5 From Alchemy to Outer Space: Gold in Science
Mammon. Now, Epicure,
Heighten thy self, talk to her all in gold;
Rain her as many showers as Jove did drops
Unto his Danae; shew the god a miser,
Compared with Mammon. What! the stone will do’t.
She shall feel gold, taste gold . . . I will be puissant,
And mighty in my talk to her.
Ben Jonson, The Alchemist
Ben Jonson’s play The Alchemist mocks the pursuit of alchemical knowledge – often equated with the desire to synthesize gold from other metals. As we will see, he was far from the first to make the alchemist into a figure of derision. But throughout much of history, alchemy has been serious business. In the early fourteenth century Western Europe experienced a shortage of silver as mines became depleted, and rulers turned to alchemists to attempt to enlarge their treasuries. Pope John XXII in 1317 responded with a Papal Bull entitled Spondent pariter quas non exhibent (They Promise That Which They Do Not Produce), which criminalized alchemy. Soon after, the Dominican order excommunicated all the alchemists within its number, and the Italian astrologer and alchemist Cecco d’Ascoli was burned at the stake – his position as professor at the University of Bologna notwithstanding. Those who opposed alchemy had religious concerns, but also economic and political ones. ‘Alchemy’ could be used for forgery, extending metallic coinage by alloying precious metals with less valuable ones; critiques of alchemy were often critiques of the avarice of alchemists as much as dismissals of the likelihood of success or condemnations of black magic. And as warfare and its costs burgeoned in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the need to produce more cash led rulers to protect alchemists in the hope of reaping benefits from the practice. Although in 1404 Henry IV of England banned the multiplication of precious metals, later in the same century Henry VI was curious enough about the practice to provide immunity to certain trusted men to investigate it.
Very early, practitioners of the art developed a bad reputation. As with Jonson, many observers have seen them as obsessed, mad scientist types impoverishing themselves in the fruitless quest to attain perfection in their art. In Philips Galle’s 1558 print based on a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, we see a chaotic scene of an alchemist’s workshop, at the centre of which the alchemist’s wife gestures toward her empty purse. Alchemy was famous for the perverse effect of impoverishing its practitioners. A later publisher added the title ‘Al-Gemist’, a play on the word ‘alchemist’, but literally meaning ‘all mixed up’. A similar but more subtly disordered scene is typical of many paintings of alchemists’ workshops, such as one in which the mad scientist appears with a monkey (a mocking symbol of imitation and fakery).
Others have viewed alchemists as charlatans, hoaxers and quacks. In the Enlightenment alchemy became the target of fulsome ridicule, and the modern field of history of science imbibed this prejudice as it sought to winnow its history of past practices down and emphasize direct precedents for modern, objective, rational methods and their findings.
But the chemical and physical ambitions of alchemy are based on assumptions that are, in a way, not that different from modern science: alchemists believed in a kind of atomic theory – a connection not lost on devotees of occult lore as they observed the new sciences of atomic physics and radiochemistry emerge at the turn of the twentieth century.1 Underlying all alchemical theories was a view of the material world as based upon a Prime Matter that expressed itself in basic elements (air, fire, water, earth) and qualities (hot, wet, cold, dry) in varying proportions. Earthly matter as we experience it was composed of these elements and qualities, and could, presumably, be both decomposed into them and recombined in different proportions. While some of the claims of alchemy seem fantastical, in an abstract way this is not so different from modern atomic theory. Alchemists also held that transformation occurred naturally (minerals grow in the earth; some animals are born from the degeneration of others; human beings become ill and then regain health) and nature could be helped along by the proper application of ‘art’. It was not really magic as we understand it, in the sense that it wasn’t considered to operate outside natural laws.
Copy after Philips Galle, The Alchemist, after painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 17th-century engraving.
The alchemical view, indeed, looked a lot more foolish from the point of view of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries than it does from that of the twentieth or twenty-first. While it might be too much to say that alchemists prefigured the many uses of gold in modern science, they were, with their tinctures and solvents, their processes of combustion, fermentation, crystallization, calcination and distillation, practising a form of experimental science, making discoveries that later served science proper. Many of the seventeenth-century European writers of what we now call the Scientific Revolution distanced themselves from alchemy – but this does not distinguish them from the alchemists of earlier centuries, who distanced themselves as proper alchemical practitioners from the charlatans and quacks who were not to be trusted. Some of the same seventeenth-century scientists who disparaged alchemy were also involved in it. Robert Boyle, one of the founders of modern chemistry, and Isaac Newton were both disciples of the American alchemist George Starkey (also known as Eirenaeus Philalethes, or ‘peaceful lover of truth’), and Boyle sought the alchemical Philosopher’s Stone until the end of his life. Alchemical experimentation produced usable knowledge, such as the discovery of phosphorus. Chemists, too, sought basic principles that could be used to explain many different chemical processes. For example, the ‘acid/alkali’ theory placed these characteristics at the basis of matter just as alchemists had imagined mercury, sulphur and salt to be basic principles of matter. As Francis Bacon wrote in his Advancement of Learning, already in 1605, ‘the search and stirre to make gold hath brought to light a great number of good and fruitfull inventions and experiments.’2 The experimental practices of the alchemists prepared the way for modern experimental science.
Alchemist with Monkey, 17th–18th century. In the manner of David Teniers II, oil on canvas.
The desire to fabricate ‘artificial’ gold and other substances (such as porcelain, pigments and various elixirs) was at the heart of the development of experimental science in early modern Europe. It was also closely connected to art practices. When Cennino Cennini refers, in his early Renaissance treatise on art techniques, to pigments made using ‘alchemy’, he is just talking about pigments made with minerals through chemical or physical processes: for example, vermilion, a red pigment made from powdered cinnabar, a compound of mercury and sulphur (not-ably, the two most symbolically significant elements in Western alchemy), or orpiment (auripigmentum, meaning ‘gold pigment’ in Latin, a sulphide of arsenic), with its brilliant yellow colour that attracted the attention of painters, alchemists and physicians, despite its highly poisonous nature.
It is often hard to tell the difference between alchemy (which we now think of as fantastical) and simple practical knowledge. Consider the medieval European writer Theophilus’ description of the process of painting in gold on manuscripts. When painting with powdered gold, one starts with a ground made of red pigments and egg white, applied wherever the artist plans to embellish the manuscript page with gold. Then, gold that has been milled into a powder is mixed with heated glue, painted onto the page and then burnished with ‘a tooth or a bloodstone that has been carefully cut and polished on a smooth, shining horn tablet’. Glue can be made from a sturgeon’s or eel’s bladder, from calf vellum (the prepared skin used as the writing surface for manuscripts) or by cooking the bones of the head of a dried pike three times.3 To modern ears the ingredients sound like the makings of a magic potion, but it was a matter of practical expertise based on naturally occurring materials.
Knowledge of practical metallurgical tasks – gilding, distilling and fabricating compounds and alloys – dates back thousands of years. The ‘making’ of gold in many cases simply involved various forms of gilding or alloying to make metallic substances that looked like gold. The more esoteric connotations of what we now know as alchemy date back at least to the first centuries of the Common Era, possibly earlier. It is hard to know how literally to take the many references of lost texts and mysterious ancient authorities, including both human practitioners and quasi-divine figures such as Hermes Trismegistus, an avatar of the Greek god Hermes whose name gives us the word ‘hermetic’. True to this term’s meaning, alchemical texts often appear intentionally obscure, designed to reveal their secrets to the initiated without exposing them to a broader circle of readers. They often purport to speak not of ordinary minerals but of mystical, ethereal substances bearing the same names. A number of writers in the late Roman Empire claimed that the emperor Diocletian, who ruled at the turn of the fourth century CE, had all the books of the alchemists in Egypt burned so that they would not produce gold to finance rebellions against him. This would then explain why the earliest alchemical texts come from around 300 CE. The accounts of censorship begin appearing a century later, and it is not clear whether they are reliable. However, an attack on alchemy might easily have been part of an effort to reform currency, discouraging the forms of knowledge necessary to counterfeit and clip coins.4
The earliest ‘alchemical’ papyrus manuscripts (for example, the Papyrus Graecus Holmiensis and the Leyden Papyrus X) are practical guides to various chemical preparations, containing matter-of-fact recipes for purifying, assaying, fabricating and ‘increasing’ metals, dyeing and colouring gems and metals, and making gold and silver inks. Some of these practices certainly involved fraud; others possess what may be a conveniently loose definition of metallic gold, encompassing ‘white, dry, yellow, and gilded things . . . pyrite [fool’s gold], cadmium, and sulphur . . . all the fragments and flakes yellowed and divided and brought to perfection’.5 Zosimos of Panopolis, an alchemist born in Egypt in the third century CE, wrote what may be the earliest treatise that can be called properly alchemical in its focus on genuine metallic transmutation and its mystical tone. Zosimos claims to be working in a long tradition dating back to pharaonic Egypt, conjures the language of Hermetic and Gnostic wisdom, and, recounting a mystical vision, associates the purification of metals with moral purification. While the conjunction of sulphur and mercury does not figure as prominently in his system as it would for later alchemists (who believed that the marriage of these two elements was the key to producing gold), he does describe the process of compounding them. He describes the ‘Philosopher’s Stone’, a chief component of later alchemical works, thought to be a pure substance possessing the property of turning other metals into gold. Zosimos also provides information about earlier practitioners about whom we otherwise know little, such as Maria the Jewess, a woman living in Egypt several generations earlier whom he credits with inventing a number of alchemical instruments. (Her name survives in the French term for a double boiler, ‘bain-marie’.) By the time of Proclus, who wrote in the fifth century, the quest to fabricate gold was an established cultural topos; he writes disparagingly of ‘those claiming to make gold out of the mixture of certain species’. His own views don’t sound much less mystical to modern ears; along with other authors from late antiquity to the early modern period, he believed that ‘gold and silver [grew] in the earth under the influence of the celestial gods and their emanations.’6
Maria the Jewess, in Michael Maier, Symbola aureae mensae duodecim nationum (1617), etching. |
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It was the Arabic language that gave us the word alchemy (along with numerous related terms: elixir, alkali, alcohol and algebra). ‘Alchemy’ derives from the Arabic translation of the Greek word chymeia (meaning a mixture). After the Rashidun Caliphate’s conquest of Alexandria in 640, Arabic alchemists had access to manuscripts that transmitted the Hellenistic knowledge of the Egyptian alchemists. They also drew on Indian practical knowledge of chemical science and metallurgy, and lent their own scientific rigour to the tradition. Jābir ibn Hayyān, born in Persia in the eighth or ninth century, was perhaps the most important of the Islamic world’s alchemists. Arabic texts attributed to him propound the idea that all metals originate from mercury and sulphur, which was to become a key theory of medieval and early modern alchemy. He (or others writing under his name) details the processes of preparation of the Philosopher’s Stone – for Jābir, equivalent to the ‘elixir of life’ – that would turn base metals into gold. But the transformation of base (less precious) metals into gold was but one part of the elements of a practice emphasizing experimentation that would continue to inform alchemy for a millennium. Jābir purified chemical compounds like sal ammoniac, prepared steel, dyed cloth and leather, and distilled acetic acid from vinegar. It is also thought that he produced what became known in the west as aqua regia, a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids capable of dissolving gold and platinum. (Nitric acid alone cannot dissolve gold, though it does dissolve silver and other metals, the origin of the ‘acid test’ to determine the purity of the metal.)
Even the Arabic texts attributed to Jābir cannot be definitively connected to a single historical figure. In Europe the problem multiplied. Jābir came to be known as ‘Geber’, a name spuriously attached to hundreds of alchemical texts composed long after his death, after alchemy arrived in Western Europe in the twelfth century. Using a pseudonym may have been less a matter of forgery than self-protection, in situations where owning up to alchemical practices might be politically dangerous. It did of course lend authority to the texts presented under a famous name, as may also have been the case for those who attributed alchemical texts to the early Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna or the Catalan physician Ramon Llull. Writers using Llull’s name propounded the mercury theory, a view that competed with Jābir’s: according to this one, the goal of alchemy was to distil the ‘quintessence’ (or ‘fifth essence’), a material form of the heavenly mercury, and then to further purify it to attain the prime matter itself. European alchemists proposed and debated a variety of systems. Roger Bacon, the English friar and scholar, emphasized animal substances like blood, milk and urine, transformed through processes of combustion, distillation and fermentation. Later alchemists believed the Philosopher’s Stone could be produced from vitriol (sulphuric acid) or nitre (potassium nitrate, or saltpetre). Paracelsus, as we will see, added salt as a key ingredient.
In alchemical symbolism across the world, from Chinese Daoist alchemy to Indian Tantric alchemy to Arabic writings to Europe, substances have symbolic genders and the production of metals is understood as a kind of sexual reproduction. In the Jābirian tradition, sulphur (like the sun) was considered male and mercury (like the moon) was female, and their union was understood as a sexual one. Joined in an acid bath, they created a hermaphrodite body that was then destroyed and resurrected. Many alchemical writings are so abstruse, complicated and metaphorical – bristling with eggs, flasks, homunculi, dragons, hermaphrodites and toads – that they appear to have more symbolic than practical meaning. ‘Take the egg’, instructs one illustration from Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens of 1618, in which alchemical learning was even set to music, ‘and hit it with a fiery sword’. This symbolism may have been a strategy to hide the practical methods of alchemical laboratories from the uninitiated. But its allusive imagery suggests that alchemical processes themselves could be understood in a more spiritual than practical light. The purification of metals might represent the purification of the soul: alchemical teachings drew upon philosophies of microcosm and macrocosm that assumed that the human, natural and divine worlds were joined together materially as well as symbolically. In an engraving from Heinrich Khunrath’s Amphitheater of Eternal Wisdom, the alchemist’s workshop forms the pupil of a giant eye, expressing the view that alchemical knowledge depended upon – among others – the maxim ‘know thyself’. More surprising might be the fact that church reformer Martin Luther saw no contradiction between alchemy and Reformation theology:
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Hermaphrodite in a landscape, from the Splendor Solis codex (1582), an alchemical text by Salomon Trismosin. |
‘Accipe Ovum’, etching in Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618). |
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Etching attributed to Peter van der Doort, after Hans Vredeman de Vries, The Alchemist’s Laboratory from Heinrich Khunrath, Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae (Ampitheatre of Eternal Wisdom, 1595).
The science of alchemy I like well, and, indeed, ’tis the philosophy of the ancients. I like it not only for the profits it brings in melting metals, in decocting, preparing, extracting, and distilling herbs, roots; I like it also for the sake of the allegory and secret signification, which is exceedingly fine . . . For, as in a furnace, the fire extracts and separates from a substance the other portions, and carries upward the spirit, the life, the sap, the strength, while the unclean matter, the dregs, remain at the bottom, like a dead and worthless carcass; even so God, at the day of judgment, will separate all things through fire, the righteous from the ungodly.7
In ancient times alchemy represented a broad philosophical outlook connected to medical practice and cosmology – it wasn’t just about increasing wealth. Gold and pharmacology had long held a close relationship. The purported ‘nobility’ of gold led to its use as an agent of immortalization in burials. In the Late Period of ancient Egypt, the seventh to fourth centuries BCE, mummies were covered in gold – that is, their skin was gilded in its entirety, or they were sealed with gold on the principal orifices or vital spots of the body. This was thought to protect the dead from decomposition and even to regenerate them as immortal beings composed entirely of gold.8
Alchemy’s healing functions were especially stressed in Asian practices that were probably known – one way or another – to the Arabic writers who became so influential in Europe. Even if gold was not central to the Chinese economic system, it was a routine component of the Chinese pharmacopoeia. Chinese alchemical practice possessed a dizzying panoply of elixirs made from herbs, flowers, grains and fruit as well as animal and mineral ingredients. Elixirs in a Ming Dynasty alchemical text range from the poetic ‘Scarlet Snow and Flowing Pearl’ or ‘Crimson-coloured Empyrean-roaming’ elixirs to the more prosaic ‘Fine Day’ or ‘Eight Mineral’ elixirs. Gold was ostensibly an ingredient of many elixirs, though few are named for it; ‘Liquid Gold and Jade Flower’ elixir is an exception.9 Cinnabar and the arsenic compounds orpiment and realgar were also favourite ingredients, though they were probably more poisonous than healthful. (In the Qing dynasty glass vessels were tinted to look like realgar – conveying its brilliant orange-red colour without the toxicity.) If a preparation did not have its intended effect, one could always find some imperfection in the adept’s completion of the requisite ritual steps. For example, the elixir known as ‘Nine-crucible Cinnabar’, which according to Jin dynasty alchemist Ge Hong enabled the Yellow Emperor to ascend into the sky, required a recipient to purify himself ritually for 100 days, keep his practice secret and then ‘throw a golden human statuette . . . and a golden fish . . . into an eastward-flowing stream as a pledge and take an oath by smearing his lips with blood of a victim (white chicken)’.10
Hexagonal mould-blown glass vases made in imitation of realgar, Qing dynasty, Beijing, c. 1723–50 CE.
Hanging scroll, alchemist with charcoal basket, Ming dynasty, after Zhang Sheng, 1351–1400 CE. |
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At the origins of their practice, Chinese alchemists may have derived ideas from ancient Indo-Iranian religious texts that linked gold with the liturgy surrounding the use of soma, a plant-based Vedic ritual drink described as golden in colour and associated with immortality. It may in fact have been a psychotropic mushroom.11 Along with drinking potable gold, eating from gold plates and utensils was thought to help attain longevity.12 It was likely in China, in the fourth century BCE, that practitioners first connected the idea of artificially creating and perfecting gold with the notion of an elixir of immortality. The origins of Chinese alchemy are inseparable from the religious and philosophical movement known as Daoism, emerging in this same period. By the second century BCE the confluence of alchemical ideas – artificial gold and the elixir of life – was well established in China.13 It would eventually spread worldwide. Chinese alchemists touted artificial gold as superior to the natural mineral: in the Nei P’ien of Ge Hong, a master alchemist asserts, to the narrator’s evident surprise, that the qualities of artificial gold exceed those of natural gold for rendering the practitioner immortal. (It’s also a factor, he admits, that alchemists are poor – so if they want it, they have to make it.)14 If you don’t believe gold can be fabricated, Ge tells us, well, some people don’t believe in dragons or unicorns either, but just because they haven’t seen them doesn’t mean they’re not real!15
As with many Western alchemical texts, the metaphorical language of Chinese alchemy often makes it difficult to tell whether the instructions for chemical processes in Chinese texts are to be interpreted in spiritual or practical terms. Ge Hong’s Baopu zi explicitly invites a distinction between public and private knowledge, dividing his work into Inner (Daoist) and Outer (Confucian) teachings. The latter give advice on practical matters of daily life; the Inner teachings give instructions on chemical processes, but also philosophical concepts, placing equal priority on ‘internal alchemy’ (processes of self-transformation through meditation) and ‘external alchemy’ (the fabrication of elixirs). Ge also wrote Scripture of the Golden Liquid of the Divine Immortals, by the Master Who Embraces Spontaneous Nature, in which he describes the process of making a series of elixirs that culminate with the production of gold and the conferral of immortality.
Ge Hong and others described both alchemy and meditation as superior to other means of cultivating the self (gymnastics, herbal medicine, breathing and sexual techniques, and diet) and to magic and divination.16 Alchemists often received favour at imperial courts, and their ranks included women as well as men: Mistress Kêng, a court alchemist during the T’ang Dynasty, could, among other feats, reportedly turn snow into silver. But as in the West, alchemy was sometimes classed with the shady practices of magicians and hoaxers (one can only imagine that the snow-to-silver transformation was simply a magician’s trick). Popular Daoism was the province of practitioners known as Fang-shih, a term that can be translated as magicians or diviners, artisans whose expertise included medicine and metallurgic transmutations as well as various forms of prognostication. According to a detractor, Ku Yung,
All those occultists . . . who are brimming with claims about the strange and the marvelous, about spirits and ghosts . . . who rotate the planting of grain in mysterious conjunction with the Five Powers, and who sow and reap in cadence with the daily sun, who rival the mountains stones in longevity, who have mastered transformations of base metal into gold, who have made whole the five colours and five stores within their bodies – those occultists cheat people and delude the masses. They hold in their grasp the black arts and in their embrace all manner of false and faked means in order to deceive the ruler of our world.17
Alchemical gold also came to be associated with longevity in Europe, although the dream of earthly immortality through a golden elixir could not find easy expression in Christian contexts. But many European alchemists were also physicians – the most famous, perhaps, being the sixteenth-century Swiss doctor Paracelsus. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein the early modern scientist epitomizes the shady realms of antiquated belief into which Victor Frankenstein delves as he attempts to create artificial life. Paracelsus did pursue alchemy (he extended the theoretical dyad of mercury and sulphur into a triad by adding salt), but he did so as part of the practice of medicine. His empirical approach to the medical arts also included the observation that cleaning wounds could be more effective than cauterizing them, and experiments with the use of metallic compounds in treating illness (such as gold compounds for the treatment of epilepsy and mood disorders), essentially inventing chemotherapy. He also invented something called laudanum, later a popular medicine involving a solution of opium in alcohol, though for Paracelsus the term could refer to several different types of elixir and might include such ingredients as gold and pearls. He also praised gold as a noble metal and general elixir, a routine treatment for ordinary mortality. He was by no means alone in this view, and the fashion for potable gold among the nobility led to some tragic consequences. In small doses gold can be safely consumed – as it is in modern fad drinks like Goldschläger and occasionally in haute cuisine – but in larger quantities it is poisonous. Diane de Poitiers, the mistress of the French king Henri II, was known to drink gold as an elixir of youth. When her body was exhumed in 2009, high concentrations of gold – a toxic level – were found in her hair.18 The quest for youth may have been what killed her.
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Anonymous French painter, Portrait of Diane de Poitiers, red and black chalk drawing, 17th century. |
Before the twentieth century gold was used to treat conditions as varied as syphilis, heart disease, smallpox and melancholia. Gold compounds have been used (in injectable and oral forms) since the early twentieth century to alleviate the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. These compounds have an anti-inflammatory effect, but long-term treatment with gold can discolour the skin and damage the internal organs. Current studies are attempting to understand the mechanism at work and to address concerns about toxicity. Some veterinary acupuncturists use gold bead implants to treat epilepsy, hip dysplasia and other conditions in animals – a method not generally used in human patients.
One of the best-known modern medical uses of gold is as crowns and fillings in teeth. The use of gold in dentistry has a long history; the ancient Etruscans appear to have used gold for dental crowns and bridges. Although the first U.S. president, George Washington, is commonly (and incorrectly) thought to have worn wooden teeth, at least one of his sets of dentures contained far more valuable substances: gold and ivory!19
If the premodern world found gold desirable as a container of value precisely because it was not useful for tools, modern science has found numerous uses for the metal. Gold is now used as a toner in photography, as a reflective coating to protect equipment and astronauts from electromagnetic radiation in space technology, as a coating in some catalytic converters, and as a heat conductor to de-ice aircraft cockpit windows. The Voyager 1 and 2 space probes, launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and now forging ahead into interstellar space, carry golden LP records bearing sound and images that document Earth cultures in the late twentieth century. More recently, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2018, was designed with mirrors coated with a microscopic gold film that reflects infrared light from space to allow it to be studied by the telescope’s instruments.
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Gold’s imperviousness to humidity and corrosion and its ductility are especially prized in high-tech applications. The physical properties of gold have enabled it to play a supporting role in numerous technological innovations. In 1786 the provincial English clergyman Abraham Bennet published his invention of a gold-leaf electroscope, in which gold enabled more sensitive measurements of electrical charge than had previously been possible. In Bennet’s electroscope, two slips of gold leaf hung in a large glass cylinder, separating in a ‘V’ shape when a charge was applied to a contact connected to them.20 In 1909 when Hans Geiger (of Geiger counter fame) and Ernest Marsden established that atoms are composed of positively charged nuclei surrounded by electrons, gold was the element they initially studied. The thinness that could be achieved with gold foil made it an apt substance to bombard with alpha particles and observe their scattering, which enabled measurements of the negative and positive charges associated with atomic gold. This in turn enabled scientists to establish the principle of ordering the periodic table of elements by atomic number (the number of protons in the nucleus of an element) rather than by atomic weight.
In September 2011 NASA engineers completed coating of the James Webb Space Telescope’s 21 mirror segments with microscopic layers of gold. |
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Gold foil was also crucial to the development of the transistor – a device that underlies all modern electronic technology – in the years immediately following the Second World War, when scientists turned from military applications to basic research. Transistors work by amplifying and switching on and off the charge passing through a semiconductor. Semiconductors – silicon is the best known – are a class of substance essential to modern electronic devices because their ability to carry a charge can be manipulated. By definition, their conductivity falls between that of conductors (of which gold is one) and insulators (such as glass), but it can be varied by ‘doping’ with impurities or ‘gating’ with electric fields. Scientists at Bell Telephone Laboratories, in search of methods to amplify sound for telecommunications, developed the transistor in 1947. They coated a plastic wedge with gold foil which was then slit with a razor to create two separate contact points that were very close together. They then pushed the gold-sheathed wedge into a piece of germanium, a semiconductor. When a positive charge was applied to the germanium, it sucked away electrons at one point of contact with the gold foil, opening up a pathway for more electrons to move through the germanium from one side of the slit foil to the other. With one side acting as the ‘emitter’ and the other as the ‘collector’, a charge could be conducted and amplified.21
The first transistor: Bardeen and Brattain’s ‘point-contact semiconductor amplifier’ made of germanium and gold.
Starting in the late 1950s, scientists also used very thin gold wire as bonding wire for complex circuitry. At 10–200 microns, thinner than a strand of human hair, gold wire was well suited to connect the components of an integrated circuit – transistors, resistors, capacitors and diodes – on a microchip. Because of its high cost, gold is now rapidly being replaced by copper, which (although it corrodes more readily) is cheaper and a better conductor.
When Hernán Cortés and his conquistadors landed in Mexico they believed they had found a land as abundant in gold ‘as in that from which Solomon is said to have taken the gold for the temple’.22 But the precious stuff was not always easy to find. When Cortés first inquired about Moctezuma’s gold, he justified his request by telling the Aztecs that he and his men suffered from a sickness of the heart that gold could cure.23 Perhaps he had in mind the purported medicinal properties of gold within the alchemical tradition; perhaps he was just inventing a persuasive fable. The story is told only later, so perhaps it was embroidered. But the metaphor is an especially evocative one. The heartsickness Cortés and his men suffered was, in the end, just their longing for gold.
That particular longing has led people throughout history to do irrational things, like pursue alchemy long after it had been discredited by all reputable scientists. Since the lust for gold survived unabated, alchemy could still, on occasion, excite the imaginations of people in need of cash (and those who would exploit that need). Late in the seventeenth century, the naturalist Johann Joachim Becher claimed to be able to turn sand into gold, and persuaded the Dutch assembly to go so far as to pay him an initial advance to set up his equipment. Ostensibly he succeeded twice in demonstrating his technique to witnesses. He certainly succeeded admirably in extracting silver from the government – before being forced to flee for his life when he was unmasked as a fraud.24 The scientific reputation of alchemy was already on the decline by Becher’s time, but it did not die: in London in 1891, an American by the name of Edward Pinter, claiming to have discovered the Philosopher’s Stone, used his purported discovery as the basis of a con game. In a familiar form of con, he used a small-scale demonstration in which he appeared to triple a small quantity of gold, thus persuading people (including one member of the famous Rothschild banking family) to hand over a much larger quantity of gold into his keeping.25
By this time, however, the thirst for gold had set its sights on a different form of transmutation. In the second half of the nineteenth century scientists proposed and debated theories about the presence of gold in seawater. Some believed gold might be extracted from the oceans, though it was unclear whether profitable methods could ever be devised given the extremely small concentration of the metal. Inspired by the scientific findings, a Baptist minister from Martha’s Vineyard set up an elaborate hoax using an actual factory building in a remote part of Maine. He concocted fake machinery and hid small amounts of gold that could be presented to curious visitors as the product of his new method of extraction. Investors who bought shares in the Electrolytic Marine Salts Company were sorely disappointed when he absconded with their life savings.
In spite of this debacle, the possibility of gold extraction from seawater continued to excite imaginations at the dawn of the twentieth century, and other inventors pressed on. Gold extraction schemes popped up in England, Malta and Australia. In the Australian scheme seawater filled a large reservoir. Mineral contents were allowed to settle, the water was drawn off, and the resulting sludge was subjected to the newly invented cyanide process – now a key component of mining – to extract the gold. The project was not, apparently, a hoax, but a sincere effort; however, the amounts produced were apparently so negligible that the project quickly collapsed.26
Lively scientific debate surrounded these attempts – as did social and ethical speculation. What would happen to modern economies were it to become possible to produce synthetic gold cheaply and easily? Jean Finot, a French sociologist and ardent anti-racist, warned in 1912 that the world economic system was in jeopardy due to future massive increases in the supply of gold, an occurrence he felt was near at hand thanks to modern technology – whether from seawater extraction, new discoveries of gold deposits or the actual fabrication of synthetic gold. The New York Times paraphrased: ‘If gold, which is the sole base of economic stability, were to suffer such violent fluctuations, what would be the position of those whose fortune is only symbolical as representing merely a certain quantity of this metal?’ But Marie Curie, whom the Times queried on the topic, dissented on scientific grounds, finding it such a remote possibility that it was ‘unprofitable’ to ‘consider the possible consequences of the fabrication of gold’.27
In the twentieth century the alchemists’ dream finally culminated in the scientific capacity to make gold. Scientists in the 1920s claimed to have synthesized gold by bombarding mercury with helium nuclei, but other scientists had difficulty repeating the experiment – a key standard for scientific knowledge. In 1941, as part of the war effort, scientists produced radioactive isotopes of gold from mercury by neutron bombardment. In 1980 a research group at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory – headed by the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Glenn Seaborg, who also discovered plutonium – transmuted bismuth into the only stable isotope of gold (also the only one found naturally, 197Au) through nuclear collision. These methods of synthesizing gold have not made a huge impact on the scientific community, even if they have stirred some imaginations. None, so far, can be carried out in a way that would make gold synthesis profitable.
Fafnir the dragon, who got Andvari’s gold but was killed for it. Illustration by Arthur Rackham for Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods (1924).
