THE YEAR 1669 MUST HAVE BEEN A
STRANGE ONE FOR HENNIG BRAND.
..........................................
Over the course of several months, the
Hamburg alchemist had collected 5,500 litres
of urine, left his spoils to stand until they were
putrid, boiled the resulting matter down to
a paste, mixed it with sand, cooked it some
more, and passed the emanating vapours
through water. The small glob of waxy
material he was left with glowed in the dark.
For someone trying to create gold, the
luminous substance must have seemed like
a promising start. But once he examined
it closely, Brand was forced to admit that,
by distilling wee, he hadn’t become the
first person to uncover the Philosopher’s
Stone. What he had become, rather, was
the first person to have actively discovered
a new chemical element. Brand dubbed
his creation ‘Phosphorus mirabilis’ – the
Ancient Greek for ‘miraculous bearer of
light’ – and sold his formula to a merchant
who thought he might somehow find a use
for the stuff.
While phosphorus was no Philosopher’s
Stone, its discovery would prove to be a
major scientific breakthrough. The sixth
most common element in any living
organism, phosphorus is essential to life on
Earth. It’s also frustratingly hard to get your
hands on. The element is so reactive and
volatile that it barely even exists in the wild:
white phosphorus, for instance, self-ignites
in air at about 30°C. And so it was that the
13 th known element, which was devilishly
hard to get hold of, disgusting to produce
and dangerously flammable, was dubbed
the ‘Devil’s element’.Initially, interest in phosphorus centred on
its potential as a medicine, and chemists- apparently not keen on Brand’s patented
urine-boiling method – set to work deriving
the stuff from bone ash. By the 1840s,
however, focus shifted to the element’s use
as a fertiliser, and countries looking to feed
their growing populations realised it could
also be harvested from guano – bird or bat
excreta. If the finest trick the Devil ever
played was convincing the world he didn’t
exist, his second would have to be chivvying
countries into a war over bird shit. In 1864,
Spain, envying Peru’s guano game, seized the
country’s crap-splattered Chincha Islands.
Chile, Ecuador and Bolivia rallied to Peru’s
aid... though no sooner had they sent the
Spaniards on their way than Chile turned
tail, claimed the islands for itself, and went
on to grab Bolivia’s section of the guano-rich
Atacama Desert too. The fallout was the
so-called ‘Guano War’ of 1879–1884, a conflict
which saw Bolivia lose not only its guano
reserves but also its coastline.If the Devil’s element has played its hand
in destruction – phosphorus has also been
a component in incendiaries, nerve agents,
napalm, tracer ammunition, and the bombs
with which the Allies strafed Hamburg (the
city, incidentally, in which the ‘miraculous
bearer of light’ was first discovered) – it
has also been put to more productive uses.
Without phosphorus-based fertilisers, it’s
doubtful a global population that has tripled
since World War II would have been able to
sustain itself.Yet even on this count, the Devil might have
one more trick for us up his sleeve. Phosphorus
is a finite resource, and many scientists have
warned that our reserves may have already
peaked. If we don’t wean our crops off the
stuff soon, mass starvation could ensue. Some
countries are already taking notice. In early
2017, Germany passed a motion making
the recovery of phosphorus obligatory for
its wastewater treatment plants. Brand, in
hoarding his piss, was perhaps ahead of his
time. When Germany’s ‘New Sewerage Sludge
Ordinance’ comes into effect, the phosphorus
storywillhavecomefull cycle. •RANDOM ELEMENT Writer Carl Dansk
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127 SMITH JOURNAL