MARGINALIA
Meissen Chymistry
Roald Hoffmann
The art of making porcelain was a Chinese technology known and
valued in the West, yet Europe tried—and failed—to
emulate this secret for hundreds of years. Porcelain was eventually
made in Saxony in 1709, in a successful piece of applied chemical
research by the "collaboration" of three men of strikingly
different character. One of these, Johann Friedrich Böttger,
was an alchemist who, in his life and work, illustrated the scant
separation of alchemy and chemistry during that time. Let me tell
their story.
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