How to turn lead into gold

How to turn lead into gold was the legendary question that plagued the alchemists of old. Their answer to this question was the belief in the existence of the fabled philosopher’s stone, a substance with the extraordinary ability to turn any common metal into gold (as well as offering eternal life and immortality because why not). Sadly, they never succeeded in their goal… but we have, and we didn’t even need the stone.

 

Alchemy

Alchemists were like the chemists, physicists and physicians of their day, their day being a really long time incidentally- possibly as early as 3500 BC and extending right up until the 19th century. But the most famous time of alchemy, where we in the west get most of our ideas of what alchemists did, was probably from the Renaissance period around the 14th century through to the eventual collapse of alchemy in the 18th century.

Their central beliefs combined religion and spirituality with magic and mythology to form an early ‘science’ that used laboratory techniques and experimental methods to create new chemicals, compounds and medicines as well as seeking spiritual enlightenment.

Although many people dismissed them as charlatans practising pseudoscience you can’t deny that they were really ambitious in their goals. These goals came from all fields of science and included, but were not limited to, transmuting common metals into gold, the creation of the elixir of immortality, the creation of a panacea able to cure all disease, the creation of a universal solvent (a liquid that anything can dissolve in, even gold) and achieving human spiritual perfection. Quite the shopping list. But as not to be too overwhelming for aspiring alchemists, the discovery of the philosopher’s stone was key to all of these things.

Above all though, they really had a special love of gold and its perceived perfection. As I wrote in my post on the black death, during the time of the plague alchemists even suggested swallowing gold as a cure. The idea being that the perfection of gold would counteract the corruption of the plague. It didn’t work sadly and they didn’t have their panacea yet so they couldn’t offer that either. Although, one of their ideas for their universal solvent would be to dissolve gold in it for its great medicinal properties, a possible panacea. Sadly they didn’t have that either. The point is though, they really liked gold.

 

Lead into gold

Now, with their love of gold, one of the central goals of alchemy was to get more of it. To that end they worked on transmuting common metals into gold, lead being the main metal they were interested in. Why lead you may ask? Well, you’ll have to try and stay with me for this explanation.

The Islamic philosopher Jabir ibn Hayyan was the guy who really started this belief way back in the 8th century. You see, he thought that every element was made up of four qualities; hotness, coldness, dryness and moistness. He went on to say that two of these qualities were external which is how they appear to us but that the other two qualities were internal and invisible to us.

Gold, he said, is externally hot and moist whereas lead is externally cold and dry. That meant that lead was internally hot and moist like gold. Therefore, if we could rearrange those qualities we could turn lead into gold. Of course, this reaction would require a catalyst and this catalyst was the philosopher’s stone. Take a minute for that to sink in.

The idea of transmuting lead into gold persisted for over a millenium until alchemy finally lost respect in favour of real chemistry in the 18th century. To add insult to injury, the new chemists were so serious in their intent to divorce chemistry from alchemy that they wrote so much against it that alchemy was demoted to the branch of science solely devoted to transmuting lead into gold.

 

The legacy of alchemy

The separation of alchemy from chemistry is really what gave rise to the modern belief that alchemists were all pseudoscientists. It reduced them to scientific frauds brought together in the ridiculous belief that they could magically change common metals into gold and the misguided quest for the mythical philosopher’s stone.

The fact is that alchemists, despite their many incorrect beliefs, were scientists and helped develop many techniques, medicines and pigments that we’ve either improved upon or still use outright today. Many of them were very good experimentalists with skills that wouldn’t be out of place in a laboratory today.

Indeed, one of the founders of modern chemistry and pioneers of the scientific method, Robert Boyle, was an alchemist, as was Isaac Newton who revolutionised physics with his ideas of gravitational force.

It’s easy to criticise the ideas of the past with our modern knowledge but we must never forget that something had to come first to get us to where we are now. So it was then and so it will be the case for scientists in the future who will no doubt criticise our own outdated techniques.

This is especially true when it turns out that they may not have been completely wrong after all…

 

Lead into gold – a modern approach

Where alchemists went wrong is that they didn’t know that lead and gold are two completely different elements, not compounds that can be changed. Thankfully, nowadays we have the periodic table which tells us that they are two different elements and you can see it below.

Now, you don’t need to understand the periodic table in any real detail and I’ve highlighted the only elements that we care about; Gold (Au) and Lead (Pb). But it’s nice to see the whole picture to appreciate that they’re close together in the table which tells us that they’re not very chemically dissimilar. They are, after all, both metals.

We do need to understand a small amount of chemistry to continue on so bear with me here. So, aside from the name, the only thing you need to know is that number in the upper left hand corner of the element; Gold is number 79 and Lead is number 82. That number is the number of protons in one atom of the element. The amount of protons an element has gives it all of its properties. If you’re holding a block of lead and a block of gold the only thing that makes them different, that gives them all the differences you can see and feel, is that lead has 82 protons and gold has 79. Pretty crazy.

One atom of gold will only ever have 79 protons, never more, never less. You can’t have gold with 20 protons any more than you can have gold with 100 protons. If someone gives you an unknown element and they tell you it has 79 protons, it’s gold. If you’re wearing a gold ring or necklace now, the gold in it has 79 protons just like every atom of gold in the entire world. The same is true of lead, lead has the number 82 in the upper left hand corner so one atom of lead always has 82 protons.

Good job, the chemistry lesson is over.

 

You can see then that lead has three more protons than gold. The question you might ask yourself then is whether removing protons from lead would give you gold. If you could take lead and selectively remove three protons from it, would you have gold? After all, I just told you that any element with 79 protons must be gold. Well, I have good news, that’s exactly what would happen. If you selectively removed three protons from lead you would indeed get gold.

Even better, we can do it. The kicker is it’s really damn hard, not to mention expensive. Oh, and you’ll need a particle accelerator.

 

Smashing lead into gold

A particle accelerator is a pretty cool piece of technology. You might already know that the largest particle accelerator we have, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) in Switzerland and despite the uproar caused when it first opened it didn’t immediately create a black hole when it was first switched on in 2010 and destroy the world.

Now, there are a whole host of things we can do with a particle accelerator but to keep it simple and relevant I’ll just tell you how we can use one to remove protons from lead.

The LHC is essentially a long circular tunnel surrounded by extremely powerful electromagnets. Into this tunnel we can introduce a stream of single protons which are then accelerated around and around the circular tunnel by the electromagnets (like in the .gif to the right). Eventually the protons reach almost the speed of light and when the protons have this much energy they can smash into other atoms smashing more protons off of them. This is our relevant point.

So in our example, the stream of protons is like the proverbial bull in the china shop full of lead atoms, smashing them indiscriminately. Unfortunately, we can’t exactly smash off the three protons we need to get gold, our bull is not particularly accurate, but if we smash enough lead the law of averages suggests that we’re bound to get some lead that only had three protons smashed off. And as we already said, lead that had 82 protons and lost three protons will have become gold which has 79 protons. If you could pull this off you’d be the envy of over a thousand years of alchemists.

 

If we can do it, why don’t we?

As of the time of writing we haven’t produced gold from lead in this way although it is definitely possible. We did, however, produce gold from bismuth back in the 80’s. Bismuth is the element next to lead and has 83 protons, just one more than lead. Therefore it needed to lose four protons to become gold.

The problem was, that although we produced gold it was in such small quantities as to be almost undetectable by modern methods. Particle accelerators, by definition, work with small quantities of things. Not just small, but minute quantities of things. After all, we use them to investigate things the size of atoms.

This is only one hurdle of course, producing small quantities of things wouldn’t be such a big deal on is own. Unfortunately, it’s also prohibitively expensive.

When the bismuth experiment was done in the 80’s, it cost approximately $5000 per hour to use the particle accelerator and they used it for about a day to get the results they did. Scaling up their results to produce an ounce (~28 g) of gold would have cost in the region of $1 quadrillion.

The price of an ounce of gold at the time was $560.

The Black Death and social upheaval

The Black Death  (1346-53) was one of the worst pandemics in human history. It resulted in the deaths of an estimated 75-200 million people in Europe which at the time represented 30-60% of Europe’s entire population. To put that in perspective, the world population at the time was only around 450 million. Epidemics and pandemics are not uncommon throughout history but what’s significant about the Black Death is that the consequences of it are still felt today.

 

The cause of the Black Death

Rats actually get a bad reputation for spreading the plague that caused the Black Death, the real culprit is the flea.

Plague is caused by a bacteria called Yersinia pestis which gets into fleas when they feed on the blood of an animal already suffering from plague. When the flea unknowingly ingests the plague bacteria it causes a blockage in the ‘throat’ of the flea which prevents the flea from feeding. In a rather disgusting biological mechanism, the hungry flea desperately tries to feed on an animal which dislodges the blockage of bacteria and the flea literally pukes this bacteria back into the animal it’s feeding on. Delightful.

Some rats, however, are what’s called a reservoir for plague bacteria. This means they can be infected by plague bacteria but suffer no consequences. Unfortunately for us this means that the flea simply has to feed on an infected rat and it will transfer the plague bacteria to the next thing it feeds on. In the case of the Black Death, it is believed that the next thing the flea fed on was another type of rat that had no resistance to the plague. Fleas, you see, are normally specific to one type of animal and rat fleas will tend to only feed on rats. The problem occurred when the newly infected rats started dying of plague because suddenly there were a lot of fleas around with nothing to eat. When there were no rats left, humans started looking pretty appetising…

 

Human infection

Once an infected flea bites someone the plague bacteria travels to the lymph nodes which, in humans, are in the groin, armpits and neck. The bacteria causes a swelling of the lymph nodes which then turn black due to an accumulation of dead blood and pus and without treatment the swellings will start travelling all over the body. If the swellings are left alone the victim will die from the build up of dead blood but if the swellings are popped the victim may die from toxic shock. Add to this a fever and vomiting blood and it’s no surprise that as much as 80% of all victims died within 4 days of showing symptoms. Nowadays, with antibiotics, the likelihood of death is only around 15%.

So how did the Black Death actually end? Well, one important reason why is that plague doesn’t spread very easily from human to human. Unless, of course, you go around poking the infected – the blood contained in the swellings were full of bacteria. But luckily the plague bacteria doesn’t exist in large amounts elsewhere in human blood so human fleas rarely consumed enough bacteria to pass it onto someone else. That meant that once enough infected rats and humans had died, the rat fleas quickly died out too due to starvation. It also helped that by that time people had learned to stay away from those already infected.

The population of reservoir rats didn’t change though which meant that plague was still around and further outbreaks did happen throughout the following centuries. There was no further outbreak in Europe however that matched the devastation of the Black Death.

 

Arrival and spread

So where did it come from? Well, plague is actually quite common among many rodents in Asia and there is strong evidence to suggest that there had been plague outbreaks in China occurring around 15 years before it arrived in Europe. Then, thanks to the burgeoning trade routes of the silk road, it was easy for rats harbouring plague bacteria to stow away on transport vessels of Mongol traders.

A more macabre story of the arrival of plague in Europe however was during the Mongol siege of the trading city of Caffa in the Crimea in 1347. The siege had already been quite drawn-out and the Mongol army were suffering from the plague. So, in one of the first recorded examples of biological warfare, the Mongols catapulted infected corpses over the walls of Caffa. Traders from the city fled in fear of the plague, unknowingly carrying it with them to the port of Sicily in the south of Italy. From there it spread north through Europe by trade and also by people trying to run away from the infected regions thereby carrying it with them. The rest, as they say, is history.

Importantly, however, not everyone was slow to realise how fast the plague was spreading. For the first of our consequences of the Black Death that we still feel today, the port of Dubrovnik in Croatia made ships and people wait 40 days before entering to be sure that they wouldn’t bring plague into the city. They called this period of time quaranta giorni which simply means forty days in the Venetian dialect of Italian. This phrase gave us the English word quarantine.

 

Medicine in times of plague

It would be an understatement to say that doctors at the time were not prepared for the plague.

You see, medicine in the middle ages was strongly influenced by alchemy which was a belief system that combined religion and spirituality with magic and mythology. You might be familiar with alchemists as those guys who tried to turn lead into gold and you’d be right. Alchemists believed that everything had a perfect form and the perfect form for metals was gold because gold was believed to be the most perfect form any metal could take. Perfection didn’t just apply to metals though, it applied to all things, even people. Alchemists believed that if a person became pure enough through spiritual means they could achieve longevity, immortality and then redemption.

This translates into medicine because herbs or minerals would be blended to change them into a better form, one that could fight disease. It was all about harnessing the hidden powers of normal objects. It may sound silly now but sometimes they hit upon something worthwhile which gave the theory some credit. St. Johns wort for example is a herb that’s been used for centuries for its anti-inflammatory properties. Alchemists would have made a preparation of St. John’s wort and say they had unlocked its hidden power but we know now that it’s due to the large amounts of the compound hyperforin, a potent anti-inflammatory compound, found in the plant.

So how effective was alchemy against the plague? Simply, it wasn’t. One suggested treatment was to swallow gold as they believed the perfection of gold would counteract the corruption of plague. It didn’t work. Another remedy they used was distilled spirit which just means strong alcohol. That didn’t work either. Although, if I knew I was going to die in a matter of days then I can’t imagine I would turn down a little distilled spirit. Consequently, the demand for distilled spirit rose considerably after the plague.

Many of the doctors of the time realised that their remedies were doing nothing and rather than contract plague themselves, promptly fled – they may not have known about modern medicine but they were not stupid.

 

The plague doctor

The lack of real doctors gave rise to a group of mostly volunteers who produced one of the most iconic images of the time, the plague doctor.

The job of the plague doctor was to verify whether people had been infected or not and record deaths in the public record. They also attempted to treat people, typically with alchemical preparations and blood letting. They had power and respect beyond many other public servants and were paid extremely well.

The costume of the plague doctor really highlighted the medical beliefs of the time. Keep in mind that in the middle ages they had no idea how diseases came about and spread. They didn’t know about bacteria and germs or the importance of cleanliness and hygiene. The dominant theory of the cause of disease was the miasma theory whereby disease came from ‘bad air’. In this theory, a bad area of air would contain poisonous materials that caused disease and could be located by its terrible smell. It was believed that people (or animals) couldn’t pass disease to each other, rather people in the same area got infected because they were in the same area of bad air. This theory is really well exemplified by the disease malaria which is spread by mosquitos living typically around smelly swampland. Malaria in medieval Italian literally means mala aria – bad air.

For this reason, the iconic beak-like mask of the plague doctor would be filled with nice smelling herbs and spices that would overpower the ‘bad air’. The long coat and hat were then worn to further prevent the body from coming into contact with the bad air. And although this did protect the wearer from the real danger, flea bites, it is very likely that the plague doctor helped carry fleas around from infected areas to non-infected areas on the clothing unknowingly spreading the disease even more…

So how does this affect us today? Well, once it became clear that the medicine of the time was completely ineffective against the plague people began to think that maybe they were wrong about the causes of disease and how to treat it. This started a period where doctors looked more at the human body in sickness and in health to study the process of disease. Surgery became an important part of medicine as more doctors stopped thinking of medicine as a spiritual or magical treatment and more as something that needs direct involvement. The truth is that we may have the Black Death to thank for the advances made in medicine that lead to our current level of understanding of disease prevention and cure.

 

Social change

You might expect medicine to undergo changes following such a pandemic but the loss of 30-60% of the population of a continent also effected serious social change.

 

The end of feudalism

Following the end of the Black Death there were not that many people around. England, for example, lost 70% of its population which left them with just 2 million people in 1400. Between 1350-1500 more than 1300 villages were just deserted.

At this time they were deep into feudalism which, broadly speaking, meant that all the land was owned by lords who employed peasants to work the land. There was almost no social mobility, you were born a lord or a peasant and you accepted your role in life. After the Black Death though, there was the same amount of land but a whole lot less people to work it. What this meant for the peasants was that the lords needed them.

Now think about this from the peasants perspective, any peasant who survived the Black Death in England witnessed many of their friends and family die. They now believe that they are special, saved by God, they believe they have a greater purpose. At the same time they have the freedom to move anywhere they want in the country because the lords everywhere need peasants to work the land. And because peasants are so scarce the lords have no choice but to entice the peasants with higher wages and better working conditions. For some, they can even buy their own land.

The price of land fell dramatically because it was desperately needed to grow crops and raise livestock. This lead to a new class of peasants, yeomen, who were farmers that owned the land they worked on – often up to 100 acres. The immediate effect of this was a weakening of the lordship as some minor lords were almost indistinguishable from wealthy yeomen.

Of course, all this had to end eventually. The government of England passed laws to restrict peasant earnings to their pre-Black Death values and to force peasants to stay on the land they had served before. Furthermore, they had to work church lands for free. Admittedly, both peasants and lords broke these laws but contempt for the government over the laws and new taxes ultimately resulted in the peasant revolt of 1381.

And this wasn’t just in England, similar laws and exploitation of the peasants fueled revolts all over Europe. The Jacquerie was a peasant revolt in northern France in 1358 and the revolt of the Ciompi occured in Florence in 1378. Feudalism never recovered.

 

Improving efficiency

With less farmers around, maintaining previous levels of crop production was impossible. Grain farming in particular was incredibly hard work and so it is no surprise that people turned to other methods of farming. One of the more popular changes was an increase in animal husbandry which is the rearing of animals by, usually, a single shepherd on grassland. The selective breeding of animals since then for more meat, more milk and more eggs has lead to the farm animals we have today.

It wasn’t just peasant jobs that were made more efficient, previously a scribe had to painstakingly copy manuscripts and books by hand for wider circulation. Experiments with improving this job after the Black Death eventually lead to the development of Gutenberg’s printing press. Gutenberg finished development of his first press in Germany in 1450, just under a century after the Black Death.

 

Opportunities for women

It was the job of the parish priest to give the final sacraments to those dying of plague. The problem with this was that many priests then caught the plague which resulted in a shortage of priests. Fortunately, the churches often had many laywomen who voluntarily gave their time to the church. It was these women who took over many of the roles that the priests had fulfilled.

Inheritance law was also changed in the wake of the huge death toll. Previously, property and land was inherited by the eldest son but after the Black Death property could be inherited by sons and daughters equally.

 

English language

In 1066 England was conquered by William the Conqueror who came from Normandy in France. Naturally, he didn’t speak Old English like the natives, he spoke Anglo-Norman. Since then Anglo-Norman was used as the spoken language of the courts where it became known as Law French. Incidentally, court documents were written in Latin.

After the Black Death the amount of French Law speakers (mostly educated clerks) was drastically reduced which caused problems for the courts. Furthermore, the peasants and yeomen were gaining power and more laws were being passed that affected them. The problem was that peasants didn’t speak Law French, in fact many lords didn’t speak Law French either, so they complained that they didn’t understand what was being said for them or against them in court. This lead to the Pleading in English Act 1362 which stated that all pleas in courts must be in the common tongue of the land – English. This act practically designated English as the official language of England. The Black Death is directly responsible for the popularisation of the English language.

 

Conclusion

As a final word, I don’t want to give the impression that the Black Death was the cause of all this change, it was always a catalyst. All the things I’ve talked about here – medical changes, peasant revolts, the rise of the yeomen and the growth of the English language – had all been developing throughout the century. What the Black Death did was pull the trigger on social change that had been rising in the chamber for a long time.

And let us not forget that the people living in the time of the Black Death experienced the closest thing to a true apocalypse that any of us will ever know. Let us hope that we never have to witness something the same again.