The original transformer

Alchemy: the study of how metals are composed, often based on a spiritual or religious pursuit

Whether you realize it or not, you wake up every morning and do some chemistry. You might turn the liquids in your eggs into solids. Maybe you remove the moisture in your bread to make toast. Meanwhile, your parents may be adding hot water to ground-up beans to create new and complex compounds that taste good and give them a caffeine buzz. Chemistry is everywhere.

Chemistry is the modern science that deals with the structure and properties of substances and how they are transformed. But modern chemistry didn’t just happen. It grew out of a long history of curious humans who used trial and error to answer questions like:

• How do you make raw foods edible?
• How do you turn ash and fat into soap?
• How do you turn mineral-bearing rocks into iron?

Most trials ended in error, but when they succeeded, people passed on the ideas to later generations. But these ideas weren’t always studied in a scientific way.

Between the days of trial and error and the arrival of modern science was something called alchemy. Not exactly science, and not exactly magic, alchemy mixes religion, spirituality, and experimentation in order to study the properties of natural substances. Especially metals.

Perhaps the greatest of the alchemists was Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, a Muslim Persian innovator who wrote over 3,000 texts on alchemy. These included:

• A list and description of all the known tools and equipment used by Greek and Muslim alchemists.
• Histories of the progress made by earlier alchemists.
• Studies of the characteristics of different metals.

Ibn Ḥayyān was one of the first people to describe the qualities of different metals—and he had a good reason for doing so. Alchemists wanted to know how to transform one metal into another. Well, what they really wanted to do was turn lead, a cheap metal, into gold, an expensive metal. The first step to meeting that challenge was to study the qualities of each metal. Then, they had to figure out the process by which you might change those qualities.

In what may be his most important contribution to later scientists, ibn Ḥayyān began to study how mixing substances—using heat, acid, and other methods and tools—could change them. These processes included:

• Distillation—Purifying something by boiling it, and then capturing the steam.
• Filtration—Putting a substance through a filter to remove impurities.
• Amalgamation—Mixing two substances so they become a new substance.

While working with metals, ibn Ḥayyān learned how to purify gold and mercury. He also isolated substances that could be used to transform other metals, substances such as sulfuric acid and nitric acid.

A man? Or a school?

Who was this brilliant man who wrote 3,000 texts and invented new ways to transform substances? It’s still a mystery. There probably was a man named Jābir ibn Ḥayyān. He was probably born in the city of Tus, in Persia. He probably worked for the Abbasid ruler Harun al-Rashid. And he probably wrote some of the 3,000 texts associated with his name. But it’s likely that a lot of the work that people attach his name to was written by other people living around the same time or later.

So, if that’s true, we’re looking at something much more exciting than a single innovator. We’re probably looking at a whole school of alchemists. Many of these alchemists were probably students of Ibn Ḥayyān’s who worked together, shared notes and ideas, and passed them on. If the 3,000 texts were written by several or many people, then we have evidence of a great effort to understand metals and other substances and transform them. Maybe they all worked together in a laboratory or workshop. Maybe there was even a whole school of alchemists in one location.

From Jābir to Geber to…

And, if it were a school, what an important school it was! The work of Jābir ibn Ḥayyān spread across the Islamic world and was preserved for later researchers—and there’s no “maybe” about that. This work was highly influential. The ibn Ḥayyān texts were translated into Latin, and by the twelfth century, they were found in Spain, Italy, and England. One group of fourteenth-century Spanish experimenters even signed their own work “Geber” to honor the influence of “Jābir.” Later, Sir Isaac Newton studied ibn Ḥayyān, and in his own studies on the nature of matter, he reproduced some of these earlier experiments.

Ibn Ḥayyān’s work looked quite different from the work of modern scientists. Yet, like many great innovators before the modern period, ibn Ḥayyān helped pave the way for later scholars who used the scientific method. His work featured many methods that later scientists would adopt. These include some of the first attempts to create a list of qualities that compare one metal to another. He also invented both new tools and new liquids in his ambition to transform one substance into another. Finally, he recorded everything very carefully. Whether he was one man or a whole school or laboratory of scientists, ibn Ḥayyān represents an important step between the trial and error of everyday work and the carefully recorded and studied science of chemistry.