How urine led to the founding of chemistry
How urine led to the founding of chemistry
By Ross Pomeroy | Published: 2024-12-30 15:30:00 | Source: The Past – Big Think
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Hennig Brand was onto something. Or rather, he thought he was.
By the 17th century, alchemists had been trying to make gold for more than a thousand years. Although the search ultimately proved fruitless for his many predecessors, Brand, a merchant and chemist living in Hamburg, Germany, was not discouraged. He now thought of a radical, yet surprisingly simple idea: gold could be found within the human body itself, and the easiest way to obtain it was by distilling a warm, golden-colored liquid that was widely and thoughtlessly discarded every day.
It was in 1669, and the quest to get gold from urine began.
The brand was not as naive as one might expect. He reasoned that if gold were actually produced within the human body and excreted in urine, it would be present in very small quantities. Therefore, he would need a lot of urine, much more than he had hoped to produce in a decade. Brand turned to his wealthy wife Margaretha for financing, who agreed (with some reservations, no doubt). With her money and her unabashed willingness to be “that guy,” he bought over fifty buckets of urine, roughly 5,500 litres, and returned to his basement laboratory.
Brand knew what to do first: boil the urine to remove all the water. The fumes quickly emanated from the basement windows into the street, seeping through cracks and crevices and spreading to the ground and upper floors of his house.
“The brand must have had some very patient neighbors.” Andrea Sella is Professor of Chemistry at University College London Comment in A BBC 4 documentary. “I don’t really know what his romantic life was like, but I can’t imagine he was that popular.”
After the boiling process, the brand was left with a thick paste, which was then heated at an extremely high temperature for several days. In the end he obtained a reddish glowing liquid, which – amazingly – caught fire after temporary contact with air. When he cooled the material in water, he found that it eventually turned white. Brand certainly didn’t find gold, but what he did find was just as exciting, if not more exciting (although he didn’t realize it at the time). It was a new element, first discovered hundreds of years ago. It was called the Noctiluca Glacier because, although it burned brighter than anything anyone has seen on Earth, it left nearby objects cold. Today, we call it phosphorus.
“He was searching for riches, but he didn’t realize that he had discovered a fundamental idea: that items could be hidden within a hidden world.” British nuclear physicist Jim Al-Khalili commented on this discovery.
From his vast store of urine, Brand distilled only 120 grams of phosphorus. He used some of it to try to make gold, but was unable to get it. Eventually, he sold the secret of how to make it in order to recoup some of the initial costs and perhaps please his wife. Eventually, this secret made its way to alchemist Robert Boyle, who not only improved the method of producing phosphorus, but realized that the element could be used to start fire on demand. Boyle was the first to apply phosphorus to the ends of wooden splints – matches!
Most importantly, Boyle recorded his methods and shared them with his colleagues. He even wrote them in a book, The skeptical chemistwhich many scholars today consider the first true chemistry book. Through his actions, Boyle introduced a revolutionary idea to the underground world of chemistry, that ideas should be shared openly.
Al-Khalili believed that “phosphorus has transformative powers after all.” “He may not have turned lead into gold, but he did turn an alchemist into the first modern alchemist. Boyle paved the way for future elemental hunters. Unlike most alchemists, he shared his methods, and was able to impart the tools they needed to unlock the secrets of matter.”
this condition Originally published on RealClearScience. Written by Ross Pomeroy, a regular contributor to Big Think.
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