Today, we remember alchemy. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
In 1859, poet George Meredith
See ye not, Courtesy Is the true alchemy,
Turning to gold all it touches and tries?
He wrote that just as the last ghosts of the old
alchemy evaporated from science. He calls up our
first impression of alchemy: that it's the way
quasi-magicians try to turn lead into gold.
Alchemy was what we called the study of chemistry
from the 3rd century BC until 150 years ago. The
word probably comes from the Greek chemeia,
which meant to transmute or change matter. That's
what alchemy, like modern chemistry, has
always been about.
What we call alchemy took form when Aristotle
adopted an older idea that all matter combined the
four essences of earth, air, fire and water. He
guessed that these elements could be changed
(transmuted) by the action of heat and cold, or
dampness and dryness.
The Greeks developed Aristotle's ideas. Then Arab
scientists took up alchemy. From time to time, it
became pretty metaphysical. The practical Romans
had no taste for it at all. As Roman civilization
spread, alchemy practically vanished until the 13th
century, when scholars began rereading the old
Greek and Arabic texts.
Of course, alchemy promised great wealth to anyone
who figured out how to transmute lesser metals into
gold. It may seem a waste that so many alchemists
devoted their lives to transmutation, but the
spin-off was enormous. By trying to understand
transmutation, they created practical metallurgy
and learned process chemistry. (Of course, they
reported their ideas in terms alien to our ears.)
In the late 1600s, alchemists decided matter was
made of only three elements, now called "earths."
Vitreous earth gave solidity to matter;
fluid earth gave it liquidity; and fatty
earth (later called phlogiston) gave it
combustibility. These were the old Aristotelian
elements: earth, water and fire - without air! By
now, they figured air to be inert -- not a
component of matter.
All the while, an increasingly analytical science
was being built on these notions. By the 1780s,
scientists saw that heat was not a part of matter
at all. So they replaced phlogiston with yet
another invisible Aristotelian essence called
caloric. Caloric merely occupied matter, and
it flowed from hot bodies to cold.
Even after the atomic theory of matter replaced the
various earths, scientists were still using caloric
to describe heat when my grandfather was born. The
alchemical view of matter didn't completely give
way to an atomic theory until the 1850s.
So before you write alchemy off as voodoo, remember
its staying power. Modern quantum physics seems to
be steering us back toward alchemical-like essences
today. And, in the early 1700s, just as the old
alchemy was unraveling, Matthew Green reminded us
of the inevitability of transmutation when
By happy alchemy of mind
They turn to pleasure all they find.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds