How Did Alchemy Contribute To Chemistry

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Where would chemistry be if not for alchemy? It is from alchemy that Chemistry came to be, despite the idea of alchemy being seemingly impractical. Alchemy was this ancient, secret, and mysterious practice with the main intentions to turn lead into gold; however, this was not the only focus of alchemy. The philosopher’s stone took a very prominent role in alchemy, a stone that was believed to turn base metals into gold and prolong youthful life indefinitely. Clearly, alchemy was very spiritually-oriented in this sense and in that almost everything was believed to have some kind of universal spirit; it was essentially a blend of myths, religion, magic, astrology, philosophy, and spirituality. Nonetheless, it was still an early step to understanding chemistry and the origin of many techniques and methods of chemistry today.
Alchemy was the stem and predecessor to chemistry, both related to scientific practices; each utilized experimentation, chemists using the discoveries having been made by alchemists. Although alchemy did focus on the understanding and acquiring of knowledge through experiments and observations of matter, it’s this data that allowed for such great development and advances in …show more content…

Now that experimentation began to be based on the scientific method, works were being published like Boyle’s, and key characteristics of alchemy were beginning to become more advanced, alchemy was now turning into the modern science, which people today now know as modern chemistry. All of the search for new compounds and elements as well as their use in medicine, industry, and more were beginning to falter from the ideas of the original concept of alchemy, thus, generating a new domain. As research began to stray from the magical and spiritual beliefs of alchemy, chemistry began to become more prominent and rise from the “ashes” of its

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