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While the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe is best known for his celestial discoveries made in the 16th century – before the invention of the telescope – he was also an alchemist who prepared secret medicines for elite clients. But what exactly Brahe worked on in his alchemical laboratory, located below his castle residence and observatory called Uraniborg, is something of a historical enigma.
The arcane nature of Brahe’s work was common among Renaissance alchemists who kept their knowledge close to the vest. Only a few of his alchemical recipes remain today. Uraniborg, located on the island of Ven off the coast of Sweden and named after the muse of astronomy Urania, was destroyed after Brahe’s death in 1601.
Now researchers who have carried out a chemical analysis of pieces of glass and pottery recovered from where Uraniborg once stood say they have uncovered new clues about what happened in the Renaissance scientist’s laboratory centuries ago.
The five fragments examined in the new study are among those discovered at the time excavations carried out by another team from 1988 to 1992. Found in the remains of a garden around the site, the fragments are believed to come from the alchemical laboratory.
Kaare Lund Rasmussen, professor emeritus in the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Pharmacy at the University of Southern Denmark, was inspired to study the fragments after wondering what insights they might offer for understanding Brahe’s alchemical work.
As lead author of the new study, he worked with co-author Paul Grinder-Hansen, senior researcher and museum curator at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, on the investigation. Four of the pieces contained higher concentrations of elements than expected, including nickel, copper, zinc, tin, mercury, gold and lead, the researchers reported Wednesday in the journal Heritage Science.
Gold is one substance that Rasmussen already associates with Brahe. In an ongoing effort to understand why the Renaissance scholar died, Rasmussen co-authored a November 2016 study that analyzed some of Brahe’s hair and bones and found excessive amounts of gold in his remains.
But the biggest revelation from the glass and ceramic fragments in the new analysis — and the source of a separate mystery — was the presence of an element not even known to scientists in Brahe’s time.
Rasmussen and his team were amazed to find tungsten among the elements found on the inside and outside of the pieces. During the Renaissance, mercury and gold were commonly used in drug recipes to treat a wide range of ailments, but evidence of tungsten among them is “very mysterious,” he said.
“Tungsten wasn’t even described at the time, so what can we conclude from its presence on a piece from Tycho Brahe’s alchemical workshop?” Rasmussen said.
Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele discovered tungstic acid in the mineral now known as scheelite in 1781, more than 180 years after Brahe’s death. Not long after, Spanish chemists Juan José and Fausto d’Elujar y de Suvisa conducted follow-up experiments that successfully isolated tungsten, described in a paper published in 1783. The chemical element, also known as tungsten, occurs naturally in certain minerals.
It’s possible the tungsten arrived in Brahe’s lab via a mineral, or perhaps he processed one in a way that isolated the tungsten without Brahe realizing it, Rasmussen said.
There is also a chance that Brahe encountered tungsten through the work of the German mineralogist Georgius Agricola, who discovered the formation of an unusual substance when he tried to smelt tin made from tin ore. Agricola named the substance tungsten in his 1546 book De Natura Fossilium.
“Maybe Tycho Brahe heard about it and therefore knew about the existence of tungsten,” Rasmussen said. “But that’s not something we know or can say based on the analysis I’ve done. This is just a possible theoretical explanation for why we find tungsten in the samples.
The results of the new study will be of interest to historians and archaeologists alike, said Lawrence Principe, a Drew professor of humanities and director of the Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Principe was not involved in the research.
“As the authors note, the discovery of a tungsten residue is very surprising,” Principe said. “Tungsten ores are relatively rare and we know very little about how much they may have been experimented with in the early modern period.”
Principe thinks that anyone who came across tungsten ore would have been struck by its extreme heaviness — the element’s name means “heavy stone” in Swedish — “and so might have tried to smelt gold from it, which is, which I would hazard a guess did in this case,” he said.
Astronomer and alchemist
Brahe was a dynamic scientist during the Renaissance who became famous after discovering a supernova in 1572. Brahe was so respected that King Frederick II of Denmark and Norway offered Brahe the island of Ven as a place to build his observatory and alchemy laboratory. The mansion served as a home and research center where students from all over Europe came to live and work, and the alchemy laboratory in the basement contained a number of special furnaces, according to the study.
The laboratory was uniquely designed, containing 16 furnaces for heating, ash production and distillation, with copper pipes running outdoors for cooling. A spiral staircase led to the family sitting room, called the Winter Room, so Brahe was never far from his experiments.
Rasmussen believes that the king made such a generous gift to Brahe not only because of their good and trusting relationship, but because European kings were more respected if they kept famous scientists in their countries – and did not want to lose them to others nations. And Brahe himself wrote that the king was eager to support the scholar’s work in both astronomy and alchemy.
Alchemy, the precursor to chemistry, served two purposes: making gold and making medicine. Alchemists who focused on the creation of gold tried through experiments to make it from less valuable metals and minerals.
Brahe, inspired by the German physician Paracelsus, devoted his time and energy to the production of medicine rather than gold. Diseases such as plague, leprosy and syphilis were common at the time, so alchemists like Brahe focused on creating medicinal recipes to treat such ailments, as well as fevers and stomachaches, Rasmussen said.
“Today we can be a little skeptical about the effects of Paracelsian drugs from the late 1500s, but at the time it was high-tech and cutting-edge,” Rasmussen said.
Brahe shared his precious recipes with only a few people, including his patron Rudolph II, Holy Roman Emperor, who allegedly asked Brahe for a plague cure.
Brahe’s plague medicine recipe was complex and contained theriac, a multi-purpose medicine at the time, which could include up to 60 ingredients such as opium, snake flesh, oils, herbs and sulphates. Valuable tinctures can also be added to Brahe’s Plague Remedy recipe, including hyacinths, corals, sapphires, or potable gold.
Given the amount of gold found in Brahe’s remains, he may also have taken gold-containing drugs to drink or drink.
The new findings leave more questions than answers about Brahe’s alchemical work, but Rasmussen said he looks forward to analyzing a new and larger set of samples from the alchemy lab in the future to look for more clues.
While it may seem strange that an astronomer who created precise instruments for studying the sky and mapping the positions of more than 700 stars would engage in alchemy, it all boils down to Brahe’s worldview, said study co-author Grinder-Hansen.
“He believed there were obvious connections between heavenly bodies, earthly substances and the body’s organs,” Grinder-Hansen said in a statement. “Thus the Sun, the gold, and the heart were connected, and the same was true of the Moon, the silver, and the brain; Jupiter, Tin and Liver; Venus, honey and the kidneys; Saturn, lead and spleen; Mars, iron and gall bladder; and Mercury, mercury and the lungs. Minerals and precious stones can also be associated with this system, so emeralds, for example, belonged to Mercury.
Brahe and the English physicist-mathematician Isaac Newton are some of the canonical figures of the scientific revolution who dabbled in alchemy, said Principe, a historian of science at Johns Hopkins.
“This is because, contrary to the rhetoric against alchemy that was popular from the 18th century, alchemy and chemistry were not different things in terms of practices, so that anyone seriously interested in matter and its transformations, and especially having wanting to control these transformations to produce things would naturally engage in alchemy,” he said.
After the death of King Frederick II, Brahe and the new King Christian IV did not have a good relationship. Brahe is known to have ignored the king’s orders, including those regarding his responsibility for keeping a fire burning at the Kullen lighthouse on Sweden’s southwest coast and guarding a chapel containing the remains of the king’s mother and father, Rasmussen said. So when Brahe died in 1601, the king and his advisers ordered Uraniborg to be torn down so it could no longer exist as a monument to the scientist, and the bricks were repurposed for other buildings.
But Brahe’s scientific achievements have not been forgotten. He was recognized for making great strides in his lifetime and these milestones paved the way for future scientists.
While Brahe correctly believed that the moon revolved around the earth and the planets revolved around the sun, he also believed that the sun must revolve around the earth. But his assistant Johannes Kepler developed the laws of planetary motion to understand how the planets revolved around the sun.
Brahe, Kepler, Newton and Galileo Galilei changed the way people understood the world and its place in the universe.
“Tycho Brahe was the first of the four giants, standing 25 years apart from 1580 to 1680, to formulate what can be called a modern world view – as opposed to a medieval view,” Rasmussen said.
