Alchemy: New Light on a Dark Art
Fools' gold, Dr Faustus - traditional images of a Renaissance black art. But was there more to it than that? Zbigniew Szydlo and Richard Brzezinski offer an intriguing rehabilitation.
In June 1897 the French journal La Nature reported that the United States Assay Office had, on April 16th, purchased the first ever gold ingot manufactured from silver.. Six months later, an article in a popular newspaper related that the inventor, Dr. Stephen H. Emmens, was 'producing enough gold to bring him at the Assay Office a profit of $150 a week'. Emmens, an American of British descent, bragged that he had finally mastered the alchemists' art and could produce gold commercially. He let slip that his 'Argentaurum' process worked by the action of high pressure and intense cold on silver, but was eventually exposed as a fraud when he claimed that his process was endorsed by a leading physicist, Sir William Crookes. By 1901 Emmens was nowhere to be traced.
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