Al-koh’l was an Arabic word indicating the sulphide of antimony so
generally used by Eastern women to darken their eyebrows, eyelashes,
and the eyes themselves. Similar words are found in other ancient
languages. Cohal in Chaldee is related to the Hebrew kakhal used in
Ezekiel, xxiii, 40, in the sense of to paint or stain. The primary
meaning of alcohol therefore is a stain. Being used especially in
reference to the finely levigated sulphide of antimony, the meaning
was gradually extended to other impalpable powders, and in alchemical
writings the alcohol of Mars, a reduced iron, the alcohol of sulphur,
flowers of brimstone, and similar expressions are common. As late as
1773 Baumé, in his “Chymie Experimentale,” gives “powders of the finest
tenuity” as the first definition, and “spirit of wine rectified to
the utmost degree” as the second explanation of the term alcohol. As
certain of the finest powders were obtained by sublimation the transfer
of the word to a fluid produced by a similar method is intelligible,
and thus came the alcohol of wine, which has supplanted all the other
alcohols.
Distillation is a very ancient process. Evidence exists of its use
by the Chinese in the most remote period of their history, and
possibly they distilled wine. But so far as can be traced spirit was
not produced from wine previous to the thirteenth century. Berthelot
investigated some alleged early references to it and came to the
conclusion indicated. Aristotle alludes to the possibility of rendering
sea water potable by vaporising it, and he also notes elsewhere that
wine gives off an exhalation which emits a flame. Theophrastus mentions
that wine poured on a fire as in libations can produce a flame. Pliny
indicates a particular locality which produced a wine of Falerno,
which was the only wine that could be inflamed by contact with fire.
At Alexandria, in the first century of the Christian era, condensing
apparatus was invented, and descriptions of the apparatus used are
known, but no allusion to the distillation of wine occurs in any
existing reference to the chemistry of that period. Rhazes, who died in
A.D. 925, is alleged to have mentioned a spirit distilled from
wine, but Berthelot shows that this is a misunderstanding of a passage
relating to false or artificial wines.
Water distilled from roses is mentioned by Nicander, about 140 B.C.,
and the same author employs the term ambix for the pot or apparatus
from which this water was obtained. The Arabs adopted this word, and
prefixing to it their article, al, made it into alembic. This in
English appeared for some centuries in the abbreviated form of limbeck.
The Greek ambix was a cup-shaped vessel which was set on or in a fire,
as a crucible was used.
Pissaeleum was a peculiar form of distillation practised by the Romans.
It was an oil of pitch made by hanging a fleece of wool over a vessel
in which pitch was being boiled. The vapour which collected was pressed
out and used.
Distilled waters from roses and aromatic herbs figured prominently
in the pharmacy of the Arabs, and Geber, perhaps in the eighth
century, describes the process, and may have used it for other than
pharmaceutical purposes. Avicenna likens the body of man to a still,
the stomach being the kettle, the head the cap, and the nostrils the
cooling tube from which the distillate drips.
M. Berthelot gives the following from the Book of Fires of Marcus
Grecas, which he says could not be earlier than 1300, as the first
definite indication of a method of producing what was called aqua
ardens. “Take a black wine, thick and old. To ¼ lb. of this add 2
scruples of sulphur vivum in very fine powder, and 2 scruples of common
salt in coarse fragments, and 1 or 2 lbs. of tartar extracted from a
good white wine. Place all in a copper alembic and distil off the aqua
ardens.” The addition of the salt and sulphur, M. Berthelot explains,
was to counteract the supposed humidity.
Albucasis, a Spanish Arab of the eleventh century, is supposed from
some obscure expressions in his writings to have known how to make a
spirit from wine; but Arnold of Villa Nova, who wrote in the latter
part of the thirteenth century, is the first explicitly to refer to it.
He does not intimate that he had discovered it himself, but he appears
to treat it as something comparatively new. Aqua vini is what he calls
it, but some name it, he says, aqua vitæ, or water which preserves
itself always, and golden water. It is well called water of life, he
says, because it strengthens the body and prolongs life. He distilled
herbs with it such as rosemary and sage, and highly commended the
medicinal virtue of these tinctures.
It is worth remarking that when Henry II invaded and conquered Ireland
in the twelfth century the inhabitants were making and drinking a
product which they termed uisge-beatha, now abbreviated into whisky,
the exact meaning of the name being water of life.
Raymond Lully, who acquired much of his chemical lore from Arnold of
Villa Nova, was even more enthusiastic in praise of the aqua vitæ than
his teacher. “The taste of it exceedeth all other tastes, and the
smell all other smells,” he wrote. Elsewhere he describes it as “of
marveylous use and commoditie a little before the joyning of battle to
styre and encourage the soldiers’ minds.” He believed it to be the
panacea so long sought, and regarded its discovery as evidence that
the end of the world was near. The process for making the aqua vitæ as
described by Lully was to digest limpid and well-flavoured red or white
wine for twenty days in a closed vessel in fermenting horse-dung. It
was then to be distilled drop by drop from a gentle fire in a sand-bath.
The chemical constitution of alcohol was speculated upon rather
wildly by the chemists who experimented on it before Lavoisier.
It was held to be a combination of phlogiston with water, but
the phlogiston-philosophers disagreed on the question whether it
contained an oil. Stahl, however, later supported by Macquer, found
that an oil was actually separated from it if mixed with water and
allowed to evaporate slowly in the open air, after treating it with
an acid. Lavoisier, in 1781, carefully analysed spirit of wine and
found that 1 lb. yielded 4 oz. 4 drms. 37½ grains of carbon, 1 oz. 2
drms. 5½ grains of inflammable gas (hydrogen), and 10 oz. 1 drm. 29
grains of water. It was de Saussure who later, following Lavoisier’s
methods of investigation, but with an absolute alcohol which had
been recently produced by Lowitz, a Russian chemist, showed that
oxygen was a constituent of alcohol. Berthelot succeeded in making
alcohol synthetically in 1854. His process was to shake olefiant
gas (C_{2}H_{4}) vigorously with sulphuric acid, dilute the mixture
with eight to ten parts of water, and distil. Meldola, however (“The
Chemical Synthesis of Vital Products,” 1904), insists that an English
chemist, Henry Hennell, anticipated Berthelot in this discovery.