from religious conflicts fled Alexandria, and those who fled east, toward the Arabian Peninsula, encountered a new religion and a new empire, the Islamic empire. This empire, in youthful exuberance, soon reached west and absorbed Alexandria itself. Within the empire, Islamic scholars translated Alexandrian philosophy and technology (including a strange notion about turning common metals into gold) and blended the mix with ideas from India, China, and the Levant. Within this rich intellectual milieu, Islamic literati digested this information, combined it with knowledge of their own, and wrote conclusions in encyclopedic efforts.

  While the Islamic authors included the idea of metallic transmutation in their considerations, within our definition of alchemists—those who sought to solve the riddle of transmutation by delving into the writings of the ancients—we can't call these authors alchemists yet. They pondered alchemy but did not practice alchemy. Obviously they had something to ponder, so someone in the empire practiced alchemy, but we have only indirect evidence of their activities through the eyes of the Islamic authors. Accordingly, we still reserve the word alchemist for our western-European practitioners. We admit this definition is dicing things a bit fine, but we, like the Islamic authors, have our organizational principles.

  Figure 2.1. A sixteenth-century western-European conceptualization of Jābir ibn Hayyān (upper right) and (continuing clockwise) Paracelsus, Ramon Lull, and Hermes Trismegistus. (Image used by permission of Edgar Fahs Smith History of Chemistry Collection. Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.)

  Alchemists or not, these Islamic authors provided vital grist for the mill. Their writings cast a long shadow over later western-European alchemy. One of the longest shadows was that of Jābir ibn Hayyān, or Jabir, as the name would translate to the West. The shadowy form associated with this name is memorable for breadth of knowledge, span of time, and multiple personalities: the Jabirians.

  JĀBIR IBN HAYYĀN

  Jābir ibn Hayyān, also known as Jabir, probably flourished (if he flourished at all1) in the late 700s to early 800s CE.2 The father of the Jabir of legend was an apothecary who educated his son in mathematics and the Koran. As an adult Jabir may have experimented with transmutation, and he may have died around 800 CE. The dates and details are difficult to pinpoint because authoring the nearly one thousand books ascribed to Jabir would have required the longevity of Methuselah, the sagacity of Solomon, and the persistence of Sisyphus. Of course, a Jabirian book was only an article or an extensive paper by today's standards, but given the lack of word processors, typewriters, and even erasers, each was a respectable effort. Accordingly, it has been proposed that the writings, the Jabirian corpus, were actually created by a group of authors, variously identified as the Brethren of Purity,3 Faithful Brethren,4 Brethren of Sincerity,5 or (our personal favorite) Faithful Friends,6 and they were written at various times during the tenth century as the effort of independent reformers or propagandists for the Fatimid caliphate of Egypt.

  For grammatical convenience, some historians adopt the convention of naming Jabir as one individual, using the first person “he,” while acknowledging his chimera makeup. Yet because the “the Jābir problem” remains unresolved7 and several speculations are tossed about, we feel free to make a conjecture of our own: the Jabirians may have included women. With Islamic women warriors of legitimate record around this time,8 why not authors as well? Accordingly, we have adopted an alternative convention9 that refers to the authors as Jabirians. But whatever the population or politics, one fact remains: essential bedrocks of western-European alchemy can be found in the Jabirian corpus.

  While the corpus covers topics from mundane to mystic, such as philosophy, theology, medicine, and agriculture, germane to the development of alchemy, there are lists of materials and instructions for their use to produce products such as synthetic minerals—and synthetic plants, animals, even humans.10 Obviously the synthetic production of humans was speculation (or else history would be quite different), but the authority of the Islamic authors convinced later western Europeans to experiment with the same goals.

  Islamic authors, like Alexandrians, endorsed the notion that everyday materials might be separated into their primal matter, purified, and then recombined into more desirable substances, and—essential to the future direction of alchemy—the Jabirians also offered a description of the proximal matter of metals, but in place of Zosimos's ethereal spirit and body, they assumed a more concrete and familiar sulfur and mercury.

  Here we must emphasize (for the first of many times): the Islamic authors and the later western-European alchemists did not mean the pure elements of sulfur and mercury we know today. By sulfur, they meant a volatile, combustible principle, but not necessarily the yellow powder we would purchase at the drugstore, and by mercury they meant a metal-like liquid, not necessarily the liquid quicksilver of thermometers and switches.

  As we illustrate in this chapter's demonstration, the sulfur/mercury description of metals was not unreasonable, based on physical observation. For instance, the seven metals identified in antiquity—gold, silver, copper, iron, lead, tin, and mercury—can all be found as natural sulfide minerals or in association with sulfide minerals, and a sulfurous odor (a vague smell of rotten eggs) can be detected when these ores are scratched or heated. All metals can be liquefied under correct conditions of temperature and pressure (mercury is already a liquid at room temperature and pressure), and five of the metals have the silvery appearance of mercury when molten (exceptions are gold-colored gold and copper-colored copper). The attraction of real sulfur for real mercury is evidenced by the use of sulfur in modern mercury spill kits: sulfur sprinkled on mercury instantly changes its slippery surface to a grainy surface that can be captured. Gold acts like a mercury sponge and spontaneously forms an amalgam (as mercury alloys are called) at a rate that is impressive to witness. Wedding rings have gone from a golden gleam to silvery sheen by merely touching a mercury puddle. So, taken all together, these phenomena gave credence to the sulfur/mercury explanation of the makeup of metals.

  As shown by this chapter's first opening quote, the Jabirians used these observat
ions to rationalize the possibility of transmutation. If metals could be separated into their sulfur and mercury, and the defects removed by purification, then the purified mercury and sulfur could be recombined into a better, more noble metal, hopefully gold. In fact, the reasoning and observations backing this principle were convincing enough to keep the notion alive nearly a millennium more. It decidedly resonated with contemporaries, such as Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyyā’ Al-Rāzī.

  RHAZES

  Later known in the Latin West as Rhazes, Al-Rāzī was a physician, born in Iran around 865 CE. A scholar, a teacher, and an author, Rhazes, like the Jabirians, assimilated new information entering the Islamic empire and added his own observations, set off in his writings with the notation li, or “as for myself.”11 He commented on medicine, healing, practical chemical materials and techniques, and his society. Outspoken enough to criticize organized religion in an empire that was organized around the Islamic religion, he felt spiritual beliefs were a regular cause of war and religious leaders were unnecessary. Still his reputation as a physician was such that he was considered more eccentric than heretical, and he wrote, practiced medicine, and attended court uncensored.

  Rhazes retained a practical outlook in science, too. His work The Book of the Secret of Secrets, despite the mysterious-sounding title, is really a collection of techniques and recipes.12 Why the enigmatic name? We speculate Islamic authors wrote for the same reasons Greek philosophers and future alchemists wrote (and present academics write)—for money, to advertise skills, and to advance reputation and standing—so an interesting title was an asset. Or maybe Rhazes had a slightly different meaning for the word secret in mind. Perhaps by “secret” he meant “proper technique,” such as one might say “the secret of a good poached egg is hard-boiling water,” but we leave this question to linguistic scholars.