As far back as he could remember, Bernard Trevisan had thought and dreamed of nothing else. The quest of the Golden Grail obsessed him. If you divulge this work, the world will be corrupted, for gold would then be made as easily as glass is made for the bazaars. If you do not heed this advice you will repent when repentance is too late. Secretly had the old man worked at first, for had not the Arabian master of alchemy, Geber himself, admonished his disciples: For heaven’s sake do not let the facility of making gold lead you to divulge this proceeding or to show it to any of those around you, to your wife, or your cherished child, and still less to any other person. Again the breath-taking suspense, again-Failure!-their stone will not turn a single one of the base metals into the elusive gold. With these potent universal solvents the two alchemists hope to fashion the philosopher’s stone. For eight long years the strange products are distilled and redistilled for the extraction of a mysterious white liquid and a red oil. These he heats in a gentle flame until they are white as snow, while his co-laborer separates the whites from the yolks and putrifies them all in the manure of white horses.

Carefully he removes the shells and gathers them into a great heap. IN THE dark interior of an old laboratory cluttered with furnaces, crucibles, alembics, stills and bellows, bends an old man in the act of hardening two thousand hens’ eggs in huge pots of boiling water. The American Chemical Society's History of Chemistry Division honored him in 1973 with its Dexter Award for 'distinguished achievement in the history of chemistry.' Jaffe received the Francis Bacon Award for the Humanizing of Knowledge. Upon the original publication of this book, Mr. A final chapter discusses some of the consequences of nuclear fission, the discovery of nuclear fusion, and the recent work with subatomic particles.īernard Jaffe is the author of many other science books and several science textbooks. Probably the most dramatic chapter in the book, the account of the development of nuclear fission, ends the story of chemistry at its most monumental achievement. After many printings in three previous editions, this book has been newly revised by the author for this fourth edition.īeginning with Trevisan and his lifelong search for the 'philosopher's stone,' the author narrates the lives and discoveries of such towering figures as Paracelsus and his chemical treatment of disease Priestley looking for phlogiston and finding oxygen and carbon dioxide, Lavoisier creating a new language of chemistry Dalton and his Atomic Theory Avogadro and the idea of molecules, Mendeleeff arranging the table of elements under his Periodic Law the Curies isolating radium Thomson discovering the electron Moseley and his Law of Atomic Numbers Lawrence and the construction of the cyclotron and more. Through these dramatic and human stories, it gives an authoritative and entertaining account of the great discoveries and advances in this scientific field. Standard reading since the 1930s, it is one of the few historeis of chemistry to concentrate on the lives of the great chemists. This book is a classic in the field of popular science.

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