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1. Stated goals of Alchemy: one, the transmutation of base metal into
gold; two, the indefinite prolongation of human life in beverage form;
three, the transmutation of human life.
2.The 15th century Dutch composer and alchemist Jacobus Obrecht
ciphered the 'music of the spheres' into atonal and polytonal
structures. When asked why he would do such a thing, he responded,
"Could you hear it in the first place?" He was told to stick to the
lead. When he died of the plague in 1505 he was out of work.
3. Johann Rudolf Glauber, moved into a second floor apartment along
the Amstel river canal in 1655. Its previous owner had been a tulip
broker. Glauber had made his fortune inventing 'Glauber's Salts,'
recommended for nausea, biliousness, dermatitis, rheumatism,
hepatobiliary disorders, bronchial asthma, diarrhea, and nervous
trauma. Mostly the salts loosened stool. His alchemy was limited to
pouring aqua regia over gold, even eventually his own filings. The
rusty fizz and then nothing. Everyone suspected him of playing the
market, reducing supply &c.; but he never seemed to invest in base
metals.
4.Cornelius Drebbel invented the perpetual motion machine and the
submarine. Only one of these things is a possibility today.
Nevertheless, he was seated among the court entertainment at the
king's wedding. His only book was a hermetic ramble. Near the end of
his life, in 1633, he was running an unsuccessful ale house. In Ben
Jonson's play 'The Staple of News,' he is mentioned in a tabloid
headline: "Cornelius-Son, Hath made the Hollanders an invisible Eel,
to swim the Haven at Dunkirk, and sink all the shipping there."
Drebbel was working for the English at the time.
5.Eliaser Bamberg (1760-1833) claimed to be the son of a Dutch
alchemist. As was common during the Enlightenment, he lost his leg to
a freak explosion. He had the idea of hollowing out his wooden leg to
hide a nip of Jenever. Before he knew it, he was performing slight of
hand under the stage-name 'The Crippled Devil.' His best trick was
transmuting gold florins into lead washers. When his marks would shake
him down for their money they would find nothing; the coins having
slid into his hollow prosthesis. He went on to sire a six generation
line of magicians ending with one who went by the name Fu Manchu. For
a short while everyone lost the ability to distinguish reality from
fiction. At least in Latin America, where the executors of the Sax
Rohmer estate couldn't claim copyright. Fu Manchu starred in six
Mexican movies and died there in 1974.
Postscript: In 1980, American physicist of Swedish descent Glenn
Seaborg successfully transmuted lead into gold using the atom-smasher
at the Berkeley National Lab. The cost of the process far exceeded the
value of the several thousand atoms of gold produced.
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