Thursday Things: Alchemy Update Edition
10 November 2022. Vol 4 No 45 By Dan McGirt. #170
Welcome to Thursday Things! If you enjoy this edition, please click the heart icon in the header or at the end of the post to let me know. You can also post a comment by clicking the dialog bubble.
“Time for some ramen noodles.” Alchemist Heating a Pot, by David Teniers the Younger (1610 - 1690), oil on canvas.
Dawn of horror
I don’t care for horror films. Mainly because they’re scary. I make an exception for classic old-time horror films. Those are okay. And you can’t get much more classic or old time than 1896’s The Haunted Castle.
Watch the First Horror Film, George Méliès’ The Haunted Castle (1896)
So how far back do we have to go to find the first horror movie? Almost as far back as the very origins of film, it seems—to 1896, when French special-effects genius Georges Méliès made the three plus minute short above, Le Manoir du Diable (The Haunted Castle, or the Manor of the Devil). Méliès, known for his silent sci-fi fantasy A Trip to the Moon—and for the tribute paid to him in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo—used his innovative methods to tell a story, writes Maurice Babbis at Emerson University journal Latent Image, of “a large bat that flies into a room and transforms into Mephistopheles. He then stands over a cauldron and conjures up a girl along with some phantoms and skeletons and witches, but then one of them pulls out a crucifix and the demon disappears.” Not much of a story, granted, and it’s not particularly scary, but it is an excellent example of a technique Méliès supposedly discovered that very year.
Spoiler alert. I just gave away the whole plot there. Oops.
The Haunted Castle isn’t too scary. And at a bit over three minutes, even if it were, you wouldn’t be scared for long. But it is “one of the first movies—likely the very first—to deliberately use special effects to frighten its viewers.” And I’ve seen far more modern films with worse FX than Georges Méliès managed in 1896. Have a look .. if you dare!
Alchemy interrupted
Alchemy is to chemistry as astrology is to astronomy. That, at least, is the conventional take on these ancient and discredited occupations. While astrologers looked to the stars for clues to the fate of individuals and nations, alchemists were busy in their labs breathing toxic fumes while they tried to transmute lead into gold, find the elixir of immortality, and the universal cure for all illnesses (the panacea).
As the story goes, the careful observations of the heavens required for drawing horoscopes gave rise to scientific astronomy, while the experiments of the alchemists lead in time to a true science of chemistry. It’s a fine tale of humanity’s slow and laborious process of rising from the mucky swamp of ignorance and superstition to the shining heights of empirical knowledge and an understanding of the universe based on evidence.
Except for one thing.
Astrology is still around. We’ve sent space probes to fly by and measure and photograph every other planet in the solar system. We’ve landed multiple probes on Mars and Venus. We’ve walked on the moon! We’re working on how to colonize Mars.
Meanwhile, one in four Americans believe in astrology.1
You’ve got to give the astrologers credit. They never gave up.
But what about alchemy? When did the alchemists stop trying to turn lead into gold? In other words:
I have to admit, this is not a question I ever pondered before stumbling upon this article.
Alchemists deserve an “A” for effort. The transmutation of metals, or chrysopoeia (gold-making), was, writes scholar Lawrence M. Principe, “a serious and rational endeavor, undergirded by coherent theoretical and observational foundations, to understand the natural world and to make use of its powers.”
Such efforts were “pursued for a millennium and a half in various cultural, intellectual, and theoretical contexts.” The fact that chrysopoeia didn’t actually work taught the scientists-to-come a lot. In recent decades, Principe and other scholars have gone a long way to rehabilitate alchemy, often thought as something of a bad seed, in the history of science.
But, given alchemy’s long history, “how then to explain the disappearance of metallic transmutation from the normal operations and goals of chymists”? When, in short, did the pursuit of alchemy end? This ending was a major development in the history of chemistry, but it’s hard to pin down.
Lawrence Principe’s inquiry focuses on the gold-transmuting activity. By the late 17th century, alchemy had a stench around it that was from more than the chemical fumes. While no alchemist ever turned lead to gold, quite a few succeeded in convincing the credulous that they had done so. Alchemists were commonly suspected of being frauds and con men. And the honest ones were considered fools.2
One point I liked is that it was in part the new discipline of economics that did in the alchemists:
Principe concentrates on the Académie Royale des Sciences in the eighteenth century: members pursued transmutation even as administrators tried to suppress it.
The Académie had been founded in 1666 by Louis XIV’s minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Colbert prohibited two topics of study at the founding: astrology and the Philosophers’ Stone. Both of these were potentially subversive. Astrological prognostications—forecasts about the king’s health or coming war or famine—could threaten political stability. Making gold, or the possibility of making gold, could threaten economic stability. “The King does not wish it to be thought that his money is produced by goldmaking,” wrote a visiting Swedish chemist in 1692.
In this same era, the Spanish performed their own version of alchemy, obtaining massive quantities of gold by stealing it from people in the New World. From a certain point of view, they converted the steel of their swords and the lead of their bullets into gold to swell the royal coffers. And then they learned about “inflation” — which was was a concept early economists were only then figuring out. If you flood the market with lots of gold, prices go up and your gold, in effect, becomes worth less.
Apparently Colbert — who was a pretty smart guy, with some economic theories of his own — had some understanding of this and did not want alchemists wrecking the economy with their homemade gold. So their alchemical undertaking had to go underground. Eventually, at some point, the alchemists gave up on transmuting metals.
Or did they? We now know that changing one element into another isn’t possible because you’d have to change the number of protons.
But we are also learning how to manipulate matter at the molecular, or even atom by atom, through nanotechnology. From a certain point of view, nanotech is just a new form of alchemy.
As for universal cures and potions to enable longevity — well, medical science is working on those too.
I say that alchemy — like astrology — never ended. It simply transmuted itself into something new. And that’s the greatest alchemical trick of all.
You can read Principe’s full article here: The End of Alchemy?3
Bloody good news
Here is some real alchemy that’s great news for vampires — oh, and also for people with rare blood types who need transfusion. Scientists in the UK have grown red blood cells from stem cells and are currently testing this lab-grown blood in patients.
Lab-grown blood given to people in world-first clinical trial
Blood that has been grown in a laboratory has been put into people in a world-first clinical trial, UK researchers say.
Tiny amounts - equivalent to a couple of spoonfuls - are being tested to see how it performs inside the body.
The bulk of blood transfusions will always rely on people regularly rolling up their sleeve to donate.
But the ultimate goal is to manufacture vital, but ultra-rare, blood groups that are hard to get hold of.
These are necessary for people who depend on regular blood transfusions for conditions such as sickle cell anaemia.
If the blood is not a precise match then the body starts to reject it and the treatment fails. This level of tissue-matching goes beyond the well-known A, B, AB and O blood groups.
The lab-grown blood is much more expensive ounce for ounce than donated blood. However, for certain rare blood types there is a shortage of donors, so being able to supply those blood types from lab-grown blood can be a lifesaving development for patients who need frequent transfusions.
Aside from cost, there are still some problems to be solved, but the ultimate goal is to be able to routinely use donated blood to grow even more blood: "We want to make as much blood as possible in the future, so the vision in my head is a room full of machines producing it continually from a normal blood donation," Prof Toye told me.
Which, again, will no doubt save many lives. But also attract vampires.
Thank you!
Please click the hearts, leave a comment, and use the share feature to send this issue to a friend who might enjoy it. See you next Thursday!
While a growing share of U.S. adults are religiously unaffiliated, there is one belief that appears to unite a significant share of them: astrology. YouGov’s latest poll finds that a little more than one-quarter of Americans (27%) – including 37% of adults under 30 – say that they believe in astrology, or that the position of the stars and planets influences people’s lives. About half of Americans (51%) say they don't believe in astrology and 22% are unsure.
Younger American adults are more likely to say they believe in astrology than older Americans are. While 37% of adults under 30 say they believe in it, less than half as many Americans 65 and older say they do (16%). Women (30%) are slightly more likely to say they believe in astrology than men are (25%). White Americans (25%) are somewhat less likely to say the stars and planets predict behavior than Black (31%) and Hispanic (32%) Americans are to say so.
Among Americans with a high-school degree or less, 29% say they believe in astrology, which is a similar share as among Americans with only a college degree (28%). People with an advanced degree (24%) are somewhat less likely to say they believe. Americans living in the Northeast (32%) and West (29%) are somewhat more likely to express a belief in astrology than people in the South and Midwest are.
This was supposed to be a brief footnote, but it’s now a bonus item this week because — really?
37% of adults under 30 believe in astrology? That explain so much.
And people with a college degree are only 1 percentage point less likely to believe in astrology than people with only a high-school degree? We’ve got really, really bad schools.
Much like some cryptocurrency enthusiasts today.
Vol. 29, No. 1, Chemical Knowledge in the Early Modern World (January 2014), pp. 96-116 (21 pages) Published By: The University of Chicago Press