Lawrence Principe found that Boyle had some definite knowledge of how to volatize gold. And when Principe read Boyle's notes, he found that the method that Boyle described for volatizing gold was the very same that Principe had deciphered from Basil Valentine's keys. Boyle called the acid “the Aqua pugilum, aenigmatically describ'd by Basilius.” Aqua pugilum was one of the names sometimes given to aqua regia, the royal water that could dissolve the noble metals such as gold. Principe noted that aqua pugilum, or “water of the fighters,” referred to what Valentine called a “most precious water made cunningly from two fighters.”30 Thus Boyle alluded directly to Valentine's image of the two swordsmen. Why was the famously skeptical chemist citing the alchemical literature?
Digging through Boyle's private papers, Principe found multiple manuscripts, letters, and notes showing that Boyle was intensively reading the writings of alchemists, deciphering their symbols, and reproducing their experiments. Principe also found fragments of a manuscript by Boyle titled Dialogue on the Transmutation of Metals. Meanwhile, another researcher, Michael Hunter, found an interview of Boyle taken by his confidant Bishop Gilbert Burnet. These two documents converge on this odd story: that Boyle once visited a foreigner who introduced him to a stranger who claimed that he could convert lead into a material supple as butter. Boyle's own assistant provided the lead and the crucible on which to perform the conversion, so that there would be no fraud. By fire, the lead melted in the crucible, and then the stranger cast a small dash of a bright powder into the crucible. Soon they removed the crucible from the fire, waited for it to cool, and then Boyle, reportedly, saw that the lead had actually become true and fine gold.31
Impossible? Chemists now teach that it is impossible to make gold by any chemical procedure. Yet in the 1600s, Boyle supposedly witnessed a transmutation. Thus Boyle concluded in his Dialogue that, despite all reasons to the contrary, the production of gold might actually be possible.
Also, by 1666, Boyle became convinced, by his own experiments, that gold could be destroyed and even transmuted into silver, but he lacked the opportunity to repeat such experiments because he was driven out of his laboratory by the bubonic plague.32 Furthermore, Boyle believed that the Philosophers' Stone would facilitate communication “with good spirits.” It would demonstrate the existence of rational spirits, angels. Thus it might even prove the existence of God. The Philosophers' Stone would not only transmute metals into gold, it would transmute atheists into believers. At the time, some adepts eagerly searched for the power to communicate with God or gods, a skill that allegedly had been mastered by Pythagoras.33
Lawrence Principe further found that Boyle had many interactions with alchemists and that he took many steps to join a secret society of alchemists in France which soon dispersed when King Louis XIV allegedly managed to kill many of its members in an explosion at the castle where they hid.
Robert Boyle provided monies to fund the works of alchemists in England and Europe. And in 1689, Boyle and the Bishop of Salisbury testified to the Parliament to have actually seen the transmutation of metals into gold, which helped repeal the Act against Multipliers, the old law against the production of silver and gold in England. It became legal to perform such transmutations. But Boyle did not get an opportunity to try to benefit from that ruling—he died on 31 December 1691. To organize his stacks of manuscripts, he had appointed three friends, including the philosopher John Locke. Promptly after Boyle died, Locke received some odd letters from, of all people, Isaac Newton.
For over twenty years, Newton had privately studied alchemy, performing countless experiments and writing thousands of notes. It was he who wrote the lines quoted at the beginning of this chapter about the wind bathing the sun and moon, about Apollo and Diana and the perfection of the world. Like Boyle, Newton read Valentine and others and pursued the art of transmutations. Newton wrote to Locke that he knew that Boyle had a process involving a “red earth and mercury,” the process for which Boyle had repealed the Act against Multipliers. Newton asked for a sample of that red earth along with a copy of Boyle's written prescriptions.34
Locke complied by mailing the prescriptions along with a bit of the mysterious red earth. But afterward, Newton became dismissive, as if he had failed to make any gold, as if it were a sham. Chronically sleepless, in 1693 Newton suffered a nervous breakdown. Then in 1696, an anonymous “adept” visited him, claiming to produce a solvent for all metals. Again Newton pondered alchemy. That year he became warden of the Royal Mint at the Tower of London; for years he supervised the production of coins and ruthlessly persecuted forgers.
And what happened to the guy who supposedly demonstrated transmutation before Boyle's own eyes? According to a medical doctor at Frankfurt am Main, writing in 1706, the alchemist who “while Boyle watched, converted lead into gold,” was traveling to France to take Boyle's letters to his master but then he fell off his horse and died.35
The secret of transmutation eluded Boyle and Newton, or maybe there never was any such secret. Chemists concluded that certain substances, the elements, are unalterable. During the next centuries, some individuals occasionally claimed to make gold, but few people believed them. Chemists rose in prominence while alchemists sank in disrepute. Alchemy as a whole drew disdain and ridicule. A chemist turned historian, Henry Carrington Bolton, remarked: “We imagine it will be hard to discover in the whole range of literature writings having scientific pretensions more senseless than the aphorisms of the disciples of Pythagoras, collected in the ‘Turba Philosophorum,’ so often quoted by the alchemists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”36 Distinguished historian Edward Gibbon had also complained that “these ancient books, so liberally ascribed to Pythagoras, to Solomon, or to Hermes, were the pious frauds of more recent adepts.”37
Paracelsus, another alchemist, complained that the secret of transmutation had been hidden by enigmatic expressions: “But since the supercelestial operations lay more deeply hidden than their capacity could penetrate, they did not call this a supercelestial arcanum according to the institution of the Magi, but the arcanum of the Philosophers' Stone according to the counsel and judgment of Pythagoras. Whoever obtained this Stone overshadowed it with various enigmatical figures, deceptive resemblances, comparisons, and fictitious titles, so that its matter might remain occult. Very little or no knowledge of it therefore can be had from them.”38
In Ovid's Metamorphoses, the character of Pythagoras claimed that all is subject to change: “Even the things we call elements do not persist. Apply your concentration, and I will teach the changes they pass through.”39 But the red tincture and its medicinal powers remained elusive and occult, the talk of secretive groups.40 No such teachings were found in any ancient texts. Such exalted tales became myths, buried in the coffin of scientific impossibilities. But sometimes, the dead come back to life.
By the 1890s, some strange substances had emerged in chemistry. Henri Becquerel found that uranium, a heavy and puzzling metal, emitted invisible rays. Gold didn't emit rays, neither did silver. Yet uranium had the power to develop photographic film, even in total darkness. And its invisible rays also electrified the air around it. Metals can become electrified, of course, but uranium was itself a source of electric charge.
In 1898, a Polish student of chemistry, Maria Sklodowska, also known as Marie Curie, began studying uranium as part of her doctoral research in Paris. Her husband, Pierre Curie, had constructed a device to detect the invisible rays of uranium by measuring faint electrical charges in the air. Marie used that device to analyze the effects of various factors, such as light and moisture, on the radiation. She found that the rays remained unaffected, which led her to conclude that the “radioactivity” was an intrinsic property of uranium.
Marie also tested whether elements other than uranium also emitted invisible rays. At first, no other element seemed to have this property. Then she tried thorium and found that it too emitted invisible rays. Having searched for such rays in all the elemen
ts, she tested many compounds too. Uranium was commonly extracted from pitchblende, a heavy black ore from mines between Germany and Czechoslovakia. Marie found that even after the uranium had been extracted, the pitchblende residue continued to emit rays. Quite surprisingly, it emitted more rays than the pure uranium. A few other minerals also emitted rays. She also found that such rays were independent of conditions such as heating, light, and acid baths. In 1898, she announced that the invisible rays were “atomic properties” of yet undiscovered elements. After more months of grueling work, Marie Curie managed to identify two new elements that she named polonium and radium. She estimated that these elements were hundreds of times more radioactive than pure uranium.
While Pierre Curie studied the radioactivity of radium, Marie worked to isolate radium entirely from the pitchblende. Only then would she be able to definitely measure radium's chemical properties. Some chemists remained skeptical of the very existence of this element. Trying to work in a suitable laboratory, Pierre and Marie only obtained access to a large but cold and shabby wooden shed where medical students used to dissect corpses. The ceiling leaked, and the building looked like a stable. Still, Marie, Pierre, and several hired workers came to labor upon piles of pitchblende residue to slowly extract minute traces of radium. They boiled the residue and repeatedly washed it with acids, alkaline salts, and water. It was backbreaking work. Marie Curie recalled: “Sometimes I had to spend a whole day mixing a boiling mass with a heavy iron rod as large as myself. I would be broken with fatigue at the day's end.”41
After two years of work, the Curies and their assistants had processed eight tons of pitchblende, using four hundred tons of rinsing waters and thousands of chemical treatments and distillations.42 When Pierre and Marie entered the shed at night, they saw in the darkness that the distilled substances in various containers glowed, in her words, “like faint fairy light.” By 1902, Marie finally had a roughly pure sample of radium, a few tiny metallic bits—about one-fiftieth of a teaspoon—painstakingly extracted from about ten tons of pitchblende.
Most people today hardly know why Marie Curie became an international celebrity. She found new elements, coined the word “radioactivity,” became the first woman professor at France's elite university the Sorbonne, and she was awarded two Nobel Prizes. Yet such achievements do not fully explain why journalists, photographers, and autograph-hounds came to stalk her.
To better understand why her contributions were extraordinary, one should list some of the astonishing properties of the elusive substances that she found and isolated. Tiny portions of radium affected glass and even diamonds by giving them colors. The substance also electrified the air around it, and its effects penetrated through solid objects. It became known as the most potent kind of poison. Radium did not need to be ingested or even touched to transmit its effects: it poisoned at a distance. A tube containing only a pinhead bit of radium placed over the spine of a mouse caused paralysis in just three hours, followed by convulsions, and then death. It killed even microbes, and its presence sterilized seeds. Moreover, the radium extract was self-luminous, it shone like electric blue light bulbs—but without requiring an influx of energy. It continually emitted heat, about 250,000 times more than the heat produced by burning an equal amount of coal. Calculations showed that one ton of radium would suffice to boil a thousand tons of water for an entire year. The energy output of radium was so great that it implied the possibility of unbelievably terrible new weapons. Frederick Soddy commented that radioactivity led one to envision the planet “as a storehouse stuffed with explosives, inconceivably more powerful than any we know of, and possibly only awaiting a suitable detonator to cause the earth to revert to chaos.”43 Likewise, Ernest Rutherford remarked that “some fool in a laboratory might blow up the universe unawares.”44 But radium also had positive effects: it cured skin cancer. Just years earlier, the mere idea of a metal having even just one of these properties would have been dismissed as a ridiculous alchemical dream.
Radium became a consumer sensation. In 1903, two patients in St. Petersburg were actually cured from facial cancer. More were cured subsequently, giving rise to the myth that radium was the ultimate cure for cancer.45 Pierre Curie hoped that it would cure blindness and tuberculosis.
Moreover, the rare metal powder had an even stranger property. In 1898, Marie Curie had speculated that radioactivity might be a kind of “disintegration of the atom,”46 but Pierre had convinced her that it wasn't. Then, in 1902, at McGill University in Montreal, Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy analyzed experimentally the emissions of radioactive elements. Soddy detected a strange gas emanating from thorium, so he stood there transfixed “stunned by the colossal import of the thing,” and he blurted in shock: “this is transmutation: the thorium is disintegrating and transmuting itself into argon gas”—but then Rutherford shouted: “For Mike's sake, Soddy, don't call it transmutation. They'll have our heads off as alchemists.”47
In hindsight, years later, Soddy remarked: “Nature can be a sardonic jester at times, when you come to think of the hundreds of thousands of alchemists in the past few thousand years toiling and broiling over their furnaces, spending laborious days and sleepless nights trying to transmute one element into another, a base into a noble metal, and dying unrewarded in the quest, whilst we at McGill, by my first experiment, were privileged to see, in thorium, the process of transmutation going on spontaneously, irresistibly, incessantly, unalterably!”48
In 1902, Soddy inferred that radioactive elements emit helium (named after the mythical Greek name for the sun, Helios, because its distinctive light had been detected earlier around the sun), and in 1903, Soddy and William Ramsay proved that radium emits helium gas.49 Again, this meant that radioactive elements do change. Marie Curie acknowledged in 1904 that such findings would finally prove “that the transmutation of elements is possible.”50
Still, chemists believed that this sort of transmutation was distinct from the alchemists' dream. For one, it happened by itself. In 1903, Rutherford and Soddy noted that radioactivity was a process that lay “wholly outside the sphere of known controllable forces.”51 Likewise, in 1906, Pierre Curie argued that if Rutherford and Soddy were correct, theirs would be “a veritable theory of the transmutation of the elements, but not as the alchemists understood it. Organic matter would necessarily evolve across the ages, following immutable laws.”52
But one day in 1906, as he was rushing across a street in Paris, Pierre Curie was trampled by a horse-drawn wagon, he died. Marie mourned his death and became increasingly reclusive. People increasingly realized that radium is extremely toxic; many were poisoned by it, including the Curies, and many dozens died. Still, it really did have some remarkable properties. Newspapers and advertisements hailed radium as a “miracle drug.” Entrepreneurs developed ways to mechanize the process of extracting the substance from pitchblende for commercial purposes, including it in products for arthritis, lupus, insanity, birthmarks, and various other conditions and diseases, as well as soaps, hair tonics, facial creams, tea, toothpaste and glow-in-the-dark paint.
Marie Curie became internationally famous. In 1921, one American interviewer and fundraiser hailed her as “The Greatest Woman in the World,” comparing her to Julius Caesar, Buddha, and Jesus Christ for having “reached into the bowels of the earth for one of the healing secrets of God.” The interviewer raved that radium was “the most priceless stuff in the world” and “the strongest force in the world. The power contained in a gram is enough to raise a battle-ship of twenty-eight thousand tons one hundred feet in the air.”53
Meanwhile, speculators anticipated that the alchemists' dream was at hand: the manufacture of gold. In 1914, the novelist H. G. Wells wrote a fictional account, The World Set Free, pondering the consequences of atomic transmutation. He dedicated the book “To Frederick Soddy's Interpretation of Radium.” In the novel, scientists managed to convert bismuth into gold, causing the collapse of the world's economies and even a nuclear war.
Wells speculated: “What chiefly impressed the alchemists of 1933 was the production of gold from bismuth and the realisation, albeit upon unprofitable lines, of the alchemist's dreams.”54 In reality, people were increasingly dreading the implications of transmutation. In the 1920s, financial experts discussed the possible impact of “modern alchemy.” Representatives of the U.S. federal government issued public comments in the New York Times trying to reassure the public that even if modern alchemists succeeded in making gold, the monetary standards would not collapse.55
Soon, chemists in various countries reported having synthesized gold. Repeated efforts showed such claims to be mistaken, yet the struggle continued for decades more. Part of the problem was that minute quantities of gold can be extracted from mercury by distilling it in a vacuum. Yet researchers at Berkeley, by bombarding platinum with neutrons, detected radioactive gold isotopes, at least.56 Also, scientists at the University of Michigan studied radioactivity induced artificially in gold.57 In 1941, scientists at Harvard University used a cyclotron to achieve the “transmutation of mercury.”58 They shot fast neutrons at about 350 grams of mercury and found that it produced three kinds of radioactive gold (isotopes that decay in hours or a few days). Hence chemists and physicists were actually making gold, but unfortunately, a kind of gold that vanishes in a few days. And in fitting fulfillment of the alchemists' conjectures, they were producing it from, of all metals, mercury.
But the imminent possibility of artificial gold did not undermine the financial markets, as economists realized that it would be preferable not to ground money on metals anyhow. In 1971, the United States ruled that dollars would no longer be valued on the basis of convertibility into gold. This ruling reduced the recurring fears that the world's economies would be wrecked by transmutation.
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