Mysterious Metal Found in Renaissance Astronomer’s Lab

Traces of tungsten, a metal not isolated until 1783, have been discovered in the 16th-century lab equipment of astronomer Tycho Brahe. Brahe ¹, known for his pre-telescopic observations, including a supernova, worked as an alchemist in an underground lab at his Uraniborg observatory.

Here’s why this is so interesting.

How Did Tycho Get Tungsten?

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Image Credit: Eduard Ender (1822-1883), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The find suggests Brahe’s experiments may have somehow yielded tungsten compounds long before the element’s official discovery by Spanish chemists Juan José and Fausto Elhuyar.

While the details remain a mystery, the anachronistic tungsten traces hint at the ingenuity of Renaissance alchemists, whose work helped lay the foundations of modern chemistry.

Brahe the Alchemist

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While best known for his revolutionary astronomical observations, Tycho Brahe had another passion – alchemy. Like many intellectuals of the Renaissance period, he dabbled in the mysterious art, seeking to transmute elements and brew elixirs.

Brahe set up a state-of-the-art alchemy workshop beneath his famous Uraniborg observatory.

Very little is known about what exactly went on down there. After Brahe’s death, Uraniborg was demolished, and the underground lab was lost to history. That is until archaeologists in the 1980s uncovered some intriguing glassware shards.

Traces of Tungsten

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Fast-forward to 2024, and those 400-year-old glass and ceramic pieces have undergone high-tech chemical analysis. Using plasma mass spectrometry, Professor Kaare Lund Rasmussen found traces of tungsten and other elements not typically associated with Renaissance alchemy.

Tungsten is an extremely hard, heat-resistant metal with the highest melting point of any element. But in Brahe’s time, it was completely unknown to science.

The metal was first isolated in 1783 by Spanish chemists José and Fausto Elhuyar. They produced it by reducing an acidic compound found in the mineral wolframite.

An Alchemical Mystery

Mysterious Metal Found in Renaissance Astronomer's Lab » scheelite wc
Image Credit:Géry PARENT, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

So what was tungsten doing in Tycho Brahe’s lab equipment 200 years before its official discovery? Rasmussen proposes that Brahe may have unknowingly extracted it from a mineral called scheelite.

Scheelite contains compounds of tungsten and calcium. Back in 1781, Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele had produced a mysterious acidic substance from scheelite, which he sensed was a new element. But he never managed to isolate the pure metal. The Elhuyar brothers later used Scheele’s acid to obtain elemental tungsten.(ref)

It’s possible that Brahe experimented with scheelite and inadvertently separated some tungsten compounds, which ended up embedded in his glassware. Without modern chemical knowledge, he would have had no idea he was handling an undiscovered element.

The Astronomer’s Secret Knowledge?

Mysterious Metal Found in Renaissance Astronomer's Lab » wolfram wc
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There is another more speculative possibility. Professor Rasmussen notes that German mineralogist Georgius Agricola described an unknown substance in tin ores back in the early 1500s, which he called “wolfram.” Agricola realized this wolfram was messing up his tin smelting.

Could Brahe have been aware of Agricola’s enigmatic wolfram and intentionally tried to investigate it? For now, there’s no clear evidence to support this idea, but it’s an intriguing thought. Perhaps the great astronomer had an inkling about the existence of tungsten long before its formal discovery.

While we may never know for sure how tungsten traces ended up in Tycho Brahe’s lab equipment, the find highlights the ingenuity and experimentation of Renaissance alchemists.

As they pursued their arcane arts, they were also laying the foundations for modern chemistry, sometimes uncovering elemental mysteries they couldn’t fully comprehend.

Source:

  1. Science Daily
Martha A. Lavallie
Martha A. Lavallie
Author & Editor | + posts

Martha is a journalist with close to a decade of experience in uncovering and reporting on the most compelling stories of our time. Passionate about staying ahead of the curve, she specializes in shedding light on trending topics and captivating global narratives. Her insightful articles have garnered acclaim, making her a trusted voice in today's dynamic media landscape.