respected American alchemist, George
Starkey, had created him out of thin air to
boost his career. In the European alchemy
circles Starkey inhabited, he could boast
that he was the only one who had met the
great Philalethes. Better yet, Starkey con-;ded to Robert Boyle, Philalethes had told
him part of the top-secret process for making the Philosophers’ Stone. In 1651 Boyle
took the bait and asked Starkey to teach him
chemistry so he could make the Stone himself. (Boyle, considered the father of modern chemistry, knew almost nothing about it
until he studied under Starkey, according to
Newman.) A Boyle notebook uncovered by
Principe in the mid-1990s describes how a
wandering alchemist seemingly transformed
lead into gold before his eyes. “The powder
that was employ’d in the operations was
not weigh’d,” Boyle wrote. “I cannot tell
precisely how many parts of lead were transmuted by it, but I remember the Gold weigh’d
much above half an ounce.” Whatever Boyle
actually saw, it was enough to convince him
that making gold was possible.
Like Newman’s, Principe’s immersion in
the labyrinthine world of alchemy began
in college, in his case in the early 1980s,
after he read The Twelve Keys, an allegorical work written in the 15th century by an
in;uential alchemist and supposed Benedictine monk, Basil Valentine. In his work,
Valentine included an illustration that,
Principe suspected, depicted a method
for rendering gold—normally one of the
most stable elements—volatile.
Looking around for other documents
Historian of science
William Newman
demonstrates a replica
of Newton’s alchemy
furnace outside his
Indiana garage.
describing the volatility of gold, he found
a treasure trove of writings on alchemy by
Boyle. One of those manuscripts included a
description of an absolutely real substance
then called Philosophical Mercury—a liquid
form of mercury that could dissolve gold
slowly, a pivotal stage in gold making.
Today Principe suspects that Philosophical Mercury was the prized ingredient that
Isaac Newton had sought from Boyle for
years—a crucial component for making the
Philosophers’ Stone. But like most alchemists, Boyle kept the details of his alchemical work hidden; he even withheld a part of
the recipe for making red earth, which he
believed was the direct precursor to the Philosophers’ Stone. “Red earth was thought
to be about as close to the Philosophers’
Stone as you could get,” Principe explains.
“It was said to change lead into gold, but
a lot less ef;ciently than the Philosophers’
Stone itself. It was assumed that if you could
create red earth, it would be relatively simple to get to the Philosophers’ Stone from
there.” The age of scienti;c transparency
