![]() The soapy phosphorus that Brandt cooked up was a curiosity. In 1678, the Duke of Saxony asked him to collect a hundred tons of urine from a garrison of soldiers and render it into what Boyle and others soon started to call phosphorus-Latin for “light-bearer.” It was left out in buckets long enough to attract maggots, then distilled in hot furnaces, creating a hundred and twenty grams of “cold fire.” Brandt believed that, if he could collect enough of this substance, he might be able to create the philosopher’s stone. As the Cambridge chemist Peter Wothers explains in his new history of the elements, “ Antimony, Gold, and Jupiter’s Wolf” (Oxford), Brandt’s recipe called for a ton of urine. After one of Brandt’s confidants provided a hint-the main ingredient was “somewhat that belong’d to the Body of Man”-Boyle deduced that he and his peers had been smearing themselves with processed urine. Another scientist saw particles in it twinkling “like little stars.”Īt first, no one could figure out what the Prometheus of Hamburg had stolen. Sinai.” Robert Boyle, the father of modern chemistry, put some on his hand and noted how “mild and innocent” it seemed. “If anyone had rubbed himself all over with it,” one observer noted, “his whole figure would have shone, as once did that of Moses when he came down from Mt. ![]() Interested parties took a look some felt that they were in the presence of a miracle. He called it “cold fire,” because it glowed in the dark. It was foamy and, depending on the preparation, yellow or black. The unsuccessful glassblower and alchemist Hennig Brandt was trying to find the philosopher’s stone, a mythical substance that could turn base metals into gold. The story of the fifteenth element began in Hamburg, in 1669.
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