Shards obtained from the alchemist’s laboratory 16Thursday The century-old scientific pioneer Tycho Brahe has traces of unexpected elements that were not really discovered for almost another two centuries. These and other rudimentary clues may provide some insight into what Brahe was doing in his basement laboratory, although many questions may never be answered.
In an era when science was largely the domain of a tiny few people lucky enough to devote themselves to study, the boundaries between different disciplines meant less than they do today. Tycho Brahe is remembered today as the greatest observational astronomer before the invention of the telescope. The unprecedented precision he achieved in measuring planetary positions proved essential to Johannes Kepler’s explanation of planetary motion; which in turn laid the foundation for Newton and missions to other planets. One of the most prominent craters on the Moon is named in his honor for this reason.
Brahe was also interested in alchemy. Unlike the more famous alchemists, he did not believe it was possible to turn base metals into gold, instead trying to use them to cure diseases such as plague and syphilis. Mercury, for all its devastating side effects, was the only treatment available for syphilis before penicillin that ever worked. Brahe’s plague cure was used by his patron, Emperor Rudolph II.
Alchemists striving to produce gold were notoriously secretive about their methods – they knew that the value of their products would collapse if everyone else could make them too. Some of this may have rubbed off on Brahe, but secrecy came naturally to him, nearly derailing his scientific legacy by making Kepler beg for fragments of his astronomical observations.
Not surprisingly, we know little about Brahe’s drugs. Among other things, the recipes survive using theriaque, a popular medicine of the time, which contained up to 60 ingredients, to which Brahe added even more after elaborate processing.
Excavations in 1988-90 at Uraniborg, Brahe’s home, may change that by revealing pottery and glass shards. The palace was destroyed by royal decree after Brahe’s death in 1601, but he published detailed plans and these fragments are believed to come from the basement where he attempted alchemy in front of prying eyes.
Uraniborg Brahe’s palace was both a luxurious home and the world’s most advanced astronomical observatory with an alchemical laboratory in the basement.
Four glass and one ceramic sherd were subjected to chemical analysis. All but one of the glass shards show enrichment in nickel, copper, zinc, tin, antimony, tungsten, gold, mercury, and lead relative to background levels, indicating that each was used in the experiments. Four of these metals are part of Brahe’s surviving recipes, and the others were of interest to alchemists of the time.
“But tungsten is very mysterious,” Professor Kaare Lund Rasmussen of the University of Southern Denmark said in a statement. “
It took another 180 years for fellow Scandinavian Carl Wilhelm Scheele to describe the properties of pure tungsten. Either the traces happened to be in the minerals Brahe used and were caught on the shards, or Brahe was way ahead of his time.
The second idea, while exciting, is unprovable. It would also be considered unlikely by most experimenters. However, given what we know of Brahe’s astronomical talents, it would not be entirely unexpected if he was also a chemist of rare skill.
Moreover, tungsten was not completely unknown before Scheel. Decades before Brah, the German mineralogist Georgius Agricola reported that tin ores from Saxony contained a mysterious additive he named Wolfram that made them difficult to smelt. This name, which means Wolf’s Foam in German, is why tungsten has the chemical symbol W today, to the chagrin of generations of school students and the delight of quiz masters.
“Maybe Tycho Brahe heard about it and therefore knew about the existence of tungsten. But that’s not something we know or can say based on the analyzes I’ve done. It’s only a possible theoretical explanation for why we find tungsten in the samples,” said Lund Rasmussen .
If Brahe was aware of tungsten, we do not know, and probably never will, whether he came any closer to purification than his predecessors. If so, the publication of his work may have represented a major advance for chemistry and shortened the long wait that ensued instead. Due to the usefulness of tungsten, for example in making harder steel (and pseudo-lightsabers), this may have led to many practical applications that occurred centuries earlier.
For Brahe, alchemy and astronomy were not as different as we think. In 1588 he wrote a letter in which he argued that there were associations between each moving celestial body and the corresponding metal and organ. For example, he associated the Moon, silver and the brain, while he thought that Venus was associated with copper and the kidneys.
Rasmussen had previously analyzed samples of Tycho’s own hair, suggesting that he may have consumed his own medicines containing gold, which he associated with the heart and the Sun.
Blurring the image further, the elements present on the shards may not be the result of Brahe’s own work. His sister and brother-in-law were also keen alchemists and frequented Uraniborg. Since Brahe’s laboratory is possibly the best in Europe, they may have borrowed it for their own work.
The study is open access in Heritage Science.