Chemistry: A Volatile History
| Chemistry: A Volatile History | |
|---|---|
| Genre | History of science |
| Presented by | Jim Al-Khalili |
| Starring | Andrea Sella |
| Narrated by | Jim Al-Khalili |
| Composer(s) | Ty Unwin |
| Original language(s) | English |
| No. of series | 1 |
| No. of episodes | 3 |
| Production | |
| Executive producer(s) | Sacha Baveystock |
| Running time | 60 minutes |
| Production company(s) | BBC |
| Release | |
| Original network | BBC Four |
| Picture format | 16:9 1080i |
| Audio format | Stereo |
| Original release | 21 January – 4 February 2010 |
| External links | |
| Website | |
Chemistry: A Volatile History is a 2010 BBC documentary on the history of chemistry presented by Jim Al-Khalili. It was nominated for the 2010 British Academy Television Awards in the category Specialist Factual.
Only in the last 200 years have we known what an element is – a substance that cannot be broken down further by chemical reaction.
The Ancient Greeks, with no way of breaking open substances, could only base their ideas of the elements on what they could see: Earth, Fire, Water and Air.
In the 16th century alchemists were busy trying to turn base metals like lead, into gold.
It was the Swiss alchemist and surgeon Paracelsus who first challenged the Ancient Greek idea of four elements.
In 1526 Paracelsus was in Basel, when the famous printer Frobenius was told he would have to have his leg amputated in a life-saving operation. Instead of accepting the received wisdom, he called upon Paracelsus who cured him in the unconventional way of using his alchemical knowledge. This established him as a radical thinker, giving weight to his ideas, principal amongst which was the idea that the world was actually made of three elements: the tria prima comprising salt, sulphur and mercury.
Paracelsus did not succeed in convincing the establishment – instead he managed to enrage them by burning their established medical texts, and eventually had to flee Switzerland for Germany.
It was, however, the alchemical pursuit for gold that led to the first breakthrough in the hunt for new elements.
In 1669 Hennig Brand was looking for a way of extracting gold from the human body, and struck upon the idea of using urine, thinking that urine might contain some part of the ‘life force’ vital to sustaining human life. To get rid of the unimportant parts, primarily water, Brand boiled the urine for several days until he was left with a thick paste. Finally, fragments of a substance emerged which burned brighter than any Medieval candle available at the time, but which left the vessel it burnt in cold: Brand named this new substance icy noctiluca – ‘cold night light’.
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