The Philosopher’s Stone is Blue
How Prussian Blue is Poised to Save Your Life
Around 1706, in what is arguably one of the most prolific scientific accidents of all time, a color maker working in a Berlin lab ran out of his normal potash (water-soluble potassium salts commonly used as a base) and borrowed some from the alchemist who ran the lab.
The colorist, a man named Johann Jacob Diesbach, was in the process of concocting a traditional red derived from crushed insects. Meanwhile the alchemist who owned the lab was no mere mortal but a bit of a mad scientist intent on creating an “elixir of life”, so his potash wasn’t your average base. Instead, Dippel, the alchemist, had distilled it using animal blood.
Before embarking on the dark arts, Johann Konrad Dippel, attended university to become a lecturer. However, his outspoken beliefs against the church branded him a heretic and, consequently, a convict. Once remanded from prison, he developed a bent for alchemy, wildly claiming he had discovered the fabled philosopher’s stone which could transform lead into gold. When that didn’t pan out, he turned to the idea of creating a cure-all.
Dippel wrote extensively about animal dissection, allegedly robbing graves and experimenting on cadavers to test his nostrums. Those rumors — along with the fact that he was born in…
