Turning Tungsten Into Gold

I wrote this blog entry by candlelight.  Which is atmospheric and, under the right circumstances, romantic.  The "right circumstances" involving the presence of at least one other person and me doing something far more interesting than writing a damn blog entry.  The principal thing candlelight is though is annoying.  A feeble, swaying light which usually manages to illuminate little more than the candle itself which is pointless because once you've lit it you probably don't need to see it again.  I think the only reason we didn't invent the electric light a lot sooner in our development is because its difficult to discover things in the dark.  Frankly I'm amazed early scientists could actually discover the door to their lab half the time.

Of course there is daylight which leads me to the conclusion that for a considerable period of time inventions and discoveries were limited to office hours.  You don't need to invent light when you're working during the day.  I'm also surprised that we invented writing before braille which works equally well in both the light and the dark.  I have no explanation at all for why sonar took so long.

To think of all the time alchemists wasted trying to turn lead into gold.  The first one of them to invent a light bulb would have found a way to turn tungsten filament into gold.  Although of course if he really wanted to profit the very next thing he would have had to invent was something to stick the light bulb into.  Since most of them were half out of their mind on mercury vapours its probably better that they stuck to what they knew.  Or rather what they didn't know.  I tremble to think at what they might have tried to stick a light bulb into.

Scientists don't like to be reminded of alchemy nowadays.  Its sort of like the scientific community's embarrassing uncle.  Half crazy, irritating at parties and just when you've convinced everybody that he's a total loss he occasionally comes up with something brilliant.  That must be the most annoying bit of all actually.  Of course most non scientists would be hard pressed to tell the difference; perhaps a little more string theory and a little less Hermes Trismegistus.  Possibly the greatest distinction would be that a scientist's ignorance is much better catalogued.

This was the trouble with alchemists.  A lot of them were really smart but they didn't really know what they were doing.  And since they were starting from wrong principles in the first place even the discoveries they did make couldn't be fitted into any sort of coherent whole.  Not that this worried the alchemists, they were perfectly fine with an incoherent whole.  And let's face it, it was an indoor job with little heavy lifting at a time when such occupations were reserved for kings and monks.

In one sense alchemy is a very human thing to study.  It is a lunatic collection of genuine knowledge and bat crazy superstition welded together by minds that were simultaneously highly intelligent (John Dee and his colleagues were no dummies) and barely capable of a coherent thought.  Nothing more human could be imagined.  As a matter of fact forget about light bulbs.  When you gather such people as that and put them in room with a mass of herbs, minerals and distillation equipment its amazing that we didn't invent the meth lab before the light bulb.