The Man Who Boiled His Own Urine and Found Light

Hennig Brand was a seventeenth-century German alchemist with a theory. Urine, he reasoned, was golden. Gold was golden. There was clearly something going on there.

Brand was a former soldier and merchant who had married twice, spending both wives' fortunes on his alchemical pursuits. By 1669, he had committed fully to his urine hypothesis. He began collecting it — not cups of it, not buckets of it, but barrels. Somewhere in the range of 1,500 gallons. He let it putrefy in open containers. Then he boiled it down to a thick paste, which he heated to extreme temperatures in a furnace in his Hamburg home, a process that took weeks and smelled exactly the way you think it did.

He did not find gold.

What dripped out of the retort instead was a waxy, white substance that glowed pale green in the dark. Left alone, it would burst into flames all by itself. Brand called it cold fire. We call it phosphorus. It was the first chemical element discovered by a named individual in recorded history — the first new building block of the universe anyone had knowingly pulled from matter since antiquity.

He had gone looking for gold in the most preposterous place imaginable, failed completely, and found light instead.