Isaac Newton: handwritten recipe reveals fascination with alchemy

The recipe for 'sophick mercury' – a key element in creating the mythic philosopher's stone to turn lead into gold – will now be available online.

First Look

A 17th-century recipe written by Isaac Newton is now going online, revealing more about the physicist’s relationship with the ancient science of alchemy.

Calling for ingredients such as "one part Fiery Dragon" and "at least seven Eagles of mercury," the handwritten recipe describes how to make "sophick mercury," seen at the time as an essential element in creating the "philosopher’s stone," a fabled substance with the power to turn base metals, like lead, into gold.  

The manuscript, which is written in Latin and English, was acquired in February by Philadelphia-based nonprofit the Chemical Heritage Foundation, National Geographic reports. The foundation is now working to upload digital images and transcriptions of the text to an online database.

The recipe is a copy of a manuscript by alchemist George Starkey, with Newton's own notes written on the back of the text, explains James Voelkel, a curator of rare books at the foundation's Othmer Library and lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania.

"The significance of the manuscript is that it helps us understand Newton's alchemical reading – especially of his favorite author – and gives us evidence of one more of his laboratory procedure," Dr. Voelkel told Fox News.

While Newton is best known as a physicist and for his work on calculus, he was also heavily involved in the medieval "science" of alchemy – now considered a mystical pseudoscience far removed from modern-day chemistry.

He wrote some 1 million words on the subject during his lifetime, but despite his own interests, scholars have long dismissed his connection with the subject.

"For many, many years, Newton's alchemy was considered untouchable," William Newman, a historian of science at Indiana University, told National Geographic.

That derision – one 19th-century biographer wrote that  "we cannot understand how a mind of such power … could stoop to be even the copyist of the most contemptible alchemical poetry" – is one reason Newton's work on alchemy is only now being reexamined.

In 1888, Cambridge University turned down the opportunity to archive his alchemy recipes, leaving them to be sold at auction for nearly $13,000 in 1936 (about $222,000 in today's dollars). They then landed mostly in private collections, National Geographic reports.

Starkey, who wrote in Latin as Eirenaeus Philalethes, published a text revealing how to make sophick mercury in 1678.

But Newton's manuscript is believed to be a copy of another Starkey manuscript, and may even predate the printed text, Voelkel told The Washington Post, indicating Newton's deep connection to the field.

On the back of the text, he also scribbled notes for another alchemical process: making iron ore.

The cryptic nature of the text also reveals more about the secrecy and intense interest that surrounded alchemy, where alchemists often used codes and allegories to avoid sharing their discoveries broadly. In England, transmutation of metals was also illegal, the Post reports.

Newton's writing reveals that he tackled alchemy with the same rigor as his scientific studies, compiling mentions and references of how each alchemist used a particular term in what Voelkel calls an attempt to do a "data-driven analysis" of the field.

For historians of science, the manuscript also helps establish that Newton's contributions to what was then known as "chymistry" also helped shaped his work on the physics of light, such as the discovery that white light is mixture of many colors.

"Alchemists were the first to realize that compounds could be broken down into their constituent parts and then recombined. Newton then applied that to white light, which he deconstructed into constituent colors and then recombined," Dr. Newman told National Geographic. "That's something Newton got from alchemy."