Background

Johann Joachim Becher was born in 1635 in Speyer, Germany. His father, a Protestant minister, died while he was yet a child, leaving a widow and three children. The mother married again; the stepfather spent the tiny patrimony of the children, and at the age of thirteen Becher found himself responsible not only for his own support but also for that of his mother and brothers.

Education

Becher was for the most part self-educated. In his later years, he recalled only one teacher who had helped him, Debus (Konrektor of the Speyer Retscher-Gymnasium from 1644). He received the Doctor of Medicine from the University of Mainz on November 16, 1661.

Career

At the age of thirteen Becher began his Wanderjahren. Residing first in Sweden, he then traveled through Holland, Germany, and Italy. His earliest dated work (1654) deals with alchemy, but his far-flung interests also included medicine, theology, politics, economics, and even the formulation of a universal language. By 1657 Becher had settled at Mainz, where he was converted to Roman Catholicism.

His first published book, Naturkiindigung der Metallen, appeared in 1661, and he was soon well established as an iatrochemist. In 1662 Becher published his Parnassus medicinalis illustratis, and in 1663 he was appointed professor of medicine at Mainz and physician to the elector. Nevertheless, the next year Becher left for Munich, where he was named Hofmedicus und Mathematicus to Ferdinand Maria, elector of Bavaria; in 1666 he accepted the post of imperial commercial counsellor to Emperor Leopold 1 in Vienna. Always interested in problems of law, politics, and commerce, in 1668 he published his Politischer Discurs, which shows him to have been the leading German mercantilist of the seventeenth century.

The years at Munich and Vienna were ones of great activity. In his official position it was Becher’s duty to introduce profitable businesses and new industries. With this in mind, he built and organized an imperial arts and crafts center that included a glassworks and facilities for the manufacture of textiles, as well as a chemistry laboratory.

Aware also of the importance of technical education for the advancement of the domestic economy of the state, he proposed important educational reforms, such as the institution of schools that gave practical instruction in civil and military engineering and statics. At the same time, eager to increase trade, Becher organized the Eastern Trading Company and proposed colonial settlements in South America. Neither did he neglect his role as alchemical advisor to the emperor. His important Physica subterránea appeared in 1669, and was followed by supplements in 1671 and 1675. At this time Becher also wrote his chief philological works and treatises on theology and moral philosophy.

Becher’s economic policies included, in 1677, edicts against French imports that proved to be unsuccessful in the southern German cities. This failure resulted in his dismissal, and after a short imprisonment in 1678, he made his way to Holland, where he sold the plans for a machine that would spool silk cocoons to the city of Haarlem. More important, he submitted to the Dutch Assembly a plan for the extraction of gold from sea sand through smelting. This had been proposed as early as 1673, but it had been abandoned then because of the outbreak of the war with France.

In 1679 a small-scale test of his process proved successful, but Becher suddenly left for England, without his family, when the process was scheduled to be repeated on a larger scale. In London, in March 1680, he completed the third and final supplement to the Physica subterránea in which he described the gold extraction process. He examined mines in Scotland and Cornwall; and his prefaces give evidence that he completed books at Falmouth and the Isle of Wight (the Laboratorium portabile and the Centrum mundi concatenatum seu magnorum duorum productorum nitri & salís textura & anatomía, both parts of the Tripus Hermeticus fatidicus, 1689, 1690).

Shortly before his death he was back in London, where on 22 March 1682 he completed his Chymischer Gliick hafen, which gives 1,500 chemical processes, including detailed recipes for making the philosophers’ stone. While in England, Becher unsuccessfully sought membership in the Royal Society. He had for years cited the works of Robert Boyle, and in 1680 he dedicated a short book on clock design to the Society. It was considered to be of little value, however, and he was not elected.

Becher’s importance for the history of science rests less in major innovations than in his influence on Georg Ernst Stahl. Stahl republished the Physica subterránea in 1703, along with his own lengthy Specimen Beccherianum. In this work and in others he lauded his predecessor while developing the concept of the terrapinguis into the phlogiston theory with the aid of experimental evidence, which was largely lacking in the writings of Becher.

Achievements

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  Becher's major achievement was in publishing of a classification of substances, particularly minerals, in which he expounded a three 'element' theory of matter. Becher's theories were later developed into the phlogiston theory - a theory widely adopted by 18th century chemists, who believed that phlogiston was a substance that existed in all combustible bodies, and was released during combustion.
  
  Becher was one of the most renowned chemists of 17th-century Germany, but he is remembered today mostly as the instigator of the notorious phlogiston theory. In his Physica subterranea of 1669, he proposed the existence of three new chemical principles or “earths”.
  
  His silk manufacturing plant had been established in Walpersdorf (Lower Austria, 1666-1678) and the First Oriental Trade Company had been founded in 1667; he proceeded to set up a House of Arts and Crafts in Vienna as a model work shop (1676-1683). 1679 he resumed his travels and journeyed widely throughout the Netherlands and England. With his mercantilist theories, B. was ahead of his time, although he seldom managed to put his ideas into practice. Was the first to succeed in extracting lighting gas from hard coal; his treatises dealt with theology, philosophy, chemistry and economics.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Truth of the Philosopher's Stone: Magnalia Naturae

    (The Truth of the Philosopher’s Stone or Magnalia Naturae ...)

    1680
  • Chymischer Glücks-hafen 1682
  • Physica Subterranea, Profundam Subterraneorum Genesin 1677
  • Introitus Apertus Ad Occlusum Regis Palatium 1667
  • Spirensis Physica subterranea profundam subterraneorum genesin, A principiis hucusque ignotis, ostendens 1703
  • Novum, breve, perfacile, & solidum organum pro verborum copia, in quavis materiâ, expeditè acquirendâ, omni scriptioni & dictioni perutile, methodi Becherianae didacticae praxis, eiusdem liber, seu an 1671
  • Institutiones chimicae prodromae, id est, Joannis Joachimi Becheri Spirensis ... Oedipus chimicus obscuriorum terminorum & principiorum chimicorum, mysteria aperiens & resolvens: opusculum, omnibus m 1667
  • Gründlicher Bericht von Beschaffenheit und Eigenschafft, Cultivirung und Bewohnung, Privilegien und Beneficien dess in America zwischen dem Rio Orinoque und Rio de 1669
  • Opuscula Chymica Rariora 1719
  • Närrische Weissheit Und Weise Narrheit 1682

• Other Work

  • Commemorative medal made of lead, transmuted by Johann Joachim Becher

    (Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna)

    1675

Religion

Becher was converted to Roman Catholicism after he had settled at Mainz in 1657.

Politics

Becher was against all forms of monopoly. He wanted to ease the debts of the Bohemian towns and to put limits on some of the land-holding nobility’s commercial rights.

Views

Becher’s views on chemistry have much in common with standard seventeenth-century Paracelsian and Helmontian treatments of the subject. His major work, the Physica subterránea, begins in a fashion reminiscent of most theoretical iatrochemical texts. After stating the need for observations and experiments as a guide to a true understanding of the universe, Becher turned to the Mosaic account of the Creation. Here he argued that the universe gravitated from the initial Chaos into five regions (ranging from the sidereal to the mineral). Then a motion was added through the rarefaction that followed the creation of light (heat).

Becher believed that air, water, and earth were the true elementary principles. The last two, however, form the real basis of all material things, since air is primarily an instrument for mixing. The essential substance of subterranean bodies (metals and stones) is earthy, and there is a need for three types of earth in metals and minerals. One type is needed for substance, another for color and combustibility, and a third, more subtle, for form, odor, and weight. These are, respectively, the terra vitrescible, the terrapinguis, and the terra fluida, earths that have been improperly identified with the Paracelsian principles: salt, sulfur, and mercury.

Although Becher insisted that each combustible body must contain the cause of its combustibility within itself, he had no clearly defined position on the role to be played by this substance in the burning process. Generally he spoke of the rarefaction of the burning substance through the dissolving power of flame, and he gave relatively little attention to any part that air might play in combustion. He was aware that metals grew heavier when calcined, and, like Boyle, he credited this to the addition of ponderable fire particles.

Becher wrote in support of spontaneous generation, and he believed firmly in metallic transmutation. He wrote at length on fermentation, which, in typical alchemical fashion, he considered to be a basic natural process of great value for the chemist. For Becher, fermentation was a rarefaction leading to perfection, and it could not continue in closed vessels without a fresh supply of air. As such, fermentation may be clearly distinguished from putrefaction, in which a mixed body is completely broken down and destroyed.

Becher was a thoroughgoing vitalist who accepted the common belief that metals grow in the earth. Similarly, he compared the flow of subterranean waters in the living earth to the flow of blood in man. He believed in a perpetual circularity in nature, and he felt that earthly reactions may properly be compared to the laboratory manipulations of the chemists. He rejected the widely held hypothesis of an internal fire in the earth and sought another explanation of the origin of mountain streams and hot springs. Arguing that it is known that surface waters fall by gravity toward the center of the earth, he noted that laboratory experience gives us the further information that vapors arise when liquids are transferred from hot containers to cold ones. Becher reasoned, therefore, that hot waters from the surface are rapidly cooled at the center of the earth, where they vaporize and return to the surface. There mountains act as alembics, and condense the waters as mountain springs; in other places, separate vapors from the interior reach higher temperatures through mixing before they erupt as hot springs or medicinal spas.

Quotations: “Chemists are a strange class of mortals, impelled by an almost insane impulse to seek their pleasure among smoke and vapor, soot and flame, poisons and poverty, yet among all these evils I seem to live so sweetly, that [I'd die before I'd] change places with the Persian King.” — Johann Becher (c.1675)

Connections

Becher married Maria Veronika, the daughter of the influential jurist and imperial councillor Ludwig von Hornigk, on 13 June 1662.

Wife:

Maria Veronika

References

• Johann Joachim Becher
  2012
• Encyclopedia Britannica
  1910
• The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire
  2016
• The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618-1815
  2019
• Neoclassical Microeconomic Theory: The Founding Austrian Vision
  1997
• The Rise of Historical Economics and Social Reform in Germany 1864-1894
  2003
• Virtuelle Tagzettel: des Universalgelehrten und Politikberaters Johann Joachim Becher
  2011