Vitals
Hometown: Newport, England
Current Location: London
Favorite book: Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban. “It’s one of those books is often described as a cult classic. It’s kind of postapocalyptic. It’s written in a quasi medieval Middle English and takes a little while to get into, and it’s just one of the richest, most compelling books.”
Favorite alchemist: The 16th-century alchemist Paracelsus. “The first biography I wrote was The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science. So he got me into alchemy.”
Favorite element: Mercury. “It’s a quintessentially alchemical element, but it’s also the most magical element. I’ve actually got a few bottles of mercury around me in my studio, which I shouldn’t really have, but it’s for inspiration.”
Philip Ball is such a prolific author that he confesses to losing count of the number of books he’s published. A quick counting of those listed on his website puts the total at 30, which makes his latest—Alchemy: An Illustrated History of Elixirs, Experiments, and the Birth of Modern Science, published Sept. 2—number 31.
Science in general, and chemistry in particular, are often the focus of Ball’s books, including Stories of the Invisible: A Guided Tour of Molecules, The Ingredients: A Guided Tour of the Elements, Elegant Solutions: Ten Beautiful Experiments in Chemistry, and The Beauty of Chemistry: Art, Wonder, and Science. His captivating topics and prize-winning prose might make other aspiring authors of popular chemistry books want to toss their book proposals out the window.
When Ball won the American Chemical Society’s James T. Grady—James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public in 2006, he was described as “full of passion for molecules”—a passion that has not abated, even as it has moved toward biomolecules in recent years. In his previous book, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology, he examines the molecular principles that govern life.
In his newest offering, Ball turns back the clock to study alchemy. C&EN reporter Bethany Halford spoke with him about the inspiration behind this book and what he learned while researching it. This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Why did you decide to write about alchemy?
A book cover that features a face within a seven-pointed star, nested in a triangle.
Philip Ball’s latest book is an illustrated history of alchemy.
Credit:
Yale University Press
I’ve always had this interest in that aspect of the history of chemistry. Alchemy still has a sort of cultural cachet; it just seems incredibly romantic. It clearly wasn’t if you were doing it at the time, but looking back now, there is this real aura of something literally magical about it. It seemed to speak to a time when doing something close to what we would now regard as science had an extraordinarily imaginative quality. It seemed to speak to a much bigger picture of the world. In what we think of as the golden age of alchemy—the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries—there was this idea of a chemical Theory of Everything: the cosmos, human spirituality, and human being, as well as of the material world. We no longer have any need for a theory that broad or that overarching, but there was something delightfully ambitious about that. It required extraordinary feats of imagination on the part of the people who were developing it—in a way that I frankly think it’s hard to find in science these days, because what we regard as science has a narrower objective.
Most people think of alchemy as the quest to turn lead into gold. How would you define alchemy?
The word itself basically just means chemistry. One way to think about it is: chemistry before we called it that. And to some people in the Middle Ages, say, that’s exactly what it was—just a way of making stuff. . . . The early days of alchemy proper—2nd or 3rd century—was when these practical arts of making started to become blended with more esoteric, more grand philosophies of how the world worked, which by the Middle Ages had a spiritual or religious element to it as well. So it was prescientific chemistry, but it was also strongly bound up with questions of spirituality and theology.
How do you think alchemy fits into the history of science, ideas, and culture?
The early- to mid-20th-century view of alchemy was that it was all about making gold and that was a fool’s quest, because we know that it’s impossible to transmute other metals into gold. But also there was this idea that it was all bound up with superstitious ideas, and gradually that has been dismantled by modern historians of chemistry and historians of science. . . . We’ve gradually got away from this idea that the alchemists were just a load of superstitious charlatans who didn’t know what they were doing and they were replaced in the scientific revolution by what looked like real science. That wasn’t the case at all. It’s now very clear that alchemy has a very important role in the history of science and how we thought about the world, what it was made of, and particularly an important place in the history of chemistry. . . .
In the course of trying to make gold—which alchemists were trying to do; there’s absolutely no doubt about that—they experimented with all kinds of substances and found out all kinds of useful and interesting things about them, which helped modern chemistry get going. It wasn’t just about making gold, and certainly from the Renaissance and even in earlier times, there was also an interest in making medicines this way. So, it’s an important part of the history of pharmacology as well. I see it also as just an important part of the history of making stuff—whether it’s drugs, whether it’s materials, whether it’s pigments, or whether it’s trying to make gold.
“It’s one of those history-of-science stories that does offer a broader narrative than just White European males doing stuff.”
Your book also features short biographies of alchemists. Tell me about why you chose to include those.
It felt important to take a look at some of these figures to give an idea of the diversity of alchemists. And by that, I don’t mean just gender diversity and nationality but also the diversity of different views of different approaches to alchemy. This is a perennial problem with histories of science: it’s very hard not to get caught up in a Western, male-centric kind of narrative. But it certainly is possible to find women who were practicing alchemy in the past. And alchemy has its own traditions in China and in India and certainly in the Middle East. During the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th centuries, it is often said that the Islamic kingdoms was really where alchemy was flourishing. So it’s one of those history-of-science stories that does offer a broader narrative than just White European males doing stuff.
What surprised you as you wrote this book?
How long alchemy persisted as such. Even in the 19th century, there were one or two people who were eminent scientists, fellows of the Royal Society, who still had a sideline in alchemy. It was by that stage totally disreputable. But they weren’t total cranks. They were part of the scientific establishment.
Is there a common theme for your books?
What draws me to write about a subject at book length, rather than an article, is how science interacts with the broader sphere of ideas and culture. . . . In this instance, I have a bit at the end looking at the way alchemy crops up in art. . . . It always seems to be the case that what artists of all sorts do with scientific ideas is often very different from what scientists themselves were aiming to do, or even meant by them, but I always find that a really interesting way in which scientific ideas are received within culture.
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