KC Kit Chapman On 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.”

Science History Podcast · Ideas & Essays · November 2026

Context

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.

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Transcript

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.…

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More from Science History Podcast

“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