Johann Joachim Becher

German chemist, physician, and inventor

• Born: May 6, 1635
• Birthplace: Speyer, Rhineland-Palatinate (now in Germany)
• Died: October 1, 1682
• Place of death: London, England

Becher developed ideas on the nature of physical substances that led to a new theory of chemistry. Also, his theory of the three “earths” argued that minerals grew from seeds in Earth’s “bowels.” As a businessperson, he would seek to capitalize financially on his ideas and inventions.

Early Life

Johann Joachim Becher (yoh-HAHN YOH-ahk-ihm BEHK-her) was born in a small German town along the Rhine River. Joachim, his multilingual father, was a teacher, then a Lutheran minister who married Anna Margaretha Gauss, the daughter of a Lutheran minister. He became a pastor in Speyer, his wife’s hometown. After the birth of Johann, three other sons followed. Johann attended the Speyer Retscher-Gymnasium, but the premature death of his father and his mother’s remarriage to an improvident and abusive man led to the end of Johann’s formal schooling. During the day, Johann did manual work to help support his mother and brothers, but at night, he continued to educate himself by reading extensively.

At the age of thirteen, Becher left Speyer and began a nomadic life that took him to Sweden, Holland, France, and Italy, where he met many scientists, including alchemists. Throughout his career, he believed that the transmutation of less-valuable metals into gold (a process called alchemy) was possible, and in 1654, he edited an alchemical text.

His “wandering years” temporarily ended in 1657, when he settled at Mainz, about 48 miles north of his birthplace. In Mainz he met Maria Veronika, the beautiful daughter of an imperial councillor. Also, he would convert from Lutheranism to Roman Catholicism and, through the influence of the elector, receive his medical degree from the University of Mainz in 1661. In this same year, he published a book on medicine, and in 1663, he was appointed professor of medicine at the university. When his project of devising a universal language was unfavorably received, he felt that his talents would be better appreciated at another European court.

Life’s Work

It is often difficult to determine Becher’s career, given his many conflicting roles and activities: scientist/pseudoscientist, astute businessman/confidence man, inventor/charlatan. For example, at Mannheim in 1664, he devised projects for improving the manufacture of silk, glass, and paper, but, before his plans were actualized, he left for Munich, angering both merchants and the nobility.

As physician to the elector of Bavaria, he had access to the best-equipped chemical laboratory in Europe, which aided him in his alchemical writings. Becher believed that a country could be self-sufficient by efficiently exploiting domestic and foreign raw materials and by developing homebred industries, and so he was an early mercantilist. These economic interests led him, in December of 1665, to accept an appointment as councillor of commerce to Emperor Leopold I in Vienna, Austria, a position he started in 1666.

Becher, an advocate of the government regulation of the economy, pushed for a state monopoly of the silk industry and the construction of a Rhine-Danube canal to facilitate trade between Austria and the Netherlands. As a mercantilist, he urged the establishment of a colonial “New Germany” in the jungles between the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers in South America that would rival the colonies of New England, New France, and New Spain.

Becher published his most important work, Actorum laboratorii chymici monacensis, seu, physicae subterranae libri duo (two books of the proceedings of the Munich Chemical Laboratory, or subterranean physics) in 1669 and dedicated it to the elector of Bavaria. Best known as Physica subterranea from a later edition (1703) published by the chemistGeorg Ernst Stahl, the book deals more with chemistry than with physics. Like many other books of the period, it blended religion and science. Indeed, Physica subterranea has been described as a deeply religious book, since Becher viewed the natural world as a creation of “God the Chemist” who was always and forever in contact with his creation through chemical changes.

Unlike many ancient and medieval natural philosophers, and some of his contemporaries, Becher was critical of the classic four-element theory that held that all material substances were composed of earth, air, fire, and water. He also disagreed with the tria prima (three principles) of the Renaissance-era alchemist Paracelsus, pointing out that the Paracelsian principles of mercury, sulfur, and salt did not share the physical properties of the actual mercury, sulfur, and salt. Becher believed mercury, sulfur, and salt were compounds, not elements.

The most influential doctrine in Physica subterranea was Becher’s theory of the three “earths.” He believed that minerals grew from seeds in the “bowels of Mother Earth.” Every substance in Earth’s crust is composed of terra fluida (fluid or mercurious earth), terra pinguis (fatty or flammable earth), and terra lapidea (stoney or vitrifiable earth). Becher maintained that the nature of metals, minerals, and stones depended on the basic earths they contained. For example, if a metal could be melted, it contained fluid earth; if a mineral could be burned, it contained flammable earth; if a stone could be neither liquefied nor burned, it contained vitrifiable earth, the principle of solidity. Using these three earths, Becher accounted for the great variety of inorganic substances as well as properties such as color, shape, odor, and weight. He extended his three-earths theory to the plant and animal kingdoms. He believed in spontaneous generation, that organic life could originate spontaneously from inorganic materials.

Just as he sought economic benefits from his ideas on minerals, so he wished to realize financial rewards from his understanding of organic materials. For example, he devised a technique for producing coke and tar from coal, and he most likely prepared the flammable gas now known as ethylene by mixing alcohol and oil of vitriol (sulfuric acid).

Although some of his ideas and projects, such as the introduction of the potato into Germany, had value, others, such as a perpetual clock and a lamp that would burn forever, had no value. His suggestion of an imperial edict against French imports proved disastrous for German cities and, after a brief imprisonment, he left Vienna for Holland, where, in 1678, he persuaded the Dutch assembly to appropriate funds for his scheme of extracting gold from sand dunes. Like many of his previous proposals, his plan for recovering gold from sea sands was abandoned as impractical. This and other failures most likely contributed to his sudden departure for England without his family.

While in England during the early 1680’s, he made some friends among the nobility who supported his work. He completed the final supplement to Physica subterranea, acquiring additional knowledge about minerals from his inspections of mines in Scotland and Cornwall. While residing at Falmouth and the Isle of Wight, he wrote other books. He returned to London in 1682, where he completed a collection of fifteen hundred chemical processes, including recipes for making the philosophers’ stone, a book published in English as Magnalia Naturæ: Or, The Philosophers-Stone Lately Exposed to Public Sight and Scale (1680). He hoped to crown his career by becoming a member of the Royal Society. To this end he wrote a brief treatise on mechanical clocks, but the treatise’s lack of originality left the society’s officials unimpressed, and he was not elected.

Late in his life, he returned to the Lutheran faith of his early years. Like so many projects throughout his career, his English enterprises bore little fruit, and he died in poverty in London in 1682.

Significance

Scholars have been divided over the significance of Becher and his works. Some see him as an “ingenious rogue,” others as a curious combination of “sense and nonsense,” and still others as the first person to construct a modern theory of chemistry. Like many of his seventeenth century colleagues who found themselves on the watershed between the medieval and modern worlds, Becher was a transitional figure. His work in science commingled alchemical and chemical ideas, and consequently, scholars disagree about his place in the history of science. Becher certainly believed in transmutation and practiced alchemy at various European courts, but he condemned astrology, finding its association of planets and metals nonsensical.

Some scholars believe that Becher only gave new names to old ideas, whereas others interpret his introduction of “fatty earth” as a step forward in the evolution of modern chemistry because his terra pinguis became “phlogiston” in the writings of Georg Ernst Stahl. Stahl used the idea of phlogiston, the first great generalization of chemistry, in his edition of Becher’s Physica subterranea.

Many of Becher’s financial schemes failed, but some of them involved the significant application of chemical ideas to industry. He was a prolific writer whose books and articles cover a wide variety of theoretical and practical subjects, which, with all their contradictions and outdated ideas, also contain the seeds of several modern scientific theories and techniques. Though he was not able to escape the limitations of his period—he believed in both God and science—he was a protochemist whose description of his profession can be used, mutatis mutandis, to describe his twenty-first century descendants.

The chemists are a strange class of mortals, impelled by an almost maniacal impulse to seek their pleasures amongst smoke and vapour, soot and flames, poisons and poverty, yet amongst all these evils I seem to live so sweetly that I would rather die than change places with the king of Persia.

Bibliography

Brock, William H. The Chemical Tree: A History of Chemistry. New York: Norton, 2000. Brock tells the story of chemistry from antiquity to the twentieth century, and he discusses Becher’s life and work in the second chapter, “The Sceptical Chemist.” Includes an extensive forty-page bibliographic essay and an index.

Jaffe, Bernard. Crucibles: The Story of Chemistry from Ancient Alchemy to Nuclear Fission. 4th ed. New York: Dover, 1976. This edition of Jaffe’s popular book is a revised and enlarged reprint of the book originally published in 1930. Chapter 3 covers Becher. Includes eleven pages of sources and an index.

Multhauf, Robert P. The Origins of Chemistry. New York: Franklin Watts, 1967. This first history of early chemistry by a professional historian of science attempts to do justice to the complexity of the many ancient and medieval disciplines that evolved into modern chemistry. Includes a forty-four-page bibliography and an index.

Partington, James R. A History of Chemistry. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1961. Reprint. New York: Martino, 1996. 4 vols. Volume 2 examines the period from 1500 to 1700 and analyzes Becher’s life and work, an important analysis for the chapter on phlogiston theory. Volume 1 provides theoretical background to the history of chemistry. Includes indexes of names and subjects.

Smith, Pamela H. The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994. Examines the interplay between the sciences, namely alchemy, culture, and commerce. Includes illustrations, a bibliography, and index.

Strathern, Paul. Mendeleyev’s Dream: The Quest for the Elements. New York: Berkeley Books, 2002. This book, intended for general readers, narrates the history of how humans came to understand the composition of Earth, with an emphasis on the fascinating people and ideas involved in this quest. Includes a section on further readings and an index.

Thorndike, Lynn. A History of Magic and Experimental Science. 8 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958. Volume 3 explores the experimental science of the seventeenth century, and chapter 20 examines the “underground world” of Becher. No index in this volume, but volume 8 has a comprehensive index of the entire work.