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 matter and some copper metal.
But perhaps the greatest stumbling block to the further development of chemistry was a case of insufficient analysis – there was a complete absence of a knowledge or concept of the gaseous state of matter. Chemistry remained a two-dimensional science, which studied, and only had equipment and apparatus to handle, solids and liquids.
This does not mean that chemistry lacked organization, for there were any number of grand theories that brought order and classification to this complicated subject. The problem with these organizational theories was not only their mutual inconsistency, but the fact that by the 1660s they looked old-fashioned and part of the pre-revolutionary landscape that astronomers and physicists had moved away from. To many natural philosophers, therefore, chemistry seemed tainted; it was an occult or pseudo-science that was beyond the pale of rational discourse.
This was where Boyle came in, for he devoted his life to bringing chemistry to the attention of natural philosophers as a subject worthy of their closest and honest attention. His intention was to ‘begat a good understanding betwixt the chymists and the mechanical philosophers’. In order to do this, he had to show, among other things, that the three or four traditional explanations of chemical phenomena lacked credibility and that a better explanation lay in the revived corpuscular philosophy.
Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim (1493–1541), who rechristened himself Paracelsus in order to indicate his superiority to the second-century Roman medical writer, Celsus, was born near Zurich, then still nominally part of the Holy Roman empire and under Austrian domination. At the age of twenty-one, on the advice of his physician father, he visited the mines and metallurgical workshops in the Tyrol where he studied metallurgy and alchemy. After claiming a medical degree from Ferrara in Italy, Paracelsus became Medical Officer of Health at Basel, a position he was forced to leave in an undignified manner two years later after his abusive and bombastic manner had offended public opinion. Thereafter, he became a rolling stone, restlessly traversing the roads and countries of war-torn Europe, associating with physicians, alchemists, astrologers, apothecaries, miners, gypsies and the adepts of the occult.
It is easy to see why he offended. Not only did he lecture in German instead of Latin, an unorthodox behaviour for a physician, but he publicly burned the works of Galen and Avicenna to show his contempt for orthodox medical opinion – a ceremony that was to be repeated by Lavoisier and his wife 250 years later.
If your physicians only knew that their prince Galen … was sticking in Hell, from whence he has sent letters to me, they would make the sign of the cross upon themselves with a fox’s tail. In the same way your Avicenna sits in the vestible of the infernal portal.
Come then and listen, impostors who prevail only by the authority of your high positions! After my death, my disciples will burst forth and drag you to the light, and shall expose your dirty drugs, wherewith up to this time you have compassed the death of princes .… Woe for your necks on the day of judgement! I know that the monarchy will be mine. Mine too will be the honour and the glory. Not that I praise myself: Nature praises me.
Is this rhetoric or the ravings of a lunatic?
Not surprisingly, contemporary estimates of Paracelsus varied tremendously. An opinion that ‘he lived like a pig, looked like a drover, found his greatest enjoyment in the company of the most dissolute and lowest rabble, and throughout his glorious life he was generally
