How experiments that don’t work can still be useful
More than 300 years ago, in 1669, Hennig Brand, a Hamburg alchemist, like most chemists of his day, was trying to make gold. He let urine stand for days in a tub until it putrified. Then he boiled it down to a paste, heated this paste to a high temperature, and drew the vapours into water where they could condense - to gold. To his surprise and disappointment, however, he obtained instead a white, waxy substance that glowed in the dark. Brand had discovered phosphorus, the first element isolated other than the metals and non-metals, such as gold, lead and sulphur, that were known to the ancient civilisations. The word phosphorus comes from the Greek and means light bearer.
