1983 – 6(3)

In summary, the constant-heat athanor was probably the last substantial development in apparatus contributed by alchemical writers before the Scientific Revolution, though the cross-fertilization of alchemy by technical mining and distilling tracts led to new improvements in the 17th c. The discovery, for example, that a chimney can be used on a furnace to increase its draft (thus eliminating bellows) may well have been an original discovery of the German alchemist J. R. Glauber (Furni novi philosophici: 1649). It is nonetheless true that many alchemical techniques had become absolete as early as the 13th c., when we find medical writers, not alchemists, describing watercooled distillation for the production of ethanol. Although it is fairly certain that Alexandrian alchemists of the first centuries of the Christian era were the inventors of the still as we know it, and the sublimatory, it was only after synthesizing the advances of industrial distillers and metallurgists that Renaissance alchemy could contribute to the apparatus of the Scientific Revolution.

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