Artifacts from the ruins of a medieval laboratory are spilling a well-known scientist’s secrets and techniques.
A chemical evaluation of damaged glassware belonging to sixteenth century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe revealed elevated ranges of 9 metals, researchers report July 25 in Heritage Science. The discovering provides tantalizing clues to his work in alchemy, a precursor to fashionable chemistry.
The astronomer is probably finest recognized for making the primary observations of supernovas and being among the many first scientists to suggest that Earth orbits the solar (SN: 12/18/99). However he additionally dabbled in alchemy. As an alternative of making an attempt to make gold from much less invaluable components, he developed elixirs just like the medicamenta tria — a trio of medicines that contained herbs and metals.
Brahe stored his recipes secret, although, says chemist Kaare Lund Rasmussen of the College of Southern Denmark in Odense. What’s recognized concerning the medicamenta tria is predicated on secondhand accounts.
Rasmussen analyzed the chemical composition of the sides of 1 ceramic fragment and 4 glass shards excavated from Brahe’s lab on the Swedish island of Ven. The chemist detected excessive ranges of mercury, copper, antimony and gold — 4 metals recognized to have been used within the medicamenta tria.
Nobody fragment contained all 4 components. A few of these metals have been discovered on simply the outside or inside sides, whereas others coated each side. The vessels may have picked up the outside metals from unintended splashes, or they could have been positioned inside a bigger vessel containing these components, say Rasmussen and coauthor Poul Grinder-Hansen, a historian on the Nationwide Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.
The remaining 5 metals — nickel, zinc, tin, lead and tungsten — aren’t listed in any of Brahe’s preserved recipes. As a result of all 5 of them have been discovered on the ceramic shard, together with copper and mercury, he could have used the ceramic vessel to gather waste, the researchers suggest. Tin, lead, nickel and zinc have been generally used within the Renaissance world, Rasmussen says. “Essentially the most peculiar one was tungsten.”
Tungsten was first purposefully remoted in 1783, almost 200 years after Brahe’s demise. The steel’s presence on the shard could possibly be coincidental, Rasmussen says. Brahe could have separated tungsten from one other materials with out realizing it.
However there’s a tiny likelihood that the isolation was intentional. Within the first half of the sixteenth century, German mineralogist Georgius Agricola reported that the presence of a sure substance (later recognized as tungsten) made smelting tin ore tough. Maybe Brahe was investigating, Rasmussen speculates.
The examine is “actually intriguing,” says Laure Dussubieux, a chemist on the Subject Museum of Pure Historical past in Chicago. Analysis on ceramic vessels is widespread as a result of they have been usually used as cookware, she says. “A lot much less work has been finished to grasp what sort of inorganic issues might need been ‘cooking.’”
