by the golden age scientists as a distillation tool over a thousand years ago. one early pioneer of distillation was the ninth century physician and chemist ara-c. amongst his many writings are the earliest known accounts of using distillation to produce substances like kerosene sulfuric acid and pure alcohol this wasn't for drinking but the use as a medical disinfect. the. hair in istanbul. dark studies the work of the scholars of the golden egg has brought with him and olympic still to show me how the early chemists used it for distillation. this one is made of copper. and there were others made of of glass or a girl glossy yes yes the important thing about a still is that there's

a hot and cold and so the whole turned is where the steam is produced then condenses. and is received into the receiver here what we would need would be water . first of all usually distilled water you could use rainwater the. flue and then will need whatever we're going to distill for example if you want perfect roses would be excellent rose petals up i'm sure the restaurant of mind only not and so the water with the rose petals will be heated up here as the steam given off it takes the center of the rose as it reaches the eleven bit queer it condenses back to liquid and drips down here into this other container who are the people who are carrying out these things the chemistry i think there are two main names which stand out above all the others above all jabbering higher. but also other drowsy. jobber but high on a particular is very early on in the golden age and he is regarded by many as the

first scientists of the golden age and awful things as he doing many of his chemical procedures are those which may still be used today. for example motion or precipitation distillation job about how young was a polymath who grew up in modern day iraq and vast work covers medicine music chemistry and much more there were thousands of manuscripts attributed to far more than a single man could actually have written it's believed that many later scholars wrote under his name because he was held in such high regard whatever the truth he's credited with applying an experimental based approach to chemistry. the scholars of the golden age began applying the scientific method to chemistry by which i mean they were conducting experiments in a way that was

a big leap from the pure philosophical thinking of the ancient greeks but to conduct careful experiments they needed apparatus much of which hadn't even been invented at the time and for chemistry in particular they need to hone their skills at glass blowing and glass making and so i'm going to meet a man who's going to show me just how difficult or easy it is to actually carry out that skill. so i. just. snidely. him be. the star molly. ball. there are some looks for. sure.

they haven't even been a awful. lot of this is the. one . in the wrong one. left as. the number of. the. other month although. if one was making it back in a century he certainly would have been doing it this way the sort of gloss they would have used one thousand years ago would have been very different they were to put this in they did all the other ingredients into these auburn's and just cooked

them a bake them until they melted so although they did have glass blowing to shake the molten glass they didn't have something with such high temperature like this jets of gas here. should clinch. that's pretty remarkable my own lembit. although job and those like him performing experiments and perfecting apparatus the work they were doing was very much a mixture of chemistry and alchemy indeed the arabic word for chemistry is l. kenya from which the word alchemy is derived but where is modern chemistry is a rigorous exact science alchemy is associated with super. a magic the main goal was to turn other metals into gold to his followers job in high yarn was

known as. the mystic because they believed his work was no different from sorcery even today some chemistry can seem like magic. chemistry student and she's going to help me with some demonstrations that i guess could be used as part of a magic show i'm going to. black simply with the power of. rights think. i need to make. up. we go.

it's not hot so this is a chemical reaction that's giving off light but no heat and for our final trick. of course all these reactions we know there's a chemical explanation for what's going on but what we call chemistry has its roots in the alchemy of the golden age. so. to what extent was their real flaw and it's being done in amongst all this myth mysticism and alchemy . jim i don't see a contradiction between science and alchemy. rather i see a synergy the one feeds on the other quite often and that you could say about every period great period of scientific breakthroughs you said of the greeks you can surgically odds of lots of middle ages you could say it's been a sauce or leave it as it newton was was involved in alchemy that's my sigs on the

real thing. the only alchemy squid obsessed with turning common less valuable metals into precious gold job of an eye on a particular was obsessed with trying to dissolve metals and that led him to research all different kinds of suits but gold is notoriously difficult to dissolve so i'm going to buy a small amount of it and see if it's possible. i just didn't like me at eleven at that. job but nothing. and then is there nothing political in merely the dozen or so we have. to live the heads. of more just to have the next you know sentiment. that does.

suck and i'm loving this but it has a commission you didn't. ever complain about and you haven't they're kind of you were. a more a lost than for far the job of an ego is. how are you handling it. took a. month. so we discover lend. a hand i figure i shall look at what it is i love and so this. guy to me through my experiment to dissolve is professor hell so. what the hell i need your chemistry expertise here i've got this gold coin and i wonder is it possible to dissolve gold berry very difficult i don't like all noble metals is relatively unreactive but the act of towards acids is only one assets that can really do the job which is this one. which means kingly water and it's called can be water because it's the only

thing which is old skulled believe that job are high on first distilled it and it's a mixture actually of two s's nitric acid and hard to claw recast yes and it's exceptionally corrosive and exceptionally react it sounds nasty it's very very nasty it's vicious so can you demonstrate it for me let's see if it works so we're going to pour into the baker i'm going to save your piece for gold coins since you've traveled so far with it and used this rather more expendable piece of zinc. so off it goes you can see it bubbling away probably would react as fast as i said it would dissolve away. and why would people want to do this why would they want to dissolve metals like go because you can purify it or you can. find your cold i am dissolving and then re proceed sightings that the meth labs know there was still the fumes are still coming up i think that lump of zinc has been dissolved entirely in the liquid. we did leave a small piece of gold in aqua region although this takes

a lot longer to react but over an hour the gold gradually dissolves. neither of us is on their own will dissolve gold but taken together they produce the right ions today exactly. the teddy chemistry wasn't only about alchemy there was a practical side to it as well and many developments in chemistry was driven by islam. cleanliness was a religious requirement in islam for example the washing of the hands face and feet before prayer and this requirement for cleanliness quickly led to the development of whole industries for example the development of so the first solid falls of so

were found manufactured in the islamic world. jobber but hey on wrote about the difference between acids and alkalies and the word derives from the arabic which means the ashes of salt referring to the original source of substances and of course alkalis are used in so making. rima has meant runs a small soap making business in jordan where she uses age old chemical processes to manufacture so these are all working. to get a nice thank you. ok remember make so by

mixing olive oil with an alkaline and then adding her own herbs and spices. this chemical process is called support a fixation now week. after cooling the soap is cut into bars and then left to draw it for two weeks. this. is a herb yeah yeahs this is believes this is but is it good for the skin and maybe. for the here not for me two legs from big. during the golden age soap making was commercialized and the process started to be developed on an industrial scale today

a bar of soap that lehman makes in two weeks can be produced in an industrial soap factory in just a few hours. this said factories in its in the united kingdom and jamie benton is in charge of the plant. was principally been made in the same way for centuries a mixture of oil and alkali we've been making soap here for one hundred fifty years and one of our king gradients is in this big tank that's one hundred tons of caustic soda the alkali to react with the oil. on this site they produce about thirty tonnes of soap per day around a hundred thousand tonnes a year industrialize soapmaking on this grand scale needs chemistry on a grand scale too and the critical factor is controlling the chemical reaction mixing carefully measured quantities in temperature controlled reactors so in this reactor we've got home kernel oil which is already we're adding the coconut oil

which is the part of the soap that actually creates the after that we're adding caustic soda. the mixture is constantly monitored as it reacts and about an hour later the reaction is complete as with remus process once it's reactive to the next stage is to draw out the soak. in here is a back you spray dryer so the so that's really here we create a vacuum and suck the water out of the so. banks of dried so pellets are sent from the factory all over the world where they are perfect and shaped into bars of so. has been made in basically the same way for centuries but modern technology like vacuum spray draw isn't precisely controlled reactors have

sped up the process. modern chemistry relies on being able to weigh and measure accurately and that's something we can trace back to the golden age. one of the reasons we regard the scholars of the golden age as the first true sciences is their obsession with accuracy is the reason why we think of job and draws the as the first true chemists and here's an example of why this beautiful sets. scales it was built by a scholar by the name of a higher than in the twelfth century it's called means arnel hecker and is said to be accurate to one part in sixty thousand if you look very carefully along the army can see very precise graduations giving us the distance from the center and as the cups are hanging from different lengths it's basically the principle of moments as they move out they will pull it down the balance is achieved when the diamond shape

in the middle is exactly vertical it's very very precise but apart from that it's actually a beautiful work of art as well. accurate weighing in measurement allowed early chemists like java have been hired to be more rigorous in their experiments and their approach to all aspects of chemistry and this included the way he looked at materials grouping and categorizing them categorizing substances enables us to navigate our way around the scientific world just like in this bizarre over here i find carpets. over here like this and after the lights textiles and over here ceramics. one job i've been high on did that was different was categorized

substances not according to arbitrate factors but according to the way they behaved in experiments this was a huge change in what had come before. back in the lab i wanted to find out what hell as a modern chemist thought of jobbers early attempts at categorizing acts and i want to show you this extracts from a manuscript of his so this is translated from arabic it's latin into english it says here among all bodies of whatsoever kind we find soul which is gold not. to be burned by sulfur and elise reacted with sulfur to the next to this least burned is jupiter which is there lou no which is silver and he goes on and he ends with and mars which is ion by reason of the only add geneive sulphur is most easily burned it's all very obscure in fact the word jibberish actually comes from jobbers namely that it if you write something to obscurely is jibberish it's like job but what he

has here seems to me the beginnings of the reactivity series for metals listing them in order of how easily they react with sulfur yes how correct was this well there was a couple little inaccuracies in it but he was way ahead of his time because showing reactivity was sulphur is often quite difficult so what i thought we do is we're going to compare and contrast of the activities of certain metals with water iron for example which he mentions we all know the i and russ so that's a slow reaction but we're going to compare and contrast a triumvirate of metals and see how fast they react and they are potassium sodium and copper i thought we'd start with the most reactive this is potassium and it's very soft and malleable and you can easily cut it with a knife so three to one.