AMERICA’S AMAZING ALCHEMIST
Sir William questioned the theory of argentaurum as an immediate substance between silver and gold. In reply, Dr. Emmens outlined his general method, but he never revealed all the details of his process. He told the English scientist to take a Mexican dollar, and “dispose it in an apparatus which will prevent expansion or flow. Then subject it to heavy, rapid, and continuous beatings under conditions of cold such as to prevent even a temporary rise of temperature when the blows are struck. Test the material from hour to hour, and at length you will find more than the trace (less than one part in ten thousand) of gold which the dollar originally contained.”
In duplicating the experiment, Sir William used a steel mortar with a close-fitting piston. The piston had a weight of twenty-eight pounds, and was raised and dropped a foot sixty times a minute by means of a cam on a rotating shaft. The mortar was enclosed in a coil of pipes containing liquid carbonic acid, and immersed in solid ice. The hammering process covered a period of forty hours. As a result the gold content of the silver was raised from .062 to .075 — a difference of 20.9 per cent. It should be pointed out that no chemical processing followed the mechanical treatment.
Dr. Emmens considered this experiment a valuable independent testimony on the truth of his theory. Without asking Crookes’ permissions, he published an account of the results, and the English physicist never forgave him for taking this liberty. Sir William complained bitterly that Emmens had betrayed a confidence, and had placed an importance on the experiment that it did not deserve.
Later Crookes made a second experiment that resulted in total failure. In this attempt, however, the physicist used chemically-pure silver. Emmens had previously stated that the silver must contain at least a trace of gold in its composition for the “force-engine” to produce more gold. But Sir William had either forgotten this statement or regarded it as unimportant.In March, 1898, Emmens wrote the following paragraph in a letter to Crookes: “You have made two experiments. In one you employed metal from a normal Mexican dollar and obtained an increase of nearly 21 per cent in the contained gold. In the other you employed abnormal Mexican dollars, and obtained no gold. It seems to me that your duty is to dispassionately announce both experiments.”
But the English scientist apparently had no desire to have his name linked with modern alchemy. Moreover, Sir William made a second unfortunate mistake. He asked Emmens to send him “a small piece of the gold you have made.” Emmens sent him a sample of the product he was selling to the U.S. Mint, which, naturally did not contain “argentaurum,” a substance which Emmens considered a temporary one in his process.
However, Crookes called the sample “a specimen of argentaurum,” and published a detailed analysis of its composition in a British scientific periodical. He pointed out that it contained only well-known elements, and that the spectrograph revealed “no lines belonging to any other known element, and no unknown lines were detected.”
By this time the correspondence between the two men had been strained to the breaking point. Sir William had spent a lot of money on his experiments, and the refusal of Emmens to go into exact details regarding his process was an added source of irritation. He, likewise, felt that Emmens had violated his confidence by publishing parts of his private letters.
The inventor, on the other hand, was annoyed by the Englishman’s suspicions, and his refusal to continue or publicly report his experiments. In May, 1898, he wrote his final letter to Crookes: “Really, don’t you think it poor sport to ride the horse of grievance? You and I are growing old, and we may surely turn our time to better account than in exchanging complaint and repartee over such a trifling matter as the whether an experiment with a bit of metal should or should not be treated as a weighty secret?” The English scientist never replied.
A year later Emmens published a book entitled Argentaurana, or Some Contributions to the History of Science. It contained a general outline of his methods, together with his correspondence on the subject with Sir William Crookes. Shortly later he exhibited his process at the Greater Britain Exhibition.
Did Dr. Emmens actually created artificial gold which he sold to the U.S. Mint? In one assay report of “argentaurum gold” made by the government, it was stated that the ingots contained impurities of a kind “constantly present in old jewelry.” In referring to this report some twenty years ago, the British writer Lieut.-Commander Rupert T. Gould, R.N., stated that this “was as neat a way of calling Emmens a ‘fence’ as could be imagined.” On the other hand, the same impurities — traces of copper, platinum, lead, zinc and iron — are to be found in coined Mexican dollars.
Dr. Stephen H. Emmens died shortly after the turn of the century, and his secret died with him. No evidence of fraud has ever been found to discredit America’s only alchemist. And his mysterious argentaurum gold, in coins and in bars buried below Fort Knox, is now a part of the wealth that supports the monetary system of the United States.