How urine led to the foundation of chemistry
By the 17th century, alchemists had been trying to make gold for over a thousand years. Though the search had ultimately proved fruitless for his numerous forebears, Brand, a merchant and an alchemist living in Hamburg, Germany, was not discouraged. He now considered a radical, yet surprisingly simple idea: That gold could be found within the human body itself, and the easiest way to harvest it was by distilling down a warm, golden-hued liquid widely and thoughtlessly discarded each and every day.
Brand was not as naive as one might expect. If gold was indeed produced within the human body and excreted in urine, it would be present in very tiny amounts, he reasoned. So, he was going to need a lot of urine, far more than even he could hope to produce in a decade. Brand turned to his wealthy wife Margaretha for funding, who acquiesced (undoubtedly with some reservations). With her money and an unabashed willingness to be “that guy,” he procured more than fifty buckets of urine, roughly equal to 5,500 liters, and retreated to his basement laboratory.
Brand knew what he needed to do first: boil down the urine to remove all of the water. Fumes soon wafted out of the basement windows onto the street and squeezed through cracks and crevices to pervade the ground and upstairs floors of his house.
