KC

Kit Chapman

Things Kit Says on Podcasts

“He thinks that light is an element. He thinks calories are elements. He thinks that certain acids cannot be simplified as well. But it is a start. It is the first time that someone is trying to put together a list of elements.” — Kit Chapman, Science History Podcast “Fire is still studied to this day. I've talked to a fire scientist who said that if you go into the center of something as simple as a candle flame, even if it was just burning methane, which is as simple as we can get, it's possible to have up to 150 different compounds and molecules forming. And we don't know at any one point which one is going to be created.” — Kit Chapman, Science History Podcast “He had bankrupted two wives with his belief, which was that he could turn his own urine into gold. He was obsessed with his own urine. … He collects 1500 gallons of urine in his basement and allows it to ferment, which must have reeked the place out.” — Kit Chapman, Science History Podcast “What fascinates me as well is that so often we almost came to a technology and then we abandoned it. One of the great examples is there is a steam engine that was created in Alexandria. Just a toy. It was a novelty. If someone had realized that you could actually use that, we would have had the Industrial Revolution 2,000 years earlier.” — Kit Chapman, Science History Podcast “Alchemy becomes the first printing sensation. Now, who are you going to get to write your alchemy books? Are you going to get a boring, stuffy doctor that no one's going to read? Or are you going to get the showman who's got the razzle dazzle? It's exactly the same today why celebrity biographies sell like hot cakes when really high quality highbrow literature does maybe not as well.” — Kit Chapman, Science History Podcast “Chemistry is class warfare. It begins with people just trying to start a fire with perfumers, slaves, with artisans in Egypt. It then moves into the middle classes with doctors, with physicians, with apothecaries, with people like Paracelsus. And now it has moved into the nobility. And it's only with the nobility that we can then start filtering it through all of the population.” — Kit Chapman, Science History Podcast

Where to Find Them

Kit Chapman writes The Curiosity Newsletter and writes Zubair’s Bookshelf . They have also been a guest on New Books in Science and Science History Podcast .

Recently: “Episode 108. Alchemy: Kit Chapman” on Science History Podcast (November 2026); “Kit Chapman, "The Age of Alchemy: How Early Innovators Shaped Modern Chemistry" (Profile Books, 2026)” on New Books in Science (July 2026); “The 1,700-Year-Old Con That Built Modern Science” on The Curiosity Newsletter (May 2026); “The Age of Alchemy: The Secret History of Chemistry from Ancient Magic to Modern Science” on Zubair’s Bookshelf (May 2026).

What They Said

“He thinks that light is an element. He thinks calories are elements. He thinks that certain acids cannot be simplified as well. But it is a start. It is the first time that someone is trying to put together a list of elements.” — Kit Chapman, Science History Podcast

Kit Chapman on Lavoisier's first list of chemical elements. The very first attempt at what became the periodic table was mostly wrong, and still a turning point.

Science History Podcast · 2026-11-11 Permalink → Listen →
Science History Podcast Around 48:14 into the episode
Kit Chapman

He was one of. He was part of a, so that was invented by a committee during the French Revolution. He was on the committee.

Frank Arthur von Hippel

Okay. So the only case in history of a committee doing something, something, well, I guess. And then, and as you said, he's the first person that you might say was indisputably a chemist. What would you say gives him that distinction of being maybe our first modern chemist?

Kit Chapman

…dispute is that he comes up with his list of elements. So he takes a list of things. What can I not simplify any further? So water, I can break water into hydrogen and oxygen. I can simplify it. But I can't simplify hydrogen and oxygen. And this is a very, very short list of what he thinks are the basic elements of the universe. Now, it's important to recognize he does not get the list right. He thinks that light is an element. He thinks calories are elements. He thinks that certain acids cannot be simplified as well. But it is a start. It is the first time that someone is trying to put together a list of elements. And of course, by 1869, many people had tried that. And finally, along comes Dmitry Mendeleev. We have the periodic table. So for me, the beginning of actually understanding the chemical world as we think of it today begins with Antoine Lavoisier just caught up in the midst of the French Revolution.

Frank Arthur von Hippel

When he was killed, was he on the verge of anything important in terms of science?

Kit Chapman

It's interesting. There's a story, probably apocryphal, but he actually asks the judge if he can have more time because he wants to finish his experiments. And he's told that the Republic has no need for chemists and the course of justice cannot be delayed. The interesting thing about Lavoisier is…

Frank Arthur von Hippel

So, Kid, I would love to talk to you sometime about the history of the periodic table as well. But this is a great place to end the interview. It's such a fascinating history, and I love the way that you've weaved together these different strands, including just showing how important alchemy was to…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“Fire is still studied to this day. I've talked to a fire scientist who said that if you go into the center of something as simple as a candle flame, even if it was just burning methane, which is as simple as we can get, it's possible to have up to 150 different compounds and molecules forming. And we don't know at any one point which one is going to be created.” — Kit Chapman, Science History Podcast

Asked what role fire played in the origins of chemistry, Kit Chapman calls it the first chemical reaction humans mastered. He points out that we still don't fully understand something as ordinary as a candle flame.

Science History Podcast · 2026-11-11 Permalink → Listen →
Science History Podcast Around 07:51 into the episode
Kit Chapman

…to get hold of. But that was how their gods were depicted. And so, of course, the artisans in the temple complexes would develop these techniques to create artificial gold, artificial silver, and artificial blue. And that's where we start getting that initial transition into what becomes chemia.

Frank Arthur von Hippel

…hand, I'd like to follow the format of your book to understand the history of chemistry, starting with early chemistry from the Stone Age to the emergence of alchemy. And on that early side of things, what role did fire play in the origins of what would eventually become alchemy and then chemistry?

Kit Chapman

Well, fire is the first chemical reaction that we master. If we don't have fire, we can't obtain ores from rock, we can't smelt, we can't do leather work, maybe a little bit, but fire obviously really supercharges everything. We can't keep ourselves warm. We can't cook food. So all of our basic survival needs, if you think about that sort of famous pyramid of needs, hierarchy of needs, are met initially by being able to master fire. It's what essentially drives civilization forward. And so I wanted to start the book there because without that first chemical reaction, we don't get everything else. We don't get metallurgy. We don't get paints and pigments and we don't get this artisanal tradition which then becomes alchemy. And of course fire is a fantastic leveler when it comes to chemistry. I always think about Michael Faraday, probably the greatest science communicator of all time. You know, Carl Sagan, eat your heart out, Michael Faraday is the man. And he had this fantastic lecture, the chemical history of a candle, where he was explaining chemistry to a lay audience using nothing more than a candle, using fire. And fire is still studied to…

Frank Arthur von Hippel

Yeah, and that's very interesting also. I mean, and it relates so much to even the evolution of our psychology because our psychology evolved around fires and storytelling and all of that. So much of the way that we are as humans has to do with the mastery of fire and the use of fire for warmth and…

Kit Chapman

Well, certainly there's several different strands that you can follow there. And that's one thing I love about chemical history and one thing I tried to reflect with the book is that we're not following one neat strand. It's not like the civilization computer game where you solve one thing and then…

Frank Arthur von Hippel

You mentioned the example of the Egyptians developing chemical means to get dyes because that way they wouldn't have to try to find these rare minerals that have those colors. Other than that, what was the role in this early chemistry of dyes and perfumes?

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“He had bankrupted two wives with his belief, which was that he could turn his own urine into gold. He was obsessed with his own urine. … He collects 1500 gallons of urine in his basement and allows it to ferment, which must have reeked the place out.” — Kit Chapman, Science History Podcast

Kit Chapman tells the story of the Hamburg alchemist who discovered phosphorus in the 1660s. This is how the experiment that produced the first new element since ancient times began.

Science History Podcast · 2026-11-11 Permalink → Listen →
Science History Podcast Around 32:31 into the episode
Kit Chapman

…isn't the end of alchemy. Alchemy continues for at least 200 years, has a later resurgence as well in the 19th century. But it's the beginning of empiricism, of scientific method, and starting to try and piece together what the world is made from. And that's a really important step in chemistry.

Frank Arthur von Hippel

…traditional Chinese medicine. You look at the Materia Medica from China and there's treatments for erectile dysfunction that are also botanical structures that look like an erect penis. So that kind of thing, I guess, was happening in many places. Can you tell us about the discovery of phosphorus?

Kit Chapman

I can, and we're going to go into a true alchemist here. This is not an iatrochemist. Hennig Brand was a fascinatingly mysterious character. He was living in Hamburg in the 1660s. Very, very strange background. He had a little bit of knowledge of certainly of chemistry and certainly of medicine and alchemy. But he'd also probably fought in a war, almost certainly on the Protestant side. He had bankrupted two wives with his belief, which was that he could turn his own urine into gold. He was obsessed with his own urine. Urine is one of those things that keeps coming up actually in alchemy. If you go all the way back to the Roman... era people were obsessed with with urine and and using urea to obviously breaks down into ammonia to bleach the the ropes this is how you get the the whitest whites in rome and vespasian actually creates a tax on on urine money doesn't stink is his quote and he uses it to build the…

Frank Arthur von Hippel

so you brought up robert boy he's quite an interesting person in his own way can you tell us about his origin story

Kit Chapman

yeah it's it's quite the origin story so he is one of the sons of the earl of cork and the earl of cork incredibly wealthy landowner he is is not the eldest son and he decides to go off around europe on the grand tour which was what you did if you were young and hip and trendy and insanely wealthy…

Frank Arthur von Hippel

Yeah, so I don't know if you can hear it in the background, but we're having a monsoon storm here now in Tucson. It's our monsoon season. And where I live, the streets, every time we get one of these big rains, the streets flood, the water comes right up to our house and it flows out very quickly.…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“What fascinates me as well is that so often we almost came to a technology and then we abandoned it. One of the great examples is there is a steam engine that was created in Alexandria. Just a toy. It was a novelty. If someone had realized that you could actually use that, we would have had the Industrial Revolution 2,000 years earlier.” — Kit Chapman, Science History Podcast

Kit Chapman picks up the theme of technologies that existed but never took off. The toy steam engine of ancient Alexandria is his example of how much depends on someone seeing a use for an invention.

Science History Podcast · 2026-11-11 Permalink → Listen →
Science History Podcast Around 25:48 into the episode
Kit Chapman

…And second, it was a cultural problem because Sri Lanka was later invaded from the Indian subcontinent. And there were more priorities than making high-quality steel that you could then sell as a trinket or something to a king that eventually ended up in the hands of Persian royalty, for example.

Frank Arthur von Hippel

…crabs in the ocean will make their burrows so that there's a bit of a lip on them. And that way, when the water flows over them, it accelerates, which draws water out of their burrows and promotes water flow. So it's very similar to the structure you're talking about with these Sri Lankan furnaces.

Kit Chapman

It is. What fascinates me as well is that so often we almost came to a technology and then we abandoned it. One of the great examples is there is a steam engine that was created in Alexandria. Just a toy. It was a novelty. If someone had realized that you could actually use that, we would have had the Industrial Revolution 2,000 years earlier. Or you could look at, for example, the Baghdad battery. There is this cell. It resembles a battery. There is certainly acid in there. It could have been used as such to give someone a bit of an electric shock. If people had realized they could do that, Alessandro Volta would have been written out of history.

Frank Arthur von Hippel

That's very interesting. In the third part of your book, you traced how alchemy evolved into modern chemistry. So to understand that history, let's go back to Europe and perhaps start with the question, what role did swindlers play in this story?

Kit Chapman

I love this little fact. And so I didn't know the etymology of the words charlatan, mountbank, and quack. And as I was researching the book, I stumbled. There is some fantastic research that's been done in this area. Julian Martins is a classic example, fantastic researcher, about the origins of…

Frank Arthur von Hippel

yeah that's right i'm actually an environmental toxicologist and and one of the categories in that field are looking at at personal care products including makeup and things like that which often have all kinds of endocrine disrupting compounds in them so i think this this trend still does continue…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“Alchemy becomes the first printing sensation. Now, who are you going to get to write your alchemy books? Are you going to get a boring, stuffy doctor that no one's going to read? Or are you going to get the showman who's got the razzle dazzle? It's exactly the same today why celebrity biographies sell like hot cakes when really high quality highbrow literature does maybe not as well.” — Kit Chapman, Science History Podcast

Asked about the role of swindlers in the shift from alchemy to chemistry, Kit Chapman explains how street-corner medicine sellers used the new printing press to sell "books of secrets". Showmanship, not rigour, drove the first mass-market science publishing.

Science History Podcast · 2026-11-11 Permalink → Listen →
Science History Podcast Around 28:02 into the episode
Kit Chapman

…look at, for example, the Baghdad battery. There is this cell. It resembles a battery. There is certainly acid in there. It could have been used as such to give someone a bit of an electric shock. If people had realized they could do that, Alessandro Volta would have been written out of history.

Frank Arthur von Hippel

That's very interesting. In the third part of your book, you traced how alchemy evolved into modern chemistry. So to understand that history, let's go back to Europe and perhaps start with the question, what role did swindlers play in this story?

Kit Chapman

I love this little fact. And so I didn't know the etymology of the words charlatan, mountbank, and quack. And as I was researching the book, I stumbled. There is some fantastic research that's been done in this area. Julian Martins is a classic example, fantastic researcher, about the origins of what I mentioned, iatrachemistry. In Italy, people would go around selling medicines, medicines with fantastically ridiculous names, cures, and this is again the idea that actually we're moving away from the idea that you just have to rely on God and balancing humours. You can actually use medicines now. Because prior to that, medicine was essentially three different paths. You had your wise women and your cunning men who would make potions and herbs for the local villages. You had the barber surgeons who were very good at bleeding you or cutting off limbs or stitching up limbs. And then you had doctors. And doctors had completely misunderstood the Hippocratic oath at that point and believed that it was very bad to even touch a patient, let alone cut them open, and would just stare at them and try and guess what was wrong and what they should take to balance the humours. And…

Frank Arthur von Hippel

yeah that's right i'm actually an environmental toxicologist and and one of the categories in that field are looking at at personal care products including makeup and things like that which often have all kinds of endocrine disrupting compounds in them so i think this this trend still does continue…

Kit Chapman

Well, it is a fantastic name. I mean, how can you avoid a name with bombastis in it? But for science historians, we just call him Paracelsus. That's what he called himself. You would give yourself this grandiose title to attract people. You know, Paracelsus better than Celsus, who was an ancient…

Frank Arthur von Hippel

Yeah, that example you gave about what was the word for when things are revealed by God by how they look for... The doctrine of signs. Okay. So, you know, that kind of thing also you see it in traditional Chinese medicine. You look at the Materia Medica from China and there's treatments for…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“Chemistry is class warfare. It begins with people just trying to start a fire with perfumers, slaves, with artisans in Egypt. It then moves into the middle classes with doctors, with physicians, with apothecaries, with people like Paracelsus. And now it has moved into the nobility. And it's only with the nobility that we can then start filtering it through all of the population.” — Kit Chapman, Science History Podcast

Kit Chapman is describing how Robert Boyle's circle made experimental science fashionable among wealthy Londoners in the late 1600s. He uses it to sum up who was doing chemistry in each era.

Science History Podcast · 2026-11-11 Permalink → Listen →
Science History Podcast Around 41:30 into the episode
Kit Chapman

Sorry, that's just me being nerdy.

Frank Arthur von Hippel

Well, I'm 59 years old, so I grew up listening to Queen, so I can relate to all of that.

Kit Chapman

…And so they would buy microscopes and they would start doing experiments. And we start getting this huge surge in the late 18th century, sorry, in the late 17th century, moving into the early 18th century, of people mastering the basic principles of experimental design. And that is incredibly important and can't really be overlooked because it shows how chemistry has moved through the classes. Chemistry is class warfare. It begins with people just trying to start a fire with perfumers, slaves, with artisans in Egypt. It then moves into the middle classes with doctors, with physicians, with apothecaries, with people like Paracelsus. And now it has moved into the nobility. And it's only with the nobility that we can then start filtering it through all of the population. And so we start getting this incredible surge in everyone being really interested in science. And starting to understand the world and unraveling alchemy, we get a surge in the 18th century of people experimenting with gases. We have the isolation of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, particularly oxygen, being probably the most important. And of course, we then end up with the French Revolution and…

Frank Arthur von Hippel

Well, I think that example you just gave of Antoine Laurent de Lavasier. How do you pronounce his name?

Kit Chapman

Lavoisier.

Frank Arthur von Hippel

Lavoisier. I think that's a great place to close out this story because, and that is, of course, the ultimate class warfare example with the French Revolution. He also invented the metric system, which is obviously an incredibly important aspect of.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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