Stimulated perhaps by Brandt’s obstinacy and Krafft’s treachery, Kunckel set to work and in time succeeded in manufacturing phosphorus. It may be taken as certain that he had picked old Brandt’s brains a little, and his own skill and shrewdness enabled him to fill up the gaps in his knowledge. However he acquired the art, he soon became the first practical manufacturer of phosphorus.
Brandt discovered phosphorus because he had arrived at the conviction that the philosopher’s stone was to be got from urine. In the course of his experiments with that liquid, phosphorus came out unexpectedly from the process of distilling urine with sand and lime.
The new substance excited great curiosity in scientific circles all over Europe, but the German chemists who knew anything about it kept their information secret, and only misleading stories of its origin were published. Robert Boyle, however, who was travelling on the Continent when the interest in the discovery was keenest, got a hint of the method of manufacture, and on his return to England proceeded to experiment. His operator and assistant in these investigations was Ambrose Godfrey Hanckwitz, who became the founder of a London pharmaceutical business which still exists. Ultimately Boyle and Hanckwitz were completely successful, and for many years the “English phosphorus” supplied by Hanckwitz from his laboratory in Southampton Street, Strand, monopolised the European market. According to a pamphlet published by him, entitled “Historia Phosphori et Fama,” the continental phosphorus was an “unctuous, dawbing oyliness,” while his was the “right glacial” kind.
In 1680 Boyle deposited with the Royal Society, of which he was then president, a sealed packet containing an account of his experiments and of his process for the production of the “Icy Noctiluca,” as he called his phosphorus.
It is related in the Memoirs of the Academy of Sciences of Paris for 1737 that in that year a stranger appeared in Paris and offered for a stipulated reward to communicate the process of making phosphorus to the French Government. A committee of the Academy, with Hellot as its president, was appointed to witness the stranger’s manipulation. According to the report of this committee, the experiment was completely successful.
It only remains to add, to complete the history, that in 1769, Gahn, a Swedish mine owner, discovered phosphorus in bones, and that working from this observation Scheele in 1775 devised the process for the manufacture of phosphorus which is still followed.
Such a remarkable substance as phosphorus, extracted as it had been from the human body, was evidently marked out for medical uses. Experiments were soon commenced with it. Kunckel’s “luminous pills” were the first in the field, so far as is known. His report was published in the “Chemische Anmerkungen” in 1721. He gave it in three-grain doses, and reported that it had a calmative effect! Subsequently it was tried in various diseases by continental practitioners. Mentz commended it in colic, Langensalz in asthenic fevers, Bonneken in tetanus, Wetkard in apoplexy, and Trampel in gout.
In 1769 Alphonse Leroy, of Paris, reported a curious experience. He was sent for to a patient apparently on the point of death from phthisis. Seeing that the case was hopeless, he prepared and administered a placebo of sugared water. Calling the next day, Leroy found his patient somewhat revived, and on examining the sugar which he had used for his solution, he found that some phosphorus had been kept in it for a long time. The patient was much too far gone to recover, but she survived for fifteen days, and Leroy attributed this amelioration to the phosphorised water which he had accidentally given her.
Gahn discovered phosphorus in the bones in 1768, and in 1779 another German chemist named Hensing ascertained its presence in a fatty matter which he extracted from the brain. Medical theories were naturally based on these observations. Couerbe, a French chemist quoted by Dr. Churchill, wrote thus in 1830:
“The want of phosphorus in the brain would reduce man to the sad condition of the brute; an excess of this element irritates the nervous system, excites the individual, and throws him into that terrible state of disturbance called madness, or mental alienation; a moderate proportion gives rise to the sublimest ideas, and produces that admirable harmony which spiritualists call the soul.”