The problem, Principe says, is that the alchemists did not yet know that lead and gold were different atomic elements-the periodic table was still hundreds of years away. “Any modern professor of chemistry today would be more than happy to hire some of these guys as lab techs.” The alchemists counted among their number Irish-born scientist Robert Boyle, credited as one of the founders of modern chemistry pioneering Swiss-born physician Paracelsus and English physicist Isaac Newton.īut despite the alchemists’ intellectual firepower and experimental acumen, the philosopher’s stone lay forever out of reach. And many of them "were amazingly good experimentalists,” says Lawrence Principe, a chemist and science historian at Johns Hopkins University. The alchemists of the 16th and 17th centuries developed new experimental techniques, medicines and other chemical concoctions, such as pigments. The supposedly dense, waxy, red material was said to enable the process that has become synonymous with alchemy- chrysopoeia, the metamorphosis, or transmutation, of base metals such as lead into gold.Īlchemists have often been dismissed as pseudoscientific charlatans but in many ways they paved the way for modern chemistry and medicine. For hundreds of years alchemists toiled in their laboratories to produce a mythical substance known as the philosopher’s stone.
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