We can talk about the development of chemistry since the emergence of intelligent man, that is, hundreds of thousands of years ago. If today making fire is a trivial matter, then for the first people experiments with fire could be called the greatest breakthrough. Tanning of hides, cooking of food – all these are the first steps of mankind in the field of chemistry. Tens of thousands of years ago, people already knew how to make paints, medicines, and poisons. Gradually, in the minds of enlightened scientists, a separate science – alchemy – began to take shape.

One of the first great scientific discoveries of alchemists could be considered the invention of glass in Egypt in the 4th millennium B.C. It is amazing, but the composition of glass of that time and our days are almost identical. Of course, at that time, only a select few had knowledge of the technology. Mostly it was priests, who guarded their knowledge from ordinary mortals. Europeans learned about chemistry only in 700 A.D., when the Arabs conquered Spain.

At that time, as now, gold was of great value. And the best minds among alchemists unsuccessfully struggled with the task of turning ordinary metals into noble metals. Thanks to this, the Arab alchemist Heber and his students invented many methods of chemical preparation: crystallization, filtration. Scientists described the production of sulfuric, nitric and acetic acids, prepared silver nitrate, bichloride, ammonia and arsenic acid. However, they failed to solve the main problem – they never extracted gold from the metal. True, no one has succeeded to this day.