To alchemists toiling and tinkering in the laboratory, Geber was an infallible master his book was regarded as the bible of alchemy. Some historians had identified Geber as the translated name of an eighth-century Islamic alchemist, but NewmanвЂ™s research turned up evidence supporting a different interpretation: Geber was actually the alias of Paul of Taranto, an obscure Franciscan monk from southern Italy. вЂњNot a modest title, right?вЂќ Newman says, laughing. These included a shadowy 13th-century figure known as Geber, whose magnum opus was called The Sum of Perfection. Newman decided to look more closely at the alchemists who had influenced Blake and Yeats. Newman noted that Blake was born in 1757 and that Yeats died in 1939: вЂњThey reflected a creative interest in alchemy that spanned the late 18th to the early 20th century - exactly the вЂrationalвЂ™ period of the Enlightenment and of modern science - at the same time that most historians were branding alchemy delusional.вЂќ What was going on? he wondered. To his surprise, he found that both poets had drawn inspiration from alchemy. When he started to study the poets William Blake and William Butler Yeats, he did what young academics always do: He checked out their sources. Newman did not know much about alchemy as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in the mid-1970s. That they understood as much as they did is the real marvel: In pursuing what today seems like little more than witchcraft, the alchemists were in fact laying the foundation for modern experimental science. They also conducted experiments that they believed proved minerals could be made to grow.вЂќ In an age when there were no microscopes to penetrate living cells and no understanding of the nature of atoms and molecules, the alchemists were not misguided so much as misinformed, doing their best to make sense of a world they could not see. вЂњThey had theories about the nature of metals that made them believe they could manipulate their structure. вЂњThere were reasons that alchemists thought they could make gold,вЂќ Newman says. Then they did something unheard-of in recent times: They made replicas of the laboratory glassware used by 15th-, 16th-, and 17th-century alchemists and re-created their experiments firsthand. Among alchemyвЂ™s signature accomplishments: creating new alloys manufacturing acids and pigments inventing apparatus for distillation, the process used in making perfumes and whiskeys conceiving of atoms centuries before modern atomic theory and providing a template for the scientific method by running controlled experiments again and again.ДЄiming to restore alchemy to its rightful status, Principe and Newman - who came to the field separately but joined forces after meeting at a conference in 1989 - went through medieval alchemical texts, letters, and laboratory notebooks filled with odd symbols and coded language. Rather, it was a valuable and necessary phase in the development of modern chemistry. Back in the day, the two argue, alchemy was not the misguided pseudoscience that most people think it was. If two of the greatest scientists who ever lived were dedicated alchemists, then alchemy needs a makeover, a big one, contend Principe and his colleague William Newman, a historian of science at Indiana University.

As it turns out, Boyle was a devotee of alchemy too. The recipe for the PhilosophersвЂ™ Stone had come from his older contemporary, the famed British chemist Robert Boyle. Newton was not the only intellectual heavyweight from his era trying to make gold. NewtonвЂ™s dabblings in alchemy are well known, but his belief that he had found the closely guarded blueprint for the PhilosophersвЂ™ Stone was astonishing indeed. Today revered as the father of modern physics and the inventor of calculus, Newton was describing a recipe for the PhilosophersвЂ™ Stone, a legendary substance that reputedly could turn base metals like iron and lead into gold.

Holding the yellowed manuscript in his hands and studying the scribbled words, he understood that he was looking at one of the best-kept secrets in the history of science. Any Newton manuscript is of interest, but this one was worth its weight in gold, literally - as Principe, a chemist and historian of science at Johns Hopkins University, recognized immediately. Lawrence Principe was sorting through a collection of old chemistry books at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia when he stumbled upon a forgotten manuscript handwritten by Sir Isaac Newton.

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