The Net (substance)
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The Net, in alchemy, is an alloy of copper and antimony, whose crystal structure induces a network pattern on its surface. It was described in the 17th century by the Harvard-educated alchemist George Starkey.
Starkey produced the substance by following what he regarded as a recipe, encoded in classical mythology, for part of the process of achieving the philosopher's stone. The relevant myth involved the god Vulcan finding his wife Venus (alchemical symbol for copper) in bed with the god Mars
Starkey's interpretation rested on typical alchemical associations, construing Vulcan as a stand-in for fire, Venus for copper, and Mars for iron; Vulcan, the craftsman of the gods, having made a metal net for the purpose of hanging the adulterous couple from a high ceiling, Starkey saw the use of iron to reduce antimony sulfide at high temperature to antimony regulus, and combining it with copper to produce the "network" on the alloy, as fulfilling the real meaning of the story.
Isaac Newton described his own synthesis of the Net in his secret notebooks (alchemy being a serious crime in England in its time), and adopted a theory like Starkey's, of mythological tales as secret alchemical information.
[edit] External links
- "The Chymical Laboratory Notebooks of George Starkey", by William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, pp. 25-41 in Frederic Lawrence Holmes et al., Reworking the Bench: Research Notebooks in the History of Science.
