The End of Alchemy? The Repudiation and Persistence of Chrysopoeia at the Academie Royale des Sciences in the Eighteenth Century

The general abandonment of serious endeavor toward metallic transmutation represents a major development in the history of chemistry, yet its exact causes and timing remain unclear. This essay examines the fate of chrysopoeia at the eighteenth-century Academie Royale des Sciences. It reveals a long-standing tension between Academie chemists, who pursued transmutation, and administrators, who tried to suppress it. This tension provides background for Etienne-Francois Geoffroy's 1722 paper describing fraudulent practices around transmutation. Although transmutation seems to disappear after Geoffroy's paper, manuscripts reveal that most of the institution's chemists continued to pursue it privately until at least the 1760s, long after widely accepted dates for the "demise of alchemy" in learned circles.