Transmutational gold rush

And in 189 6 (and possibly even the year before, when Crowley had attended his lectures), Ramsay had asked his class to think of themselves as medieval students of alchemy. He asked them to imagine him as the alchemist Basil Valentine as he read to them one of Valentine s discourses on alchemy in class. Ramsay and Collie both would be at the center of what, in chapter 3,1 shall call the transmutational gold rush —when academic chemists, beginning around 1904 and following Ramsay s lead, attempted to use radiation to transmute the elements and specifically saw this practice in alchemical terms. 

While some contemporary alchemists such as Hunter, Emmens, Jollivet-Castelot, and Ayton had indeed tried to make gold, Ramsay s attempted transmutations led to a rush toward a different kind of treasure scientific immortality. Multiple chemists pursued the same kinds of experiments that Ramsay had, believing that they too had found positive results. They attempted to position themselves within the scientific world as the first to have proven artificial transmutation. Between 1907, when Ramsay announced his supposed copper transmutations in Nature, and 1914, when he abandoned his efforts, several significant chemists (including J. N. Collie, Hubert Patterson, E. C. C. Baly, Thomas Merton, Irvine Masson, and A. C. G. Egerton) all participated in experiments to use either radium emanation or cathode rays and X-rays to cause chemical transmutation. 

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... 

The fire of the furnace, which might be fueled with anything from charcoal and peat to rushes and animal dung, needed constant attention. Many alchemists believed that transmutation would be easier if very high temperatures could be obtained. They used the bellows to such an extent that they earned the niclmame of "puffer." Now this term is used more appropriately to describe those who were searching only for gold, and not the true alchemist who also aimed at spiritual perfection. 

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