The Chemist Who Tasted Everything

Carl Wilhelm Scheele discovered oxygen. He also discovered chlorine, manganese, barium, and tungsten. He isolated citric acid, lactic acid, and glycerin. Working alone in the back rooms of Swedish pharmacies with homemade equipment, he made more chemical discoveries than virtually anyone in the eighteenth century.

He identified each one, in part, by putting it in his mouth.

Scheele's laboratory notebooks read less like chemistry and more like a tasting menu from hell. He sampled mercury compounds and noted their flavor. He tasted arsenic and recorded its profile with clinical care. Hydrogen cyanide — one of the most lethal substances known to science — he described as having a "pleasantly sharp acidulous flavor," the way someone else might describe a good Riesling.

He did this for years. Substance after substance, discovery after discovery, each one catalogued with the same calm, methodical precision. His hands swelled. His joints ached. His body slowly filled with the things he had so carefully tasted and so carefully described.

He was, by most accounts, the most gifted experimental chemist of his century. He was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and attended exactly one meeting. He never held an academic post. He never stopped working.

He died at forty-three, surrounded by the chemicals he had spent his life identifying, his notebooks still open, his descriptions still precise.

The poisons tasted exactly as he said they would.