Anne Rooney - The Story of Chemistry

Making medicines has been an important spur to progress in chemistry for millennia. Here, 13th-century Persian pharmacists are at work.

Our earliest ancestors began their exploration of pre-chemistry when they discovered the transformative power of fire, or ground minerals and plant matter to make pigments and medicines. These first adventures were doubtless haphazard and random; they would have revealed some substances that were useful, some that were not, and probably some that were downright dangerous.

Early humans messing around with matter and its properties exploited the riches of the natural environment in a way that involved changing them to uncover new properties. This is the very essence of chemistry: to discover the ways in which matter can be transformed and use them to your advantage. We can easily imagine a forebear from the Paleolithic period poking a stick in the fire and finding that he or she could then make a mark on the rock with the blackened end, or that juicy, chewy, fibrous meat becomes easier to eat and has a different flavour after the application of fire. Perhaps dyes and pigments were first discovered accidentally, when squashed plant material left a stain. Without curiosity, these serendipitous accidents would have led nowhere. Inquisitive humans who heated lumps of earth with sparkly seams running through them to extract the metal, or fashioned clay from the mud at their feet into useful shapes, were the first proto-scientists, the first pre-chemists. They didnt know or need to know how the transformation of matter worked or why it changed properties they simply explored and exploited their discoveries in ways that became essential to human culture and civilization.