Lithium transmutation

The scene at the Chemical Society had transcended that ever experienced at a scientific meeting. Ramsay began by giving a clear and concise account of the reasons for his faith in transmutation, and alluded playfully to the criticisms that had been brought against his statements about the transformation of copper into lithium. 

As the transmutation rush continued across 1913 and 1914, the Alchemical Society continued to engage with scientific research. The engineer Herbert Chatley, in his December 12, 1913, talk to the Society entitled Alchemy in China, discussed Ramsay s transmutations, presumably his radon-induced supposed transmutations from copper to lithium and his observed transmutations of radium to helium. Chatley opined that a more gradual change would produce gold as one of the descending steps (37). And the December... 

A little later Madame Curie and Mademoiselle GHeditsch repeated Cameron and Ramsay s experiments on copper salts, using, however, platinum apparatus. They failed to detect lithium after the action of the emanation, and think that Cameron and Ramsay s results may be due to the glass vessels employed. Dr. Perman has investigated the direct action of the emanation on copper and gold, and has failed to detect any trace of lithium. The transmutation of copper into lithium, therefore, must be regarded as unproved, but further research is necessary before any conclusive statements can be made on the subject. 

Transmutation of Copper into Lithium.—The transmutation of the baser metals into gold was one of the chief aims of the alchemists. Although their labours proved fruitless as regards their immediate object, they laid the foundation of that scientific chemistry to which the modem industrial world owes a deep debt of obligation. In 1818 Faraday contemplated as a possibility the transmutation of the metals, for he said in a lecture delivered before the City Philosophical Society To decompose the metals, to re-form them, and to realize the once absurd notion of transmutation—these are the problems now given to the chemist for solution. 6... 

The suggested possibility of transmuting copper into lithium and sodium has already been mentioned (pp. 55 and 87). 

Results by Ramsay and collaborators on the supposed transmutation of elements, e.g. of copper into lithium by exposure to radium emanation, were all shown to be erroneous. ... 

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