DISCOVERY OF ALCOHOL AND DISTILLATION. 85 

 THE DISCOVERY OF ALCOHOL AND DISTILLATION. 



BY M. P. E. M. BERTHELOT. 



A LCOHOL is an important factor in modern civilizations, the 

 -j~ source of great revenues to states, and of immense wealth, 

 to those who deal in products containing it. While wine, beer, 

 hydromel, etc., have been in use from prehistoric times, the active 

 principle common to them which produces the pleasant excite- 

 ment and the disgusting intoxication, and which is concentrated 

 in spirituous liquors, alcohol, has been known for only seven or 

 eight centuries ; it was unknown in antiquity. The story of the 

 way the discovery of it was made is one of much interest. 



The reservation of the name of alcohol for the product of the 

 distillation of wine is modern. Till the end of the eighteenth 

 century the word, of Arabic origin, signified any principle atten- 

 uated by extreme pulverization or by sublimation. It was applied, 

 for example, to the powder of sulphuret of antimony (koheul), 

 which was used for blackening the eyes, and to various other 

 substances, as well as to spirits of wine. No author has been 

 found of the thirteenth century, or even of the fourteenth cen- 

 tury and later, who applied the word alcohol to the product of 

 the distillation of wine. The term spirit of wine or ardent spirit, 

 although more ancient, was also not in use in the thirteenth 

 century ; for the word spirit was at that time reserved for vola- 

 tile agents, like mercury, sulphur, the sulphurets of arsenic, and 

 sal ammoniac, which were capable of acting on metals and modi- 

 fying their color and properties. The term eau-de-vie was given 

 in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to the elixir of long 

 life. It was Arnaud de- Villeneuve who employed it for the first 

 time to designate the product of the distillation of wine. But he 

 used it, not as a specific name, but in order to mark the assimila- 

 tion which he made of it with the product drawn from wine. The 

 elixir of long life of the ancient alchemists had nothing in com- 

 mon with our alcohol. Confusion of the two has led the historians 

 of science into more than one error. 



Our alcohol first appeared under the name of inflammable 

 water, a name which was likewise given to spirits of turpentine. 

 Let us try to determine, from the ancient authors and those of 

 the middle ages, what was the origin of the discovery of alcohol, 

 and to trace the successive steps in the knowledge of that sub- 

 stance. The ancients observed that wine gave out something 

 inflammable. We read in Aristotle's Meteorologica, "Ordinary 

 wine possesses a kind of exhalation, and that is why it gives out 

 a flame." Theophrastus, an immediate disciple of Aristotle's, says, 

 " Wine poured upon the fire, as for libations, throws out a light" 



