Ancient explosives and the philosopher's stone: a history of alchemy

The roots of alchemy

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1:48I can't stop singing. Shop new deals every day, this Prime Big Deal Days. I think that's it. Nope, there's more. Luggage, smart glasses. Think of alchemy and you'll likely imagine bubbling vials of curious potions and molten metals. But how close is this popular perception to the truth? In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Kit Chapman traces a global story of discovery

2:21that blurred the boundaries between science and mysticism. Speaking to Emily Briffitt, he explains how alchemists pursue dreams of immortality, universal cures and turning base metals into precious ones, laying the foundations for modern science. So today we are talking all about your book, The Age of Alchemy. Now, this book challenges the idea that the story of chemistry begins with the Enlightenment. In your view then, when does it really start?

2:52I don't think we can put a start on it, and I don't think we can even put a location on it. One of the things that I'm trying to show is how science is used by everybody at all times. So we can go all the way back to prehistory, we can look at the origins of fire and tanning and metallurgy, all those things that helped us build society and civilization to say that that's the origins of chemistry. If you're looking at the origins of alchemy, we can start to piece together when that begins.

3:23And the key moment is in Alexandria in Egypt. So Alexandria is a phenomenal melting pot. It's founded by Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great dies, and one of his generals, Ptolemy, takes over. The Ptolemaic dynasty, they were phenomenal at supporting and championing science. They built the Great Library in Alexandria. So we have all of this education and flooding in there. We have Greek education, we have Jewish education, the Romans take over as well, and we have the Roman influences. And while this is all going on, we're also building on the ancient Egyptian temple cultures,

3:57which were very keen on artisans and metallurgy. And we start seeing this all come together and create the first alchemists.

Phases and core tenets

4:04Now, when would we say the real crux of the age of alchemy is? So there's several different phases to the ages of alchemy. If you start with the Egyptian alchemists, we are looking at around 50 AD to 300 AD. And this is where we get a lot of our ideas about what alchemy is. There's not a lot of surviving manuscripts from that time, because Diocletian, one of the emperors, essentially declared war on alchemy. He ordered all alchemy books to be burnt at the end of what's called the crisis of the third century. And that was because he was worried about people making counterfeit gold.

4:37And it's a fair worry, because the ancient Egyptian and Egyptian Roman Greek alchemists, as we think of them, they were focused on that. Ancient Egyptians believed that they could commune with their gods by idols, and they were directly talking to the gods. And so they had to make the gods as godly as possible. And their gods were made of lapis lazuli, gold, and silver. Really expensive things to get hold of. So of course they're going to try and make cheap gold paint alternatives. And that's where we start seeing alchemy emerge.

5:09That becomes kemia, a Greek word for fusion. It could also be the origins of the place, because kem and kemet were words for Egypt. And then that transitions, because some of that knowledge is lost. Very, very few manuscripts survive because of Diocletian's purges. And that means that it translates into the Byzantines and later into Islam. And that's where we get the al from. That is the kemia, al-kemia. So we have this second resurgence, where Islamic scholars are working on alchemy.

5:40Finally, that translates over into Europe. We know exactly when. Robert of Chester in 1144, on the 11th of February, if you really want to know. He finishes his translation of an Islamic text. That becomes the origins of alchemy in Europe. But it's only once we get the printing press and we start spreading ideas and information that alchemy really takes off. It's always seen as this kind of fringe science slash belief in God slash philosophy. And once we've got the printing press, we start spreading all of these books.

6:11They have archaic names deliberately. Everything in alchemy uses code words. Even the authors aren't who they say they are. And we start seeing alchemy's golden age in around the 1500s and 1600s. So I think when I think of alchemy, I'm thinking something fairly mysterious, quite esoteric. My brain wanders either towards fantasy with sort of wizards brewing potions or perhaps stories surrounding the Philosopher's Stone. But I'm sure neither of these quite encompass what alchemy is in its full.

6:43Could you tell us what is alchemy? It is all of the above. So alchemy, depending on who you are, and in fact, who you're talking to at any one moment could change depending on whether or not they want to be seen as a philosopher, whether they want to be seen as a scientist. They'll even change their names in some cases. A guy called George Starkey was quite famous for this. He influenced the Royal Society. He was friends with Robert Boyle, very, very prominent physicist. But also he would write books under this ridiculous pseudonym. And he would say things like, you know, take the fiery dragon and hide it in the egg and

7:16stuff like that. So it is a combination of belief, of practical science and metallurgy in particular, and a philosophy. So a lot of alchemists are influenced by what we call hermeticism. This is a belief in Hermes Trismegistus. Then that is a combination of the gods Hermes and Thoth. So a Greek god and an Egyptian god. And this is being used by alchemists as an example of how you can create the philosopher's stone. The stone which is not a stone.

7:47A secret ingredient that will help you, depending on who you ask, it could extend life and youth. Or it could be how to turn a base metal, such as lead, into gold. And of course, this is only Western alchemy as well. We also have Chinese alchemy, and that's very much influenced by medicine. And so you have a look at the Tang Dynasty, for instance, and we have four emperors at least who die of mercury poisoning by trying to extend their life drinking elixirs.

8:19And what would happen is one emperor gets killed with the mercury poisoning. The person who sold it, the quack, is executed, and the sun takes over. And then the sun is convinced by another quack, oh, no, no, my mercury treatment is actually the one you need to drink. So all of this is happening around the world, and it stretches back thousands and thousands of years. Okay, so we have the idea of turning base metals into gold or things like that. We have curing disease, prolonging life. So they're the core tenets of alchemy then.

8:51Yeah, if you want to sort of boil it down, it is turning base metals into gold or silver. The ancient Egyptians actually valued silver more than gold, but precious metals, those are the two noble metals. And in fact, they're linked with the stars and the sun and the planets. So the moon is related to silver, the sun is related to gold. And so you'll see a lot of code words saying, you know, the sun is excellent, that means you've made gold. Saturn is lead. And of course, quicksilver is linked with the planet Mercury. And so we now know it by its planet's name.

9:22So you've got some astrology going on there and astronomy as well. In terms of the other key parts, it is immortality, certainly in the East. It's usually prolonging life and curing disease in the West. And this idea of healing and eternal youth. And of course, once we go over to the Americas in colonization, and we see the Western powers, particularly Spain, going over into South America, we start seeing them search for the cities of gold, we start seeing this hunt for the fountain of youth.

9:54Of course, this is influenced by some ideas that they have with alchemy. But we have to bear in mind that people didn't see a distinction between metals, science, philosophy and God. They were all the same thing to them. If a world looked as it did, it was because God made it. And in fact, you'll see some Iatra chemists, these early medicinal chemists who were influenced by alchemy, people like Paracelsus, very, very famous one, they will be looking for, there's this belief that they've got this idea of linked with signs.

10:26So nature is giving you clues as to what will treat diseases. So if you have, for example, problems in the bedroom, you are looking for a plant that happens to be shaped a bit like a penis. And that's just how they thought the world worked. So a real blurring of lines between the science in inverted commons and belief more broadly. Yeah, absolutely. There's a blurring between science and belief. And also there are con artists. There's no escaping from it. There are people who are trying to make a quick buck.

10:57There are very cunning ways. So you could, for example, hide a tiny nugget of gold inside a lead ball. And knowing that lead has a lower melting point than gold, once you heat that up, the lead will dissolve, leaving the gold miraculously, it's appeared. And of course, then you say, well, if you want more gold, you'll have to give me some money so I can do more experiments. And then you do a runner. We see this all the time. In China, they banned the creation of gold because of that reason. In England and France, it was alchemy was outlawed in England for hundreds of years, precisely

11:28for this reason. Chaucer mocks it in the Canterbury Tales. You know, why is there no such thing as a rich alchemist? And of course, we get a lot of our names for con artists from alchemy. So a person that sold salves and cures in the Netherlands would be a quack salver. We get quack. And in Italy, particularly the iatra chemists, these people are using medicines and cures. They would travel around in towns. They were known as the charlatani or the charlatans. And they wanted to attract crowds.

11:58So they would give their potions fantastic names. It would be the angelic honey or the philosopher's stone, in one case. That was a purgative. And they would put on these big shows. They would get beautiful ladies to be doing dancing. They'd get jugglers. They'd get fire breathers. And so they wanted to attract a crowd. They would build temporary scaffolds for those crowds. A montenbanki or a montibank. So mountebanks, charlatans, quacks all come directly from this tradition of alchemy. Even looking back, I think alchemy could be seen as this rather fanciful thing.

12:30How seriously did practitioners take this?

Serious practitioners and experiments

12:33So some practitioners took it incredibly seriously. And some very famous scientists were alchemists. Isaac Newton is probably considered the last great alchemist. He absolutely believed in alchemy. We didn't know this until the 1920s. We found a treasure trove of his alchemical works, over a million words written on alchemy. Robert Boyle was fascinated by alchemy as well. He always took a little bit of a distance, but he absolutely was conned several times by people showing him stuff. So there are people who take it incredibly seriously.

13:04Popes took it very seriously. There is an example where one pope holds a meeting between alchemists and skeptics. And he says, OK, prove to me which side is right. He sides with the skeptics. He doesn't believe that alchemy works. We also have Pope Clement VII, who actually poisons prisoners to see if this remedy will work. He gets two prisoners who are given poisoned marzipan, basically. They're given, I think it's wolf's bane, or maybe the second prisoner gets wolf's bane. He does it twice. And one prisoner gets rubbed down in this cure, this Mithridatum, which is based on a guy called

13:40Mithridates, who supposedly sort of gave himself immunity to all poisons in the Roman era. And of course, when the Romans came for him, he tried to drink poison, couldn't because he was cured of all poisoning, and had to ask his bodyguard to stab him to death. Poor Mithridates. Anyway, so they're making this Mithridatum. And Pope Clement VII, very, very famous pope. He's the one that's involved with Henry VIII and all that stuff. He gives these poisons to two prisoners, rubs one of them down with this oil that supposedly cures poisons. That prisoner survives, the other one dies.

14:12Now, rubbing down someone with oil wouldn't have been a cure, but he was doing this in front of doctors and apothecaries. And so, presumably, that person had a greater constitution and just happened to survive the poisoning. Even so, the pope wrote a pamphlet around Rome saying how great this cure was. And we'd like to see things like, you know, named after the pope, these cures reaching the market. I was going to ask you, how do you tell between a quack and a genuine alchemist? Seems like it might be quite difficult. So, alchemists were also scientists, ultimately.

14:46And they are looking at using the latest techniques. Quite often, as I mentioned, they're using code words to hide what they're really doing. And sometimes those code words can be incredibly elaborate. There is a book called Atalanta Fusions. Atalanta Fusions is the story of Atalanta the Huntress, who was a Greek myth. She's a runner. She is in a running contest. She says she'll marry a guy who can beat her. This guy convinces one of the gods to give him a golden apple. And every time she overtakes him, he lobs a golden apple at her head and she gets distracted. He wins the race.

15:16He forgets to thank the god. And so, he and Atalanta go and have Nookie in a temple and they're turned into lions. And that story is told with symbolism, with music. There's music in this book, Atalanta Fusions, and it's linked to this myth. But that's not what's going on. Because if you look at the symbols and the pictures, they're very strange. There is a pregnant man with the world in his belly, for instance. There's mentions of hermaphrodites. There is someone who is taking the fiery sword and slaying the dragon.

15:47And all of this is code for what's going on. Because if you take Atalanta and her bow and you replace them with mercury and sulfur, and at the time that was the predominant theory that mercury, sulfur, and a bit of salt made up everything in the world, you start to see that this is actually an alchemical process and they're giving you the recipe. But even that isn't enough. Even knowing that these are code words isn't enough. Because you then have to put the book into the right order. And there is a magic square cipher where you rearrange the pictures and the story

16:20to suddenly discover the recipe that is trying to be given by the alchemist. It must be insanely difficult now looking back to try and decipher some of these and get to grips with what they're trying to get at. Absolutely. And it's led us into some very strange paths. There's a guy called Zosimos of Panopolis. And Zosimos lived about 300 AD. We don't quite know when. He was an alchemist. He was a hermeticist. This is around the time of Diocletian's purges. He was writing to someone called Theosabia. We don't know if that was his sister, if it was an apprentice,

16:51or if she was a fictional character that he was using as a plot device. But he writes descriptions of his recipes and they are encoded. He mentions things like the divine water, which probably means sulfur. And he writes about dreams. So he will write that he saw a tiny white-haired barber going into an area and then cutting the heads off some people made of copper, things like that. And Carl Jung, in the 19th century, assumed that this was a philosophical text.

17:23We were turning our souls into gold, as it were. Whereas actually, it's probably a hidden alchemical recipe that he's using. And he's just using all these codes. So it is hard to unpick. There is some phenomenal work that goes on to do it. There's a guy called Lawrence Principe in America. He will actually do the experiments and go through them. Do not try alchemical experiments at home. I can't emphasize that enough. They are all incredibly horrible, even if it just stinks out your room. I mean, and they will. One of the earliest ones we have from something called the Leiden Papyrus X.

17:57A grave robber found it in 1827, 1828. And this is the only original alchemy book we have from the time everything else is copied. There is a recipe there for how to make fake gold, how to make a gold dip, basically. And it's using things like the urine of a small child. It's using sulfur. It reeks out your kitchen if you try it. And it can produce potentially dangerous fumes. If you zoom into the 1600s and you have a look at what's called the Books of Secrets,

18:27which were kind of alchemical light. So they're kind of popular alchemy, if you like. They are designed for people who are running households. There's one called The Secrets of Isabella Cortez. Isabella Cortez almost certainly never existed. It was probably a man pretending to be a woman so that they could sell to noble women. And there's things like treatments and remedies and cures. There's things of how to make a decent soap or polish. But of course, there's an alchemical recipe in there as well of how to make gold. And that one is very interesting because it uses all of these code words. It says the sun is excellent, etc.

18:59But what's actually happening is being concealed by the color changes in the recipe. Because you forget right at the start, you put in a tiny amount of gold. That gold is forming an amalgam with mercury. And it's a process known as fire gilding. So we're essentially plating that gold and then evaporating off the mercury onto an object. It's all hidden behind these code words, behind these elaborate scientific razzmatats. Up until the 19th century, into the 1800s, people are still fascinated by things like fulminating gold,

19:30which is a gold recipe that explodes in a purple smoke. Because gold explodes and it turns purple. It's fantastic. Probably the first high explosive. And that's coming from alchemy. If you're looking at the gifts from Chinese alchemy, gunpowder comes from this alchemical tradition. It was probably initially used in medicines and cures and somehow we ended up getting into gunpowder. And also some remedies that we use today. So artemisinin, which is a plant that is then refined into a drug, which is now used to treat malaria. This is an advertisement from Surfshark.

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Strange recipes and discoveries

22:20I particularly love a recipe that was used for the discovery of phosphorus. So in the 1660s, there was a guy called Hennig Brand, and he became convinced that he could create gold from his own urine. And so he gathered up the equivalent of 1,500 Coke bottles of urine and fermented it, made it go stale, and turned it into this icky, sticky substance. And suddenly, late at night, his apparatus began to glow. And he thought he had made the Philosopher's Stone. He was incredibly excited. He couldn't make gold from this glowy stuff, though.

22:51He was really disappointed by that. He sold the recipe to a friend of his, and this guy then travelled around Europe, showing the kings and queens of Europe his glowing wee-wee. And later, he showed Robert Boyle. Robert Boyle realised that actually what they had made was phosphorus. So we had actually discovered a chemical element through that. One of my favourites. The other one, a bit of an older recipe, and it was to make Spanish gold. And to make Spanish gold, first of all, you need the blood of a red-headed man, you need this and that, and you need basilisk powder.

23:27Now, of course, where does one get hold of a basilisk, given they don't exist? Well, fortunately, we're told. What you need to do is get two gay roosters and get them to mate. And once they produce an egg, you then get a toad to sit on it. It will hatch a basilisk. You trap the basilisk, you heat it up for a certain amount of time, and you roast it, and you create your basilisk powder that way. Now, of course, basilisk powder doesn't exist. What we're really looking for is a substance that's white and powdery, and when you combine it with the blood of a red-headed man, we realise what we're talking about, and we get the recipe for Spanish gold, which is just a hue of paint.

24:06OK, that's quite a turn. I was not expecting from urine. We've had basilisk powder, and now we're just at paint. Everything in alchemy always comes back to urine. It's one of those strange things, because it was incredibly useful in the ancient times. When we look at fullers and laundries, you used urine to bleach your shirts and make them white, because urine, when it breaks down, you get ammonia. It's incredibly useful, incredibly versatile. And in fact, it was so important that one of the Roman emperors actually taxed collecting urine from public urinals.

24:43And there's this very famous phrase, money doesn't stink. That's where it came from. But the urine tax, the tax on collecting urine, was used to build the Colosseum. Who knew urine had such extraordinary uses? Now, were there any other ingredients that you think would make a modern chemist do a double-take or run for the hills? Everything? Yeah. So it's funny, I was talking to Andrea Seller, who is a phenomenal chemist, and we were looking at what we could do with alchemy, and we were going,

25:15we can't do that one, that's too dangerous. We can't do that, that's too dangerous. You know, anything involving mercury is just a no. Once we get into the 18th century, and we start seeing the very end of alchemy, and there's some ideas that are still lingering, something called phlegiston, this idea that there is a mystical substance that makes things burst into flames, it's called phlegiston. Eventually, when that's disproved, we get oxygen, and that's really the transition into chemistry. But one of the key guys who discovered oxygen was Sheila, and Sheila was probably the biggest loser in history.

25:45The guy discovered oxygen, and he never got the credit. He discovered several different acids, never got the credit. And it's usually because his publisher delayed publishing it, or the letter arrived a week later than someone else did it, or people didn't believe he did something. He only had one major discovery attributed to him in his lifetime. It was Sheila's green. It was this phenomenal colour of green that everybody loved, and Napoleon absolutely adored it, wanted Sheila's green on his wallpaper. So when he moved to St. Helena after the Battle of Waterloo, and he was exiled,

26:18he had Sheila's green all over the house. And during the Victorian era, we noticed that people started dying when they were in rooms with Sheila's green, because Sheila's green was also used in candles and things like that. And there's this horrific death of a flower dyer in London, and her eyeballs turned green, she begins to vomit green. People start going, there's something very, very wrong here. And what happens is Sheila's green contains arsenic. And when it gets mouldy, when it gets wet, we start getting arsine gas. And so people were literally being gassed by their wallpaper.

26:54And you have a look at Napoleon, his hair contained, when we did samples of it, contained a lot of arsenic. So even in death, Sheila, his one triumph in life was a disaster, and probably killed the most famous man of his age. Gosh, that's not a success to have on your records. Because alchemy seems very, sort of this mysterious art. And we might say that it's all hypothetical. Does it have many successes? Obviously, that wasn't a major success.

27:25Is it more successful than we tend to assume? Can we say that?

Incremental growth of science

27:29Yeah, we absolutely can. We think of science as this sort of magical explosion that happens in the 18th century. And suddenly we've got science, and we never had science before. And that's just not the case. Everything in history is incremental. It's gradual growth and gradual progression. It's done by making connections that we don't always see. And that can be using through industry. That can be everything from tanning, as I mentioned, through to metallurgy. It's the improvement of instruments so that we can actually start looking at the world.

28:01It's the printing press so we can start spreading those ideas. Science becomes popular. I mean, the idea of scientist as a job didn't exist until the 1830s. There is no mention of scientist. And that only exists because women were doing science. There was a fantastic astronomer, Somerville, and she wrote a book. People couldn't describe her as a man of science or a philosopher of science. They had to come up with a new word. They chose scientist. So it's the fact that everybody is doing science at all points in history.

28:34And really, it brings us together as people that we actually get into the modern age. When you look all the way back and you try and trace who is the oldest chemist that we could possibly name, we go right back to Babylon. And there is a tablet and cuneiform. So someone has literally engraved the words into cuneiform. And it's a recipe for perfume. And it was written by someone called Tafuti Abelakam. And Tafuti is almost certainly the oldest person we could probably call a chemist.

29:07She was a perfumer. She might well have been a slave. We don't know. But certainly the Babylonians were known for capturing young ladies and taking them and making them perfumers. And she obviously was writing this recipe that was fit for a ruler. She was of the palace. So it was incredibly important work. And the techniques that she was using, distillation, filtration, heating, understanding evaporation, all of those elements are what gives us the foundation of science today. So trying to say that science just happened to sort of appear in a whiz-bang fizz, it just isn't the case.

29:43So we haven't suddenly got boom, science, in the 18th century. It would be great if we did, you know, and we could name it. But no, science is something that we have been using since prehistory. It is used across the planet. And even in areas where we often don't consider science, you know, we don't talk about, for example, Mesoamerican science very much. Of course they had science. And of course they were looking at the world in their own interpretations, the cultures such as the Maya and the Aztec. Like, the Mayans were using filtration systems, which we only started to understand in the 20th and 21st centuries, to purify their water.

30:21They were using pozzolanic cement. So this is cement using ash from volcanoes that actually can self-repair. And so the reason that their buildings to this day are still in the jungle, if you go to Tikal, you can go up these temples. People probably know Tikal from the end of the first Star Wars movie. It's what they used as the base of the Battle of Yavin. And these fantastic structures in the jungle still stand. How did they exist over a thousand years in a humid environment like that? It's because the concrete self-repairs. And we use the same technology in lighthouses. The Stevenson family, the most famous of which is probably Robert Louis Stevenson, but Robert Stevenson, he built lighthouses.

30:56The Bell Rock Lighthouse, it self-repairs. We've never had to replace part of the Bell Rock Lighthouse. And it's been there for 200 years.

Techniques and lasting words

31:03So I would ask you whether there are any tools or techniques or ideas that stem from alchemy that are still deeply embedded in modern science. But I feel like that might not be the right question to ask because it is. If you look at the basic techniques of modern science, things like filtration, things like distillation, things like evaporation, understanding how these things work. If you look at devices that were being used in Alexandria, there's a device called the kerataxis, which isn't quite a reflux apparatus, but you can kind of see the similarities if you're a scientist.

31:36These are fundamental things that we use today. We use words from alchemy all the time. So elixir comes from alchemy. And again, this is Islamic in origin. Crucible, a little place of torment. Crucibulum. We use that. We even use things in our day-to-day if we don't think we're doing science. So Paracelsus, who I mentioned, fascinating guy, had some very, very weird ideas. He thought that mermaids existed and were trying to steal the souls of men so they could get into heaven. Really interesting character. He was also a terrific proponent of actually doing stuff.

32:10He's the guy that brings medicine out of the idea of the humours and doctors just kind of studying patients and actually getting down and doing stuff. He was a drunk. I mean, the guy drank like a fish. He dies in a very strange way that might have been a barroom brawl, or he might have been thrown out of a window or off a cliff, or it might have been all three things. But he was trying to think of how to describe his favourite tipple. He wanted to know what was the best essence of wine. And he was trying to come up with a word. He thought about what's the finest thing I can think of in terms of, you know, granular.

32:43Well, it's coal, the eyeliner, the powder. So, obviously, we're using the the, so that's alcohol. So, alcohol. He comes up with the word. There you go. It all comes back to alchemy. It all comes back to alchemy.

Comparing ancient and modern labs

32:56Suppose we had time travel. If we could, say, transport a medieval or ancient alchemist into a modern laboratory, what do you think would perhaps surprise them most? Or perhaps, on the other side of things, just feel really familiar? So, I think it depends, obviously, when you're talking about. If you took someone from the Romo-Egyptian sort of culture of alchemy, someone like Mary the Jewess or Cleopatra the alchemist, who were figures of the time, or Democritus, and I use sort of air quotes there because he definitely wasn't Democritus.

33:29Democritus was dead for hundreds of years before that, but he claimed to be Democritus. As I said, in alchemy, you know, no one is who they say they are. It's almost like a spy thriller. If you took one of them into our modern labs, they would certainly recognize some of the processes we're doing. They would be familiar with the idea of heating something up. A Bunsen burner would be incredible to them, the fact that we can control temperature in that way. One of the great arts of an alchemist was how to control temperature and being that precise. So, understanding that, having ingredients actually described by what they are

34:01rather than sort of the general minerals that they have, because they didn't understand what elements were. We didn't have elements until a guy called Antoine Lavoisier in the French Revolution. He's the guy that first makes a list of saying, this is the basic stuff that you can't simplify any further. He gets the list wrong. He thinks calories and lights are elements, but he does actually start becoming what we know now as the periodic table. For example, they would know iron. They would recognize iron, although if it's a particularly ancient Egyptian, they would think it's incredibly rare.

34:33They would recognize things like bronze. They would recognize metals. But they wouldn't recognize sodium chloride, for example. They would know it as salt, but they wouldn't understand the label sodium chloride. They would be confused by that. And they wouldn't understand the periodic table. If you showed them the periodic table, they'd be like, what is this list of things and why is it arranged in this order? We don't get there until the 19th century. That's a great point to leave us on. Is there anything else that you would like to add? Any message you would like to leave the listener with, I suppose?

Science belongs to everyone

35:03If you are interested in science, never feel that you don't belong in science. It's the great lesson from history. Science was done by everybody. And when you look at the great discoveries right up until the 21st century, they are made by people on the fringes of society, often. It's made by minorities. Women were heavily involved in alchemy and heavily involved in science. It's involved by the disenfranchised and it's steampunk. It goes right down to the lower classes and builds up into the upper classes.

35:35So science is for everybody and history is for everybody too. So get involved. That was science historian and adventurer Kit Chapman. His latest book is The Age of Alchemy, How Early Innovators Shaped Modern Chemistry, which was recently announced as winner of the 2026 Royal Society Trevedi Science Book Prize. This fall, discover why there are two sides to every pancake story at Cracker Barrel.

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