ALCHEMY

“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 2000 hens’ eggs in huge pots of boiling water. Carefully he removes the shells and gathers them into a great heap. These he heats in a gentle flame until they are as white as snow, while his co-labourer separates the whites from yolk and putrefies them all in the manure of white horses. For eight long years the strange products are distilled and redistilled for the extraction of a mysterious whiteliquid and a red oil. With tese potent universal solvents the two alchemists hope to fashion the ‘Philosopher’s stone’. At last the day of final testing comes. Again the breathtaking suspense and again-failure! Their stone will not turn a single one of the base metals into the elusive gold”
----Bernard Jaffe in Crucibles: the Story of Chemistry

That ALCHEMIST was Bernard Trevesian. He wasted all of his considerable fortune on the useless search for the philosopher's stone to turn base metal into gold. For, had not the ancient masters written that gold was the purest form ,next was silver, then copper and finally iron? So, by purification it should be possible to turn iron into copper to silver and finally gold.But with his dying breath Trevesian revealed the truth that the masters had not thought fit to deliver--TO GET GOLD YOU HAVE TO START WITH GOLD.This mad pursuit for filthy lucre did indeed have a silver lining, or should we say golden lining? It paved the way for the most interesting and invaluable branch of science--CHEMISTRY.