Alchemy.

Alchemy.

The alchemy was a technical ancient practised in the middle ages which principal aims were to discover a substance that would transmute the ordinary metals into gold and silver, and to finding means to prolong the human life indefinitely. Without place to any doubt, the alchemy has been the mother of the current Chemistry and those mysterious alchemists, fleeing of the religious rules and of the Inquisition they laid the foundations to what it was later the modern scientific development.

Born in the ancient Egypt, the Alchemy started blooming in Alexandria, in the period Hellenistic. More or less in the same period, a school of alchemy developed in China. Already in the writings of some Greek philosophers the first chemical theories are anticipated. One thinks that the Roman emperor Calígula supported experiments to produce gold. The base of the alchemy departs from the doctrine Aristotle that postulates that " all the things tend to reach the perfection ". On having considered to other imperfect metals with regard to the gold, it was supposed that the nature would turn them finally into gold.

The Arabic alchemists worked with gold and mercury, arsenic, sulphur, salts and acids, and they familiarized themselves with a wide range of what nowadays we are called chemical reagents. His scientific belief was the potential of transmutation, and his methods - principally attempts to you block up - led them to finding a lot of new substances and to invent many useful processes.

The alchemy, since it happened with the rest of the Arabic science, transmitted to Europe across Spain, thanks to the extraordinary bloom that the sciences and the arts experimented on Al-Andalus during the middle ages. The first existing works of the European alchemy are those of the monk Englishman Roger Bacon and the German philosopher Alberto Magno; both were believing in the possibility of transmuting low metals into gold.

Roger Bacon believed that the gold dissolved in royal water was the elixir of the life. Alberto Magno was dominating the chemical practice of his time. In the 15th century, the scholastic philosopher Italian holy Tomás de Aquino, the Majorcan polygraph Ramon Llull and the Benedictine monk Basil Valentine also contributed very much, for the route of the alchemy, to the progress of the chemistry, with his discoveries of the uses of the antimony, the manufacture of amalgams and the isolation of the spirit of the wine, or ethyl alcohol.

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