AS AN ear and respectable sce is often said to date from 1661, whe Boyle of Oxford published The Sceptical Chymist —the first work to distinguishbetwees and alchemists—but it was a slow and ofteic transition. Into theeighteenth tury scholars could feel oddly fortable in both camps—like the GermanJohann Becher, who produced an uionable work on mineralogy called PhysicaSubterranea , but who also was certain that, given the right materials, he could make himselfinvisible.
Perhaps nothier typifies the strange and often actal nature of chemical s its early days than a discovery made by a German named Hennig Brand in 1675. Brandbecame vihat gold could somehow be distilled from human urihe similarity ofcolor seems to have been a factor in his clusion.) He assembled fifty buckets of humanurine, which he kept for months in his cellar. By various redite processes, he verted theurine first into a noxious paste and then into a translut waxy substanone of it yieldedgold, of course, but a strange and iing thing did happen. After a time, the substancebegan to glow. Moreover, when exposed to air, it often spontaneously burst into flame.
The ercial potential for the stuff—which soon became knohosphorus, fromGreek and Latin roots meaning 「light bearing」—was not lost on eager businesspeople, but thedifficulties of manufacture made it too costly to exploit. An ounce of phosphorus retailed forsix guineas—perhaps five hundred dollars in today』s money—or more than gold.
At first, soldiers were called on to provide the raw material, but su arra washardly ducive to industrial-scale produ. In the 1750s a Swedish chemist named Karl(or Carl) Scheele devised a way to manufacture phosphorus in bulk without the slop or smellof uri was largely because of this mastery of phosphorus that Sweden became, andremains, a leading produatches.
Scheele was both araordinary araordinarily luckless fellooor pharmacistwith little in the way of advanced apparatus, he discovered eight elements—chlorine, fluorine,manganese, barium, molybdenum, tungsten, nitrogen, and oxygen—and got credit for hem. In every case, his finds were either overlooked or made it into publication aftersomeone else had made the same discovery indepely. He also discovered many usefulpounds, among them ammonia, gly, and tannic acid, and was the first to see theercial potential of chlorine as a bleach—all breakthroughs that made other peopleextremely wealthy.
Scheele』s oable shorting was a curious insisten tasting a little of everythinghe worked with, including suotoriously disagreeable substances as mercury, prussic acid(another of his discoveries), and hydroic acid—a pound so famously poisonous that150 years later Erwin Schr?dinger chose it as his toxin of choi a famous thoughtexperiment (see page 146). Scheele』s rashness eventually caught up with him. In 1786, agedjust forty-three, he was found dead at his workbench surrounded by an array of toxicchemicals, any one of which could have ated for the stunned and terminal look on hisface.
Were the world just and Swedish-speaking, Scheele would have enjoyed universal acclaim.
Instead credit has teo lodge with more celebrated chemists, mostly from the English-speaking world. Scheele discovered oxygen in 1772, but for various heartbreakinglyplicated reasons could not get his paper published in a timely manner. Instead credit wentto Joseph Priestley, who discovered the same element indepely, but latterly, in thesummer of 1