The End of Alchemy? The Repudiation and Persistence of Chrysopoeia at the Académie Royale des Sciences in the Eighteenth Century (2014)
Principe, Lawrence M. (Author)
Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 29, no. 1
Issue: 1
Pages: 96-116
Edition Details: Title of volume: “Chemical Knowledge in the Early Modern World”
Language: English
The general abandonment of serious endeavor toward metallic transmutation represents a major development in the history of chemistry, yet its exact causes and timing remain unclear. This essay examines the fate of chrysopoeia at the eighteenth-century Académie Royale des Sciences. It reveals a long-standing tension between Académie chemists, who pursued transmutation, and administrators, who tried to suppress it. This tension provides background for Etienne-François Geoffroy's 1722 paper describing fraudulent practices around transmutation. Although transmutation seems to disappear after Geoffroy's paper, manuscripts reveal that most of the institution's chemists continued to pursue it privately until at least the 1760s, long after widely accepted dates for the “demise of alchemy” in learned circles.
...MoreArticle Eddy, Matthew Daniel; Mauskopf, Seymour H.; Newman, William R. (2014) An Introduction to Chemical Knowledge in the Early Modern World. Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 1-15).
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