A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

Perhaps nothing better typifies the strange and often accidental nature of chemical science in its early days than a discovery made by a German named Hennig Brand in 1675. Brand became convinced that gold could somehow be distilled from human urine. (The similarity of colour seems to have been a factor in his conclusion.) He assembled fifty buckets of human urine, which he kept for months in his cellar. By various recondite processes, he converted the urine first into a noxious paste and then into a translucent waxy substance. None of it yielded gold, of course, but a strange and interesting thing did happen. After a time, the substance began to glow. Moreover, when exposed to air, it often spontaneously burst into flame. The commercial potential for the stuff – which soon became known as phosphorus, from Greek and Latin roots meaning ‘light-bearing’ – was not lost on eager business people, but the difficulties of manufacture made it too costly to exploit. An ounce of phosphorus retailed for 6 guineas2 – perhaps £300 in today’s money – or more than

Hennig Brand - German Chemist - 1675 - Story of accidenta discovery of phosphorous from urine