In 1669, a bankrupt German alchemist boiled fifteen hundred gallons of urine in his basement for months. He was looking for gold.

His name was Hennig Brand. A Hamburg merchant, a junior officer in the Thirty Years War, an amateur alchemist. He had married for money. The first wife died. He married a wealthy widow named Margaretha. By forty he was deep in debt, obsessed with the philosopher's stone, the legendary substance that could turn base metal into gold. Brand had a theory. Urine was the colour of gold. Gold was the colour of gold. Somewhere inside the human body, hidden in waste, was real gold. He just had to boil it out.

Brand started collecting. His own urine. His wife's. Anyone he could buy it from. He let it putrefy in a stone cellar for fourteen days, until worms crawled on the surface. He boiled the liquid down to a thick black syrup. He mixed the syrup with sand and charcoal. He heated the mixture in a sealed crucible for sixteen hours until red fumes rose. He condensed the fumes through a long glass tube into a sealed flask of cold water. And at the bottom of the flask, something glowed. Pale white. Cold. It cast its own faint light against the dark. When Brand scraped it onto a saucer, it caught fire in open air, without a spark.

He had not made gold. He had isolated phosphorus. The first new chemical element discovered in recorded history. The first since antiquity. Brand sold the recipe for two hundred thalers to a Dresden alchemist named Johann Daniel Krafft, who took the glowing substance on tour through the courts of Europe. He demonstrated it to King Charles the Second. He demonstrated it to Robert Boyle. Boyle worked out the chemistry. Every match you have ever struck. Every bag of fertiliser. Every periodic table on every classroom wall. Traces back to a bankrupt German trying to make gold from his own piss.

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