18. Alchemists invented gunpowder while seeking an altogether different product
Alchemy was the forerunner of the science of chemistry, emerging in Europe and Asia during the Middle Ages, as well as in the Islamic world and the subcontinent of India. Alchemists studied different materials, attempting to reduce them to their essence, and to achieve the perfection of the human body and soul through the creation of a universal essence common to all. It was a universal concept that there were but four basic elements of creation, and nearly all alchemists worked in secrecy, rendering them suspect by religious fundamentalists who linked much of their work with sorcery and witchcraft.
In the mid-eighth century in China, according to existing Taoist texts, and again later in the ninth century, alchemists in China pursuing an elixir of life, believed to give immortality to the body which it would share with the soul, created a compound which they called “fire medicine”. The Chinese mixed saltpeter, realgar (a form of arsenic), and sulfur, bound with honey, and created what later became refined as gunpowder. By the early ninth century it was weaponized, and succeeding centuries saw its use expanded to bombs, rockets, mines, and eventually guns. Gunpowder was discovered accidentally as part of a search for immortality, one of the greatest ironies of human history.