ABSTRACT
In 1941 researchers artificially produced gold from mercury, but the great dream of the alchemists is a non-starter; it would cost some millions of pounds to produce just one pin head of gold. One of them is known to history as Paracelsus a Swiss chemist of violent temper, physician and professor of physics and surgery. Gunpowder played a part in the fruitful life of the French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier. Although Dr. Joseph Priestley suffered a serious burn to his hand while heating concentrated sulphuric acid, the hazards he encountered were of a kind not normally associated with the practice of chemistry. The attention of French chemists is unfortunately diverted to less pleasing and less useful occupations, and countrymen seem to have felt the shock, and it has contributed to render them torpid.’ Two french chemists, Messrs Sivel and Croce-Spinelli, were hailed as martyrs to science and buried in great style in Paris.
