I wanted to pulverize them, treat them with acid, roast them, reduce them—whatever was necessary—so I could extract their metals myself. I knew, from looking through a chemical catalog at the factory, that one could buy these metals already purified, but it would be far more fun, far more exciting, I reckoned, to make them myself. This way, I would enter chemistry, start to discover it for myself, in much the same way as its first practitioners did—I would live the history of chemistry in myself.
