Pee-riodic Fables

For more than a thousand years, we poor humans only knew about a handful of elements. Elements are those substances that can’t be reduced to anything simpler, no matter how much you cut them in half or try to strip away parts of them.

These irreducible substances we knew about were nature’s low-hanging fruit. We could find gold, silver, and copper by digging in the ground. There were clumps of each of these, and you could sometimes coax one of these precious metals out of another rock by heating it up and pouring it out.

By the time of the Bronze Age, people were comfortable with mixing copper and tin together, and they understood that each element had its own unique properties. Gold was more malleable than silver, but lead would melt at a much lower temperature, and mercury was liquid at most temperatures where humans live and thrive.

Then, suddenly, pee came to the rescue. Remember how I told you about the petermen who used to go around collecting pee during the time of Charles I in England?

Subjects were expected to hand their waste over to the petermen or saltpeter men, guys hired by the Crown to go from house to house collecting waste (or, even grosser, to hunt through waste) in order to collect nitrate-rich materials like pee.

Sometimes, folks would take their chamber pots to a niter bed, which was a bit like a giant compost pit. Their waste would augment the enormous heap of decaying organic matter. The unpopular petermen were responsible for all of this.

They needed all this pee because it contained potassium nitrate (saltpeter), an essential ingredient used in making gunpowder.

This wasn’t the first time urine was collected for industrial use. During the time of Emperor Vespasian—not quite 2000 years ago, but catching up quickly—clothmakers would use ammonia from urine to create a dye that would actually set in the fabric.

Ammonia made the ink more soluble, helping it bond better to fabric. This made for the boldest, richest colors sold anywhere, and you can bet this was a hot commodity. It’s also an incredible natural cleaning agent, and it’s useful as a catalyst when making soap.

Naturally, Vespasian wanted in on this action, so he taxed the fullers—the cloth cleaners who collected that liquid gold from public urinals all over town. The saying “money doesn’t stink” comes from this moment in our history.

So, pee was long considered a valuable source for other materials, but could elements be found in human urine as well? A German alchemist named Henning Brand set out to answer this question by taking fifty buckets of urine, and allowing them to ripen for weeks, so the ammonia would separate. I’m holding my breath just thinking about how amazing this must have smelled.

He then used a process of boiling and condensing, boiling and condensing again, separating liquids from solids, and vapors from liquids. Eventually, he got the pee down to a sludgy substance that clumped together, but a distinct white substance had formed on the sides when the vapors had settled back down.

This was unlike any other substance Brand had ever encountered, and it fascinated him endlessly. For one thing, this stuff glowed in the dark. Brand’s head went straight to the metaphysical world here, and after all, who can blame him? He was a product of his time, and alchemists had to keep an open mind if they wanted to discover how to turn lead into gold.

While Charles I and Emperor Vespasian seemed to do something similar, Brand was doing something altogether new here. This wasn’t extracting ammonia or saltpeter from another substance so you could clean clothes better or make gunpowder. This was the discovery of one of those elements, and it was the first one in a thousand years.

This was just the first crack in the porcelain bowl, but the urinal finally burst as scientists began to piece together what Brand’s findings meant.

Aristotle’s view had been that there were, in fact, only four elements: earth, air, water, and fire. This was widely accepted until this moment, and Brand’s discovery really opened the floodgates (I hope you aren’t somewhere where you can’t get a quick bathroom break if you need one while reading this).

Water and air weren’t really pure substances themselves, but instead made up of elements. This flipped Aristotle’s view on its head, after being widely considered true in the ancient and medieval Eurasian world for nearly two full millennia.