The first known person to discover an element relied on pee and actually was looking for the Philosopher’s Stone. Henning Brand used up the financial resources of three people – himself, his first wife, and his second wife – in the focused pursuit of finding a way to turn base metals into gold. Alchemy favored transformations of one substance into another, and the human body does this marvelously when it spouts forth golden urine. And so, Hennig collected many many gallons (estimated about 1500) of pee, and boiled and distilled it . . . Eventually (in 1669 CE) he got a shining white liquid that burst into flames when it contacted with oxygen. Henning called his substance “phosphorus” which in Greek meant “light bearer,” and was the term for the planet Venus. Phosphorous is the sixth most common element in the human body. We can laugh in retrospect at the fallacies inherent in Hennig’s experiments, but in an age before it was possible to distinguish atoms from molecules, chemistry advanced in slow lurches, almost in spite of itself.
Source(s): Painting is “The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus” 1771, by Joseph Wright.
