The Age of Alchemy

The Age of Alchemy is a history of chemistry that will not start in the Enlightenment. Kit Chapman's case, put on his first page, is that no one person created chemistry: it grew over thousands of years out of alchemy, which he treats as the practical work of people changing one substance into another to make a living, far more often than as superstition. So the book begins with fire, with early humans who learned to control it and later used it to extract metals from ore, and follows the craft through Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Islamic world, China, India, Sri Lanka, Mesoamerica and Europe.

The cast is the pleasure. Around three thousand years ago, on the Tigris, an Assyrian palace perfumer named Tappūtī mastered distillation and filtering, and we know her name only because a cuneiform tablet records it, with a remarkably detailed recipe. Mary the Jewess, in first century Alexandria, designed apparatus still in use today. Sri Lankans smelted steel for blades harder and sharper than any others of their age, in hilltop furnaces driven by monsoon winds blowing over them, a puzzle the archaeologist Gill Juleff solved, and Chapman travels to Sri Lanka to hear her explain it. In China the search for immortality produced lethal elixirs, and Ge Hong recorded a treatment for malaria in 340 CE. After the Arab conquest of Egypt, Islamic scholars formalized the discipline, and Chapman credits them with aqua regia, the mixture that dissolves gold. Paracelsus turned alchemy toward chemical medicine, and urine runs through many chapters, used to tan leather and distilled by alchemists who hoped to draw gold from it. The old dream of transmutation is finally met in nuclear physics.

It moves along at a good pace. Chapman writes as a traveling journalist as much as a historian, moving between the record and his own visits, with entertaining anecdotes, clear explanations of the chemistry, and an occasional joke. The story from the first campfire to the modern age goes into about 320 pages, so this is a book of many short stories rather than one long one, and half of it passes before a modern European scientist appears. It suits curious readers of Sam Kean or Bill Bryson, and any student who was taught that chemistry began with the discovery of oxygen.