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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2014
On 14 February 1727/28, Humphrey Newton wrote to John Conduitt:
About 6 weeks at spring, and 6 at the fall, the fire in the elaboratory scarcely went out, which was well furnished with chemical materials as bodies, receivers, heads, crucibles, etc., which was made very little use of, the crucibles excepted, in which he fused his metals; he would sometimes, tho’ very seldom, look into an old mouldy book which lay in his elaboratory, I think it was titled Agricola de Metallis, the transmuting of metals being his chief design … His brick furnaces, pro re nata, he made and altered himself without troubling a bricklayer. [Quoted in Betty Jo Dobbs, Foundations 8.]
The experimenter in question was not a deluded alchemist pursuing ignes fatui in a squalid workhouse, such as one finds in paintings by Brueghel or Teniers, but Sir Isaac Newton. Thanks to much pioneering study in the last quarter century, it is now widely known that this great investigator of light and optics, planetary motion, mathematics, and physics, was also a tireless experimenter in matters alchemical. The late Professor Dobbs has stated that “most of [Newton's] great powers were poured out upon church history, theology, ‘the chronology of ancient kingdoms,’ prophecy, and alchemy” (Foundations 6) – not upon “scientific” interests.
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