Author: Matt Blitz / Source: Today I Found Out
While it’s likely others had tried it before, the first surviving documented attempt of someone trying to turn something to gold in a (relatively) scientific fashion occurred around 300 AD. The proto-scientist in question was a Greco-Egyptian named Zosimos.
During his lifetime, it’s thought that he wrote nearly thirty books about alchemy, but most of them have been lost to history. What we do know is that in his work he focused mainly on the use of vapors, specifically sulfur vapors which do cause some things to turn yellow. For example, he found that when mixed with liquid mercury, the resulting substance becomes a yellow solid, but it wasn’t gold.From there for nearly two thousand years famed scientists like Isaac Newton, Roger Bacon, Robert Boyle, and Jabir ibn Hayyan all tried their hand at making gold. All failed, but did give the world numerous other advancements as a result of their work. As science historian Lawrence Principe noted in 2014, they “were amazingly good experimentalists.”
This brings us to more modern times and one of the most distinguished scientists of the 20th century you’ve probably never heard of- Glenn T. Seaborg.
Seaborg was far from being a no-name chemist with a crazy vision of turning lead into gold when he decided to make the attempt in 1980. For example, in 1941, he led the team that first discovered/produced/isolated the element plutonium. This led to the United States pursuing a program to make plutonium for use in their atomic bomb project, which later morphed into the top-secret Manhattan Project which Seaborg also worked on. (Although, along with many other scientists who worked…
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