Jābir ibn Ḥayyān

The original transformer

Whether you realize it or not, you wake up every morning and do some
chemistry. You might turn the liquids in your eggs into solids. Maybe you
remove the moisture inside your bread to make toast. Meanwhile, your
parents may be adding hot water to ground-up beans to create new and
complex compounds that taste good and give them a caffeine buzz.
Chemistry is everywhere.

Chemistry is the modern science that deals with the structure and properties
of substances and how they are transformed. But modern chemistry didn’t
just happen. It grew out of a long history of curious humans who used trial
and error to answer questions like:

1. How do you make raw foods edible?

2. How do you turn ash and fat into soap?
3. How do you turn mineral-bearing rocks into iron?
Most trials ended in error, but when they succeeded, people passed on the
ideas to later generations, which helped expand our collective learning. But
these ideas weren’t always studied in a scientific way. Between the days of
trial and error and the arrival of modern science was something called
alchemy. Not exactly science, and not exactly magic, alchemy mixes religion,
spirituality, and experimentation in order to study the properties of natural
substances, especially metals.
Perhaps the greatest of the alchemists was Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, a Muslim
Persian innovator who wrote over 3,000 texts on alchemy. These included:

1. A list—including descriptions—of all the known tools and equipment

used by Greek and Muslim alchemists
2. Histories of the progress made by earlier alchemists
3. Perhaps most important, studies of the characteristics of different
metals
You see, ibn Ḥayyān was one of the first people to describe the qualities of
different metals, and he had a good reason for doing so. Alchemists wanted to
know how you might transform one metal into another. Well, what they
wanted to do was to turn lead, a cheap metal, into gold, an expensive metal.
The way to pursue that challenge was to study the qualities of each metal.
Then they had to figure out the process by which you might change those
qualities.

In what may be his most important contribution to later scientists, ibn Ḥayyān
began to study how mixing substances—using heat, acid, and other methods
and tools—could change them. These processes included:

1. Distillation – Purifying something by boiling it and then capturing the

steam.
2. Filtration – Putting a substance through a filter to remove impurities.
3. Amalgamation – Mixing two substances so they become a new
substance.

A man? Or a school?
Who was this brilliant man who wrote 3,000 texts and invented new ways to
transform substances? It’s still a mystery. There probably was a man named
Jābir ibn Ḥayyān. He was probably born in the city of Tus, in Persia. He
probably worked for the Abbasid ruler Harun al-Rashid. And he probably
wrote some of the 3,000 texts associated with his name. But it’s likely that a
lot of the work that people attach his name to was written by other people
living around the same time or later.

So, if that’s true, we’re looking at something much more exciting than a
single innovator. We’re probably looking at a whole school of alchemists.
Many of them were probably students of ibn Ḥayyān’s, working together,
sharing notes and ideas, and passing them on. If the 3,000 texts were written
by several or many people, then we have evidence of a great effort to
understand metals and other substances and transform them. Maybe they all
worked together in a laboratory, or workshop. Maybe there was even a whole
school of alchemists in one location!