← Back to context

Comment by John23832

7 days ago

Random question. Historically, why have Lead and Gold been so closely linked? Why did alchemist focus on turning lead into gold (and not start with iron, or a rock like quartz)? Is it just because they're two heavy soft metals?

35 comments

John23832

Reply
bad_haircut72  7 days ago

The leading theory at the time was that metals were grown in the earth, starting as base metals and transmuting over time/under certain conditions into the higher metals, eventually ending up at gold, which they thought was the end point because it never tarnished. It was actually not a terrible theory given the information they had, all metals come from the ground after all - the idea of turning lead into gold wasn't some magical thinking, they were trying to reproduce natural conditions in the lab and speed it up, just like we do today in hundreds of other ways today. If someone had succeeded it would have been like doing the double slit experiment of it's day, a complete proof that alchemical theory was right.

  • 55555  7 days ago

    Today we turn carbon into diamonds by doing exactly that! Very interesting, thanks for sharing this information. I had no idea.

  • bad_haircut72  7 days ago

    replyming to my own comment here but for this audience in particular, consider that given this reasonable train of thought (that alchemy was like an advanced science which, if cracked, would have this really cool financial upside of providing infinite gold) - consider how many companies must have been created, raised money to do R&D, built working prototypes, rewrote the books & sometimes even made money by accident. If you were someone balancing their portfolio in 1700s Amsterdam, from a risk management perspective you would have invested at least a little bit on AlchemyTech just incase it really doesn turn out to be a real thing. People had lifetime careers wrapped up in it !

  • yyhhsj0521  6 days ago

    > leading theory

    hehe. Seriously though, why weren't people trying to turn iron or copper into gold? Why lead?

rad_gruchalski  7 days ago

Most likely because lead was used for faking coins. Lead covered in a thin layer of gold. You know that coin biting move from movies about middle ages? It was to check if you’re dealing with gold or lead. So lead was the impersonation of the fake. Turning a fake into the real deal.

  • Antipode  7 days ago

    I thought the coin bite was just to check that it left an indentation. How would you use it to differentiate gold from lead? They're both soft.

    • bee_rider  7 days ago

      I found a little discussion on the topic:

      https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8810/is-biting-...

      They found a paper which apparently (I didn’t dig into their sources) says:

      > concludes that the coin biting is most probably a cliche in literature and movies.

      > The manuscript points out that there are many references to coin biting form early 20th century but not from older (contemporary to the setting) sources e.g. […] They put a possible origin to the cliche to 19th century gold prospectors distinguishing pyrite from gold nuggets by biting.

      So, it may have been 19’th century authors speculating about to-them long past history, based on current events.

      The relative softness of different widely circulated alloys bounces around quite a bit over the ages, but the author only has to come up with something that is plausible to their audience, after all. Biting a coin is sort of trope of an expert at adventure, right? In some sense it is plausible enough that there’s some difference the property of widely circulated alloys, so whatever that difference is, the expert knows how it feels. Maybe the common fakes of the era are softer lead, maybe they are some harder silver alloy, but the expert pirate knows.

      2 replies →

MatmaRex  7 days ago

This very article states:

> This long-standing quest, known as chrysopoeia, may have been motivated by the observation that dull grey, relatively abundant lead is of a similar density to gold, which has long been coveted for its beautiful colour and rarity.

guestbest  7 days ago

If one wanted to fool someone into accepting gold painted lead as genuine gold, it is easier than trying to pass off pyrite. Golds much higher melting point is a giveaway, though. I don’t think it was the idea of atomic properties that was attempted to be changed but the selection of certain properties that alchemy was attempting to transmute to lead from gold, such as melting point and color to make a cheaper gold in a lab.

rdtsc  7 days ago

Maybe because the weight was "close enough", at least closer than iron, so they figured they must be closely related. So we just need a "little bit" of work to it make shiny and beautiful and 40% heavier or so.

And I am sure they tried to change silver to gold as well. It's even closer in weight so an even a smaller changer is needed.

marcodiego  7 days ago

A friend of mine who was into alchemy, told me it was because the difference was only three protons. I don't if early alchemists knew that or why not consider metals that are less than three protons different from gold.

  • cgriswald  7 days ago

    Those would iridium, platinum, mercury, and thalium. For varying definitions of "early", these alchemists only knew about mercury and maybe platinum (there was platinum in Egyptian gold, but it isn't clear they knew it was in there or thought of it as anything more than an impurity). Mercury they did try to turn to gold. They thought of it as an ur-metal from which all other metals came.

    But as the sibling poster states, no, they didn't know.

    • mariusor  7 days ago

      I think that Gold/Platinum alloy is one of the plot points of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and it's in relation to Newton's alchemical experiments.

krapp  7 days ago

One has to remember that alchemy was as much a religious and spiritual pursuit as anything resembling proto-science, and understand that occultists were working from a worldview which was nominatively deterministic - meaning the names and properties of things in the natural world held inherent power and reflected a higher, divine nature ("as above, so below")

The transmutation of metals in alchemy is a metaphor for the transmutation of the soul, from its base and sinful nature ("lead") to divinity ("gold".) The means of purifying one was the means of purifying the other, and the "philosopher's stone" alchemists often sought to achieve this was credited for doing both.

Also... it was often an easy grift to get room and board (and money) from wealthy patrons.

Here is a good /r/AskHistorians thread about this[0].

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/114vo4m/alch...

  • tanseydavid  7 days ago

    Thank you for this. Here's a pull quote from the linked article:

        Broadly speaking, alchemical writings are not just concerned with the 
    manipulation of physical matter; rather, alchemy can be viewed as a 
    philosophy that synthesizes chemistry and spirituality. A common overarching 
    idea is that transmuting materials is directly analogous to the purification 
    of the soul - alchemists were, in general, trying to advance *spiritual* 
    enlightenment as well as *intellectual* enlightenment. It's important to 
    understand this mindset in order to grasp what they were trying to achieve 
    with metallurgy.

hasmanean  7 days ago

Because alchemists were afraid of people stealing their recipes. Jabir bin Hayyan (aka Geber) the father of chemistry wrote in his own shorthand which is named after him—-gibberish or jibberish.

So Lead, gold, and quicksilver were not the substances their names suggest. They were codenames. The real processes have never been revealed.

RajT88  7 days ago

Most likely. "If we could just make this shinier... we could be rich"

Alchemists probably weren't thinking about the gold economy, in that if they figured out how to turn something common like lead into something more rare like gold, that gold would no longer be rare, and they wouldn't be rich for very long.

  • brokencode  7 days ago

    The first ones to discover this would have been rich though. I doubt they cared what would happen to anybody else in the long run.