they have at times to get out such words as methylethylamylophenylium.
However, if (as Peter Morris has noted) the historian avoids chemical detail and language, the scientific story become exigious and almost trivial. For this reason, while the first twelve chapters should present little difficulty to a sophisticated general reader, I have not hesitated to use technical language in the five chapters that are devoted to twentieth-century chemistry. Because this is a history, and not a textbook, of chemistry, I have not defined and explained symbols, equations and technical vocabulary. These chapters will present little difficulty to readers who have a secondary or high-school foundation in chemistry (and will have the privilege of being critical of my treatment). At the same time, it is to be hoped that there is sufficient of a human interest story in the intellectual and experimental worlds of Pauling, Ingold, Nyholm, Woodward and the other giants of twentieth-century chemistry, to propel the non-chemical reader towards the final pages.
The history of chemistry has served and continues to serve many purposes: didactic and pedagogic, professional and defensive, patriotic and nationalistic, liberalizing and humanizing. As I write, especially in America, where words like ‘chemical’, ‘synthetic’ and ‘additive’ have unfortunately become associated with the pollution, poisoning and disasters caused by humans, the history of chemistry has come to be seen by leaders of chemical industry and educators as a possible way of revaluing chemical currency: that is, of demonstrating not only the ways in which chemistry plays a fundamental role in nature and our understanding of cosmic processes, but also how it is essential to the economy of twentieth-century societies. In other words, the history of chemistry not only informs us about our great chemical heritage, but justifies the future of chemistry itself. Such a justification echoes the liberal and moving words of the first major historian of chemistry, Hermann Kopp1:
The alchemists of past centuries tried hard to make the elixir of life … These efforts were in vain; it is not in our power to obtain the experiences and views of the future by prolonging our lives forward in this direction. However, it is possible and in a certain way to prolong our lives backwards, by acquiring the experiences of those who existed before us and by learning to know their views as if we were their contemporaries. The means for doing this is also an elixir of life.
It is in this spirit that The Fontana History of Chemistry has been written.
1 On the Nature of the Universe and the Hermetic Museum
Maistryefull merveylous and Archimastrye Is the tincture of holy Alkimy;
A wonderful Science, secrete Philosophie, A singular grace and gifte of th’Almightie: Which never was found by labour of Mann, But it by Teaching, or by Revalacion begann.
(THOMAS NORTON, The Ordinall of Alchemy, c. 1477)
In 1477, having succeeded after years of study in preparing both the Great Red Elixir and the Elixir of Life, only to have them stolen from him, Thomas Norton of Bristol composed the lively early English poem, The Ordinall of Alchemy. Here he expounded in an orderly fashion the procedures to be adopted in the alchemical process, just as an Ordinal lists chronologically the order of the Church’s liturgy for the year. Unfortunately, although the reader learns much of would-be alchemists’ mistakes, and of the ingredients and apparatus, of the subtle and gross works, and of the financial backing, workers and astrological signs needed to conduct the ‘Great Work’ successfully, the secret of transmutation remains tantalisingly obscure.
The historian Herbert Butterfield once dismissed historians of alchemy as ‘tinctured with the kind of lunacy they set out to describe’; for this reason, he thought, it was impossible to discover the actual state of things alchemical. Nineteenth-century chemists were less embarrassed by the subject. Justus von Liebig, for example, used the following notes to open his Giessen lecture course:
Distinction between today’s method of investigating nature from that in olden times. History of chemistry, especially alchemy …
Liebig’s presumption, still widespread, was that alchemy was the precursor of chemistry and that modern chemistry arose from a rather dubious, if colourful, past1:
The most lively imagination is not capable of devising a thought which could have acted more powerfully and constantly on the minds and faculties of men, than that very idea of the Philosopher’s Stone. Without this idea, chemistry would not now stand in its present perfection …[for] in order to know that the Philosopher’s Stone did not really exist, it was indispensable that every substance accessible … should be observed and examined.
To most nineteenth-century chemists, and historians and novelists, alchemy had been a human aberration, and the task of the historian seemed to be to sift the wheat from the chaff and to discuss only those alchemical views (chiefly practical) that had contributed positively to the development of scientific chemistry. As one historiographer of the subject has put it2:
[the historian] merely split open the fruit to get the seeds, which were for him the only things of value. In the fruit as a whole, its shape, colour, and smell, he had no interest.
But what was alchemy? The familiar response is that it involved the pursuit of the transmutation of base metals such as lead into gold. In practice, the aims of the alchemist were often a good deal broader, and it is only because we take a false perspective in seeing chemistry as arising from alchemy that we normally narrowly focus on to alchemy’s concern with the transformation of metals. However, as Carl Jung pointed out in his study Psychology and Alchemy, there are similarities between the emblems, symbols and drawings used in European alchemy and the dreams of ordinary twentieth-century people. One does not have to believe in psychoanalysis or Jungism to see that the most obvious explanation for this is that alchemical activities were often concerned with a spiritual quest by humankind to make sense of the universe. It follows that alchemy could have taken different forms in different cultures at different times.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, after the elderly French chemist, Marcellin Berthelot, had made available French translations of a number of Greek alchemical texts, an American chemist, Arthur J. Hopkins (1864–1939), showed how they could be interpreted as practical procedures involving dyeing and a series of colour changes. He was able to show how Greek alchemists, influenced by Greek philosophy and the practical knowledge of dyers, metallurgists and pharmacists, had followed out three distinctive transmutation procedures, which involved either tincturing metals or alloys with gold (as described in the Leiden and Stockholm papyri), or chemically manipulating a ‘prime matter’ mixture of lead, tin, copper and iron through a series of black, white, yellow and purple stages (which Hopkins was able to replicate in the laboratory), or, as in the surviving fragments of Mary the Jewess, using sublimating sulphur to colour lead and copper.
While Hopkins’ explanation of alchemical procedures has formed the basis of all subsequent historical work on early alchemical texts, and while Jung’s psychological interpretation has stimulated interest in alchemical language and symbolism, it was the work of the historian of religion, Mircea Eliade (1907–86), who, following studies of contemporary metallurgical practices of primitive peoples in the 1920s, firmly placed alchemy in the context of anthropology and myth in Forgerons et Alchimistes (1956).
These three twentieth-century interpretations of alchemy, dyeing, psychological individuation and anthropology, together with the historical investigation of Chinese alchemy being undertaken by Joseph Needham and Nathan Sivin in the 1960s, stimulated the late Harry Sheppard
