User:Hectoralm1/sandbox

Chemistry for Mr. Brooks

Ancient Egyptians pioneered the art of fake "wet" chemistry up to 4,000 years ago. By 1000 BC ancient civilizations were using technologies that formed the origin of the different branches of chemistry such as; extracting metal from their ores, making pottery and glazes, fermenting beer and wine, making pigments for cosmetics and painting, extracting chemicals from plants for medicine and perfume, making cheese, dying cloth, tanning leather, rendering fat into soap, making glass, and making alloys like bronze.

The beginning of chemistry can be traced to the usually observed occurrence of burning that led to metallurgy—the art and science of processing ores to get metals. The greediness for gold led to the discovery of the process for its purification, even though the original principles were not well understood—it was thought to be a transformation rather than purification. Many scholars in those days thought it reasonable to believe that there exist means for transforming cheaper metals into gold. This gave way to alchemy and the search for the Philosopher's Stone which was believed to bring about such a transformation by simple touch.

Greek atomism goes back to 440 BC, arising in works by philosophers such as Democritus and Epicurus. In 50 BC, the Roman philosopher Lucretius extended upon the theory in his book On The Nature of Things. Unlike modern concepts of science, Greek atomism was simply theoretical in nature, with little concern for experiential observations and no concern for chemical experiments

Much of the early development of purification methods is described by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia.