Scientists examined the artifacts of a medieval alchemist – and found an element that changed history

Here’s what you’ll learn as you read this story:

• Researchers analyzed centuries-old shards from Tycho Brahe’s ruined observatory, revealing evidence of his secret basement alchemical laboratory and the metals he used to make noble potions.

• The shards showed the expected elements—but also tungsten, a surprise since it wasn’t officially identified until the 1780s, raising the question of whether Brahe used it intentionally or encountered it by accident.

• The discovery highlights how Brahe mixed astronomy and chemistry, using metals bound to planets and organs, while the actual role of tungsten in his treatment remains unknown.

This story is a collaboration with Biography.com.

Nowadays, we would call them proprietary blends. But in the late 1500s and early 1600s, individual alchemists called the potions they concocted in their laboratories ‘secrets’. And thanks to a study published in Hereditary scienceWe now know a little more about the secrets of an alchemist in particular.

It turns out that Tycho Brahe, mostly known for his study of astronomy, had his own basement laboratory for mixing potions with certain special elements.

Brahe’s famous observatory, now housed in his castle-like Uraniborg observatory on the island of Van in Sweden, was demolished in 1601 after his death. But recently, a team of researchers from the University of Southern Denmark and the National Museum of Denmark analyzed five shards between the garden and this ancient garden. The shards were believed to have come from a basement alchemical laboratory.

The authors examined the cross sections of the shards for 31 trace elements using mass spectrometry by converting the sample molecules into charged ions. While the shards were rich in the expected elements — including nickel, copper, zinc, tin, antimony, gold, mercury, and lead (four of which were glass and one was ceramic) — there was one discovery that surprised experts: tungsten.

“Tungsten is very mysterious,” archaeologist Kare Lund Rasmussen of the University of Southern Denmark said in a statement. “Tungsten wasn’t even described at the time, so what are we to infer from its presence in a shard from Tycho Brahe’s alchemy workshop?”

This is a question that does not have a clear answer. While Rasmussen said that tungsten occurs naturally in some minerals, and could have entered Brahe’s laboratory that way, there is another plausible theory: Brahe had a secret substance to help him create medicines for Europe’s elite.

Not classified as an element until the 1780s, tungsten probably first appeared in German chemistry as ‘wolfram’, and had a German influence on Brahe’s medicine. “Perhaps Tycho Brahe heard about this and thus knew of the existence of tungsten,” Rasmussen surmised. “But that’s not something we know or can say based on the analysis I’ve done. It’s just one possible theoretical explanation for why we find tungsten in the samples.”

“The most interesting elements are found in higher concentrations than expected,” Rasmussen said, “indicating enrichment and providing insight into the materials used in Tycho Brahe’s alchemical laboratory.”

The business of making medicine was secret. Brahe, like others of the day, did not share the makeup of the prescription. Brahe was known for his plague medicine – an extremely complex remedy that could contain up to 60 ingredients, from snake meat and opium to copper, oil and herbs. Could the resulting drug also contain tungsten as part of the finished product?

“It may seem strange that Tycho Brahe was involved in both astronomy and alchemy, but when one understands his worldview, it makes sense,” Paul Grinder-Hansen, senior researcher and museum curator at the National Museum of Denmark, said in a statement. “He believed that there was a clear connection between the heavenly bodies, the elementary substances and the organs of the body.”

Gold and mercury were often used in medicines by alchemists (including Brahe), and it was common for alchemists to associate earth elements with properties of space and the human body. And there’s a whole list of those connections. Silver is linked to the moon and the brain, while gold is linked to the sun and the heart. Jupiter and the liver were connected by tin, Venus and copper by the kidneys, Saturn and the spleen by lead, Mars and the gall bladder by iron, and Mercury and the lungs (of course) by mercury. In this thinking, gold was a common ingredient for the medicine of the day, including that taken by Brahe.

Where tungsten fits into the mix, however, is unclear. It is still a secret.

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