Ur Analysis

So this friend of mine whom I've never told anyone about invented this at home kit people can use to check whether they have any vitamin or mineral deficiencies. It's basically just a urine analysis kit that monitors your excreted levels of things like calcium, magnesium, zinc, etc.  If you're getting enough, and it's coming through, you should cut back on your supplements because it's wasted or could even be harmful.

The simple analytes are easy--things like calcium, magnesium.  He's working on the organics now. He calls it "Ur Analysis"  Get it?

Phosphorus, The Miraculous Bearer Of Light

"The Alchymist" by Joseph Wright of Derby (1771)

Several elements -- gold, silver, copper, mercury, lead, iron, tin, sulfur, and carbon -- were known since ancient times. Three more were discovered during the Dark Ages: antimony, arsenic and zinc. Phosphorus was first isolated in 1669 during the pre-dawn hours of the Enlightenment and it was the first element whose discovery was recorded in modern times. After a lapse of about a hundred years, new elements were rapidly discovered up until the last one, Francium, was found in 1939. New elements were of course still synthesized afterwards.

Van der Krogt retells the amazing story of Henning Brandt's discovery of phosphorus and its subsequent naming as the "light bearer" -- it's well worth a read. The above painting, called "The Alchymist" by Joseph Wright of Derby, depicts the special property displayed by elemental phosphorus: its chemiluminescence as it slowly burns in air. I once provoked a challenge over at Trooper York's as to whether Brandt had really discovered phosphorus. You can read that here. I think the notion that medieval alchemist Paracelsus actually discovered phosphorus is a Montana Urban Legend. Incidentally, I did learn researching this blog post that glowing phosphorus may indeed be an ancient phenomenon: see the story of the "will o' the wisp" here.

The Wright painting also reminds me of the covers of the old Aldrich Chemical Company catalogs. I wish that Alfred Bader would publish a collection of all the past covers. More of what I'm talking about can be found here.

Since the time of Brandt, better sources than putrefied urine have been found for the element, namely, bone.  Did you know that we may one day face a phosphate shortage?  Perhaps the time will come when we start to recycle people's bones.

I'll end with a recipe à la Trooper York for elemental phosphorus:

How to Make Phosphorus (ref)

1. Allow urine to sit in an open container for 7 days.

2. Mix two tablespoons of finely-powdered charcoal and two tablespoons of powdered cinnamon* into the urine and stir.

3. Pour the urine/charcoal dust and cinnamon mixture into a glass retort with a glass tube leading into a second beaker filled with plain water.

4. Heat the retort containing the urine mixture using your torch. Be sure to wear protective clothing, eye protection and a breathing mask.

5. Allow the vapors from the urine mixture to bubble through the plain water. A yellow or white waxy substance will collect in the bottom of your water beaker. This is phosphorus. Do not expose it to the air or it may ignite spontaneously. After being exposed to light your phosphorus should glow very brightly in the dark for several hours.
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* I'm not at all sure of the role of cinnamon here--perhaps as an anti-oxidant or an odor-masking agent for a very unsavory process.

Taking the Piss out of Vitalism



Friedrich Wöhler (1800-1882)

The notion that matter from living beings essentially differs from matter derived from non-living sources used to be called vitalism. Vestiges still remain. Historically, the terms "organic" and "inorganic" delineated the chemistry of life from the chemistry of inanimate matter. Over time, "organic chemistry" morphed into the generic chemistry of carbon and, within that genus, biochemistry came to mean the chemistry of living things. This left "inorganic chemistry" to cover the chemistries of every other element. That is more or less the state of things today. Biologists have encroached on biochemistry with molecular biology, bringing along their cellular frame of reference.

We credit Friedrich Wöhler, a 19th century German chemist, with undoing the notion of vitalism in chemistry. He synthesized urea, which had only ever been isolated from urine. The whole story is beautifully retold here. As part of an Internet wager, I tracked down the original letter from Wöhler to his erstwhile mentor, Professor Jakob Berzelius; I partially translated it from German:

Berlin, February 22, 1828

Dear Professor!

Although I surely hope that my letter of January 22nd and the post-script from February 2nd have arrived, I live every day, or rather every hour with the anxious hope to get a letter from you. I wanted to wait to write again but I cannot, so to say, "hold my chemical water" and must say that I can make urea without the use of kidneys or even an animal, whether it be human or canine. Ammonium cyanate is urea. [1]

Wöhler went on to describe how natural urea from urine, Pisse-Harnstoff, was the same as artificial urea.  He then ended with a possible "out" for the adherents to vitalism:

This artificial formation of urea--can it be an example of forming an organic substance from inorganic materials? It is remarkable that cyanic acid (and ammonia) are originally produced from an organic substance, and a natural philosopher would say that both come from an animal carbon, and from the resulting formed cyanic compounds, the organic has not yet disappeared, and therefore an organic body is produced yet again. 

Your Wöhler.

How Wöhler took the piss out of vitalism (so to speak) is a nice example of what T. H. Huxley meant when he later wrote:

The great tragedy of science, the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

I got into a friendly wager over on Twitter after I discovered that both Wöhler and Huxley were credited with that pithy saying.

I tweeted: Who wrote "The great tragedy of science, the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."?

"T.H. Huxley" responded StarlessTwit

Not so fast I responded: "That's what the Internets would have you believe but there is this."  The link goes to a Wiki link crediting Wöhler with the saying.

I wagered that Wöhler had said it originally and that Huxley had been miscredited: link

That's when amba, the fact checker, weighed in, citing original source: "sorry to disappoint"

I can't finding anything close to what Huxley said in the original letters between Wöhler and Berzelius.  Wiki is wrong on this count.

Never bet against amba.

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[1] Wöhler treated cyanic acid, HOCN, with aqueous ammonia and generated ammonium cyanate, NH₄CNO. Ammonium cyanate is unstable and spontaneously rearranges to the more stable urea in situ: