50 Fun Facts About Alchemy

Alchemist Hennig Brand boiled down buckets of urine hunting for gold and instead found which glowing element?

Phosphorus glowed pale green in the jar, so Brand named it after the Greek for light-bearer. He needed about 1,500 gallons of urine to make just 120 grams.

Which piece of kitchen equipment is traditionally credited to a woman alchemist of ancient Alexandria?

The bain-marie, or Mary's bath, is traditionally credited to Mary the Jewess, whom later writers called the first true alchemist of the Western world.

Chinese alchemists hunting for a potion of immortality are thought to have stumbled on which explosive mixture?

Gunpowder probably began as a lab accident: old Chinese texts warn of mixtures of sulfur, saltpeter and honey that burned experimenters' hands and faces and even their houses.

Johann Böttger, an alchemist jailed by Augustus the Strong to make gold, instead gave Europe which luxury material?

Porcelain was the next best thing to gold for a monarch always short of money: Böttger's hard-paste recipe of 1708 led to the Meissen factory two years later.

Which English scientist wrote far more about alchemy than about optics or physics, the fields that made him famous?

Isaac Newton's alchemy papers were judged unfit to publish and resurfaced at a 1936 auction, where economist John Maynard Keynes bought many and called him the last of the magicians.

Which legendary prize did alchemists chase in the belief it could turn base metals such as lead into gold?

The philosopher's stone was also said to heal every illness and add years to anyone who drank a tiny piece of it dissolved in wine.

Which Paris scribe, a character in the first Harry Potter novel, won a posthumous reputation as an immortal alchemist?

Nicolas Flamel was a real man who drafted contracts and letters for a living and died in 1418; the legend that he made gold and cheated death grew up about two centuries later.

Which Brazilian author wrote The Alchemist, a novel about an Andalusian shepherd boy seeking treasure at the pyramids?

Paulo Coelho wrote the book in Portuguese, and it became an international bestseller that has been translated into more than 65 languages.

Which symbol, found in Tutankhamun's tomb and later adopted by alchemists, shows a snake eating its own tail?

The ouroboros takes its name from the Greek for tail-eating, and one early alchemical drawing of it encloses Greek words meaning the all is one.

Which Swiss alchemist, born Theophrastus von Hohenheim, taught that only the dose makes a substance poisonous?

Paracelsus was probably also the first to give zinc its modern name, and he treated syphilis with carefully measured doses of mercury.

Which mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids did alchemists prize because it could dissolve gold?

Aqua regia means royal water, and during the Second World War chemist George de Hevesy used it to dissolve two gold Nobel medals so the Nazis could not seize them.

What name did alchemists give the miniature artificial human supposedly grown in a sealed flask kept warm in horse dung?

Homunculus is Latin for little person, and the sixteenth-century recipe called for forty days of steady warmth before the creature was said to stir.

Which legendary potion, sought by alchemists from China to Europe, was said to grant eternal youth to whoever drank it?

The elixir of life often did the opposite: Chinese recipes were laced with mercury and lead, and are thought to have shortened the life of the Ming dynasty's Jiajing Emperor.

Alchemists paired each of the seven known metals with a heavenly body; which metal belonged to Mars?

Iron shared the war god's planet and its symbol, and chemists kept calling compounds of the metal martial into the seventeenth century.

In the alchemists' scheme linking seven metals to seven heavenly bodies, which planet was matched with tin?

Jupiter lent tin its symbol, and compounds of the metal went on being called jovial into the seventeenth century.

A sixteenth-century Swiss physician's theory of three primes added which everyday substance to sulfur and mercury?

Salt stood for the body, the solid and permanent part of any material, while sulfur was the soul that burned and mercury the fluid, changeable spirit.

The legendary alchemical sage Hermes Trismegistus merges the Greek god Hermes with which ibis-headed Egyptian god?

Thoth was the Egyptian god of writing and magic, and Greeks in Egypt worshipped the two as one in his old temple city, which they renamed Hermopolis.

Which short, cryptic text credited to Hermes Trismegistus gave occultists the maxim 'as above, so below'?

The Emerald Tablet came with a tale of its discovery in the tomb of Hermes, and medieval alchemists read it as coded instructions for making gold.

Which Anglo-Irish author of The Sceptical Chymist attacked the four-element theory yet practised alchemy himself?

Robert Boyle is widely regarded as the first modern chemist, and the popularity of his book helped push the old doctrine of four elements into disuse.

Brussels physician Jan Baptist van Helmont coined which everyday science word, taking it from the Greek for chaos?

Gas was his word for the wild vapour given off by burning charcoal, which he recognised as the same stuff released by fermenting grape juice.

Emperor Rudolf II, intrigued by astrology and alchemy, moved the Habsburg court from Vienna to which city?

Prague became the Habsburg capital in 1583 under an emperor whose other hobbies included horses, clocks and collecting rarities.

Which Swiss psychiatrist argued in Psychology and Alchemy that alchemical symbols surface in modern patients' dreams?

Carl Jung built the book around the dreams of one patient, who turned out to be the physicist Wolfgang Pauli.

Which English poet exposed a swindling alchemist in The Canon's Yeoman's Tale, one of his stories told by pilgrims?

Geoffrey Chaucer has the Canon and his Yeoman ride up late to join the Canterbury pilgrims, and the servant promptly exposes his master's shady business.

Which playwright wrote The Alchemist, a 1610 comedy first performed by Shakespeare's company, the King's Men?

Ben Jonson's play is generally considered his best comedy, and the poet Coleridge ranked its plot among the three most perfect in literature.

Glenn Seaborg's team used a particle accelerator to turn a few thousand atoms of which metal into gold?

Bismuth became gold at a Berkeley laboratory in 1980, but making it this way is estimated to cost a trillion times the market price of the metal.

Which ruler, buried with the Terracotta Army, sent ships full of young men and women to seek immortality?

Qin Shi Huang took to calling himself The Immortal, and one hypothesis holds that a mercury potion from his court alchemists is what killed him.

Which author from Panopolis in Roman Egypt wrote the oldest known books on alchemy around 300 AD?

Zosimos called his writings Cheirokmeta, Greek for things made by hand, and he is the main source for what is known about Mary the Jewess.

Which name did Renaissance alchemists give their theorized universal solvent, a liquid able to dissolve any substance?

Alkahest has no agreed origin as a word, because the physician who first wrote about it left no trace of where the name came from.

Which court astronomer and adviser to Elizabeth I spent much of his time on alchemy and conversations with angels?

John Dee owned one of the largest libraries in England at his home in Mortlake, and came back from his travels on the Continent to find it vandalised.

Alchemists drew each of the four classical elements as a triangle; which element was a plain triangle pointing upward?

Fire was tied to sulfur in alchemy, and tradition held that metals were slowly incubated by it in the womb of the Earth while alchemists merely sped things up.

Alchemists wrote gold as a circle with a dot at its centre, a sign astronomers use for which heavenly body?

The Sun's circled dot only caught on in the Renaissance; before that both the star and the metal were drawn as a disc with a single ray.

Medieval alchemists used which name for the element, beyond earth, air, fire and water, thought to make up the stars?

Quintessence was held to fill the universe beyond the earthly sphere and to move in circles, unlike the four ordinary elements, which moved in straight lines.

Which alchemical still, its name borrowed from Arabic, joins two vessels with a tube to distil liquids?

The alembic takes its name from the cap that sits on the heated pot, where rising vapour cools, condenses and runs down a spout into the receiver.

Which alchemical furnace was nicknamed Slow Henry because, once filled with coals, it kept burning for a long time?

The athanor was built to give the uniform, constant heat needed for the slow operation that alchemists called digestion.

Which term, from the Greek for gold-making, did alchemists use for transmuting base metals such as lead?

Chrysopoeia had a humbler sibling, argyropoeia, the making of silver, which was often attempted by transmuting copper.

Which cure-all sought by medieval alchemists shares its name with a daughter of Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine?

Panacea was said to carry a potion that could heal any human malady, and her sister Hygieia, goddess of cleanliness, gave us the word hygiene.

Citrinitas, the third of four colour stages in the alchemical Magnum Opus, was named for which colour?

Yellow came after the blackening and the whitening and before the final reddening, though writers after the 15th century often folded it into that last stage.

Which everyday word comes from the Arabic name for a fine powder worn as eyeliner?

Alcohol began as al-kuhl, the kohl, and the term was first used for the very fine powder made by subliming the mineral stibnite.

Which name did medieval alchemists give sulfuric acid, a thick liquid they made by roasting green crystals in a retort?

Oil of vitriol earned the word oil because it did not evaporate in air, unlike the thinner liquids that alchemists called spirits.

Which French chemist, later guillotined, named oxygen and wrote the first extensive list of chemical elements?

Antoine Lavoisier showed the part oxygen plays in burning, which overturned the old phlogiston theory, and he also helped construct the metric system.

The Chinese name for alchemy literally means a method for refining which scarlet ore of mercury?

Cinnabar could be roasted to release liquid quicksilver, then burned with sulphur to become the red solid again, a pairing Chinese alchemists read as yang and yin.

Which early alchemist, known in medieval Europe as Geber, is the purported author of a vast body of Arabic writings?

Jabir ibn Hayyan's name is attached to the oldest known systematic classification of chemical substances, in works tentatively dated to well after his death.

The friar Albertus Magnus is credited with isolating which poisonous element by heating one of its compounds with soap?

Arsenic was isolated in 1250 by a Dominican better known as the teacher of Thomas Aquinas, though Arabic writings describe a similar feat more than four centuries earlier.

Which Danish astronomer, who lost part of his nose in a duel, was also known in his lifetime as an alchemist?

Tycho Brahe built an alchemical laboratory at Herrevad Abbey, where he was assisted by his keenest disciple, his younger sister Sophie.

Which eighteenth-century adventurer with a taste for alchemy is said to have claimed he was 500 years old?

The Count of St. Germain hid his real name and origins so well that they remain unknown, and Voltaire dubbed him the Wonderman, a man who does not die.

Which alchemical work published in La Rochelle consists mainly of illustrated plates, as its Latin title hints?

Mutus Liber means the Mute Book, and its largely wordless pictures have invited contradictory interpretations since it appeared in 1677.

Which English radiochemist revived the alchemists' word transmutation after seeing thorium convert itself into radium?

Frederick Soddy made the discovery with Ernest Rutherford in 1901 and went on to win a Nobel Prize for his work on the origin and nature of isotopes.

Which English Franciscan, later honoured as Doctor Mirabilis, was a leading thirteenth-century explainer of alchemy?

Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus were the most notable scholars to summarise the newly imported alchemical knowledge and explain it in the terms of Aristotle.

Chinese alchemy grew up within which tradition, whose adepts adopted neidan, or internal alchemy, in the early 700s?

Taoism turned alchemy inward with neidan, which prized meditation and compounds found in the human body over the mixing of minerals.

Which Latin term names the formless substance that alchemists believed the Magnum Opus had to begin with?

Prima materia was given the names of all kinds of things, because it was supposed to hold the qualities and properties of everything elementary.