“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.”
Science History Podcast · Ideas & Essays · November 2026
Context
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.
Transcript
…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.
…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?
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…
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…
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…
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?
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