| Show 1 ItI 1 A brief history ROO astory of chemistry ariti en fo SS W MW g R li by V C ebaugh ph D 1 I 4 ISO according to a legend long current among the ehe chemists mists of pennsylvania an rate irate blast furnace superintendent once exclaimed that ananias was the father of all chemists while this statement was denied by the members of the class so maligned it might have been true perhaps that only a few of the protesting analysts could have given a really satisfactory account of their predecessors in the science and art of chemistry perhaps too there may be some chemists and assayers throughout our intermountain country who have only shadowy notions about the men who lived and wrought with crucible crucible and cupel generations before we were born and into the fruits of whose labors we have come A short account of the origin of the science of chemistry and of the great lights that have shed their lustre over not only their own but over all succeeding ages may prove of interest like many other sciences chemistry has its beginnings lost in the mists of antiquity even at the earliest periods of which history gives us any record we find mankind in the possession of some knowledge essentially chemical in its nature nat tire but it was not until about the middle of the eighteenth century that chemistry as a science could claim a place with her older sisters astronomy tr onomy mathematics medicine philosophy and physics like most of these she too was at first regarded with superstition and venerated as an art divine in the course of time she became the servant of the magician bician the alchemist and the physician her right to exist as an independent science was established less than two centuries ago sorcery and magic seem to have been the sources from which chemistry sprang the etymologies proposed for the word chemistry bear witness to this fact sui das a greek writer of the eleventh century tu ry defines chern chernela eia as the preparing of gold and silver but there can be but little doubt that this word was derived from an egyptian term chema or chemi meaning black concealed obscure or hidden chemistry is therefore the hidden hi adden occult or black art unfortunately burned almost all the writings of the egyptians bearing upon this subject and waves of rel religious ivious enthusiasm on the ahe part of christian and mohammedan were responsible for the destruction st of many more priceless volumes relating to this subject A picture of the scenes attending thle the de destroying soyIng of proscribed parchments parch ments is given to us in the nineteenth chapter of acts where we read and many that believed came and confessed and showed their deeds deeds many of them also NY which used urious curious c acts broughtes br their books together and burned them be before fore all men and they counted the price of them and found it fifty thousand pieces ot of silver we all remember the moslem conqueror who destroyed every library in his path with theary the cry if these books contain what is in the koran we need them not if they deny the truths of the tha koran we want them not let all bw be burned 11 As a result of this infatuation there ans ar extant no original manuscripts of the early workers in the black art and in order to learn about them we are forced to consult the writings 0 of their contemporaries or 0 of their followers who flourished flou rishe d in the ninth and tenth centuries of our era it disinter is interesting to note that almost all of these early writings are the work of monks the ancient chinese and japanese Jd knew something about metals alloys dye stuffs pigments etc in fact they made porcelain and gunpowder long before the europeans ro the inhabitants of india extracted metals from their ores made steel and prepared paints centuries before the christian era the egyptians were especially skilled in matters chemical many papyri of a chemical nature are found in their tombs hermes us the thrice great was revered as the founder of both the art and the science the knowledge of chemical facts and processes was confined to the priesthood and the novice had to undergo a long and arduous c course urse of training before he was admitted to the class of adepts laboratories were almost invariably built in connection with some temple the Chal deans were famous for their knowledge of things abstruse astrology and magic were favorite studies with their wise men and not only the common peo pie but also the most cultured classes had implicit confidence in their seers the dwellers in mesopotamia understood the working of metals the manufacture of glass and the art of coloring they asserted that a connection existed between the metals and the planets a belief of which we find relics in our nomenclature even at the present d day ay thus gold and the suu sun silver and the moon copper and venus iron and mars tin and mercury and lead and saturn were linked together our name lunar caustic for silver nitrate e has its origin in this fact jn in their writings the same symbol stands for either the metal or 0 r the planet the jews and the phoenicians Phoenicia ns si and at a later period the greeks and the romans learned learn ed the mysteries odthe black art from the egyptians the nations of western europe were the last to come in contact with the erudition of the orient and received much of their instruction only through the romans and the saracens saracena Sara cens how much was known to the ancients of course practice as distinguished from theory was paramount no attempt to connect the th e two by experiment was made in fact an appeal to experiment to determine the truth of conclusions derived from a process of pure reason would have been considered as an insult to intellect in metallurgy the alloy electron or electrum gold and silver gold silver lead iron tin copper and bronze were known tae making of glass pottery manufacture the use of pigments and the preparation of pharmaceutical ceu substances were understood was known in the second century before christ the process of amalgamating gold and mercury also dates from very early times but the method of separating gold from silver was discovered during our era mercury was known twenty two hundred years ago to it was given the name liquid silver methods for making lime acetic acid whose solvent powers were greatly overestimated sugar starch fatty oils turpentine pitch etc were used in very remote times the ancients usually ascribed the origin of the chemical art to supernatural personages like hermes us cadmus or prometheus from the mythical founder hermes the name hermetic art was applied to chemistry and even now when we close a vessel securely we say that we have sealed it hermetically the object of the practice is twofold two fold a to secure greater respect for the art by ascribing to it a divine origin and b to conceal the real workers workers and thus enable them to escape the occasional accas ional storms of persecution that broke oyer those that practiced arts above the ken of ordinary mortal men and women theoretical considerations were extremely crude the transformation of on ono kind of substance into any other kind at will was deemed quite possible did not nature show such transformations every day how else could the growth and decay of living matter be explained or why was it that iron when thrown into the water issuing from copper mines was itself changed into copper thales B C declared that all things were made from water an claimed that air was the primordial substance Herak leitos made the same assertion about fire while Phere kides assumed that all things proceeded from the earth empedocles introduced the four element ment theory although the name of aristotle is usually associated with it according to this conception earth earan air fire and water are the fundamental materials out of which all the various forms of matter have brave been made to these four aristotle added afifah element blenie nf or li quinta laquinta supposed to be ether more subtle and divine than the other elements our word quintessence is a lineal descendant of quinta in the early part of the christian era there flourished a number of al chemists as we are prone to call them high dignitaries of church and state leaders in the world of letters and eminent men in all the higher classes of society vied with one another in their devotion to the art Zo who lived in the third century wrote awen ty eight books upon alchemy in which he describes furnaces stills various pieces of laboratory apparatus minerals alloys mineral waters glass making etc greek thought dominated the time but under more auspicious circumstances it found its last lodgment in the temple of the of memphis and the temple of atah in egypt all these were destroyed by the emperor in his efforts to L extirpate pagan religions and customs egypt ceased to be the center of intellectual life constantinople arabia and spain successively became the noted centers 0 of f learning and the arabians became the leaders of thought their influence has left its imprint on our science the prefix al in the words alcohol alembic alchemy etc stands as an ever present reminder of the arabians work in chemistry to be continued |
