fbpx

KidsKonnect

Hennig Brand Facts & Worksheets

Hennig Brand was a German merchant, alchemist, and pharmacist who accidentally discovered the element phosphorus while trying to conduct experiments and searching for the philosopher's stone.

Search for Worksheets

Worksheets /People /Figures /Hennig Brand Facts & Worksheets
Premium
Hennig Brand Worksheets
Not ready to purchase a subscription? Click to download the free sample version   Download sample

Hennig Brand was a German merchant, alchemist, and pharmacist who accidentally discovered the element phosphorus while trying to conduct experiments and searching for the philosopher’s stone. He was the first named person in history to find a new chemical element.

See the fact file below for more information on the Hennig Brand or alternatively, you can download our 23-page Hennig Brand worksheet pack to utilise within the classroom or home environment.

Key Facts & Information

BRAND’S EARLY LIFE

  • Hennig Brand was born in 1630 in Germany. He lived and worked in Hamburg.
  • History books have very little information about Brand’s early life. Some historians claimed that he lived a humble life and was an apprentice glassmaker as a young man. However, a letter he wrote for his second wife indicates that he was a man with high social standing.
  • Brand held a post as a junior army officer during the Thirty Years Wars. His first wife’s dowry was enough to allow him to pursue alchemy and leave the army.

THE SEARCH FOR THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE

  • Hennig Brand was one of the alchemists obsessed with discovering the philosopher’s stone, a substance that supposedly transformed base metals, such as lead, into gold.
  • He exhausted all his deceased wife’s money on this pursuit. He got married again to Margaretha, a wealthy widower whose financial resources allowed him to continue the search.
  • As scientists believed that it was possible to change worthless materials into precious metals, Brand himself spent countless hours in his laboratory and experimented with water, combining it with various materials in hundreds of combinations to discover the philosopher’s stone.
  • Brand had another idea when he read an alchemy cookbook called 400 Auserlensene Chemische Process by F. T. Kessler, which included mixing alum, salpetre, potassium nitrate, and concentrated urine to turn base metals into gold.
  • In 1669, one of his many attempts gave promising results. He heated a mixture of sand and charcoal with a tar-like substance produced by boiling down about 1,500 gallons of human urine for two weeks. It was unclear where he got the urine, but after he maintained the mixture at the highest temperature his furnace could reach for many hours, water vapor was formed and condensed into thick white drops that gleamed brightly for hours.
  • Brand thought he finally discovered the philosopher’s stone and called his new substance phosphorus, which came from the Greek words phos, meaning “light”, and phoros, meaning “bearer”.

THE FIRST PHOSPHORUS

  • Hennig Brand continued to experiment on this substance, expecting it to turn basic metals into gold. It did not. However, he learned that his discovery would glow and occasionally burst into flames when exposed to oxygen. He made a glow-in-the-dark ink out of it and read his alchemy books using the light that came from it. However, as most alchemists at that time did, he kept the details a secret.
  • After six years, he finally accepted that his discovery could not create the philosopher’s stone, and he was broke. Hennig Brand sold his secret to German physician Johannes Daniel Kraft and paraded the new wonder substance around the courts of Europe.
  • Once the secret that the newly discovered substance was made from urine, chemists raced to make their own phosphorus, first by Johann Kunckel von Lowerstern of Sweden in 1678 and later by Robert Boyle of London in 1680.
  • Ambrose Godfrey Hankwitz, Boyle’s assistant and the founder of the famous pharmaceutical firm in London called Ambrose Godfrey, developed the process on a commercial scale and exported phosphorus across the continent.
  • The credit for discovering phosphorus went to Robert Boyle, as Brand did not publish the result of his experiment.
  • In the book Elements of Theoretical and Practical Chemistry, Pierre Joseph Macquer finally gave credit to Brand, writing that “the phosphorus here described was first discovered by a citizen of Hamburgh named Brandt, who worked upon urine in search of the Philosopher’s stone.”

COMMEMORATING BRAND’S DISCOVERY

  • Macquer’s understanding that the misguided experiments could create real discoveries inspired a painter named Joseph Wright.
  • Being a member of an intellectually engaged circle of physicians, scientists, and industrialists in the English Midland, Wright decided to re-create Brand’s scientific discovery.
  • He asked engraver William Pether to work on the bright white feature of Brand’s discovery. Pether used an engraving technique called mezzotint to highlight the bright light that phosphorus produced. The amount of light was exaggerated. The painting was named The Alchymist, in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone, Discovers Phosphorus, and prays for the successful Conclusion of his operation, as was the custom of the Ancient Chymical Astrologers.

THE USE OF PHOSPHORUS

  • Phosphorus turned out to be more than a lighting spectacle and a source of entertainment. As soon as it was commercially produced, it was sold to apothecaries and natural philosophers, and it was used as a centerpiece of demonstrations at princely courts and in scientific society.
  • Within 100 years, when phosphorus appeared in Macquer’s chemistry textbooks and once mineral phosphates had replaced urine as the best source material, it made its way to matches, fertilizers, and bombs. It is also used to create LED lights.

Hennig Brand Worksheets

This is a fantastic bundle which includes everything you need to know about Hennig Brand across 23 in-depth pages. These are ready-to-use Hennig Brand worksheets that are perfect for teaching students about Hennig Brand who was a German merchant, alchemist, and pharmacist who accidentally discovered the element phosphorus while trying to conduct experiments and searching for the philosopher’s stone. He was the first named person in history to find a new chemical element.

Complete List Of Included Worksheets

  • Hennig Brand Facts
  • Brand’s Bio
  • Hennig’s Inquiry
  • An Important Discovery
  • Uses of Phosphorus
  • Accidental Inventions
  • The Phosphorus Team
  • Fact or Bluff
  • Boyle vs. Brand
  • The 13th Element
  • Inspiring Inventions

Link/cite this page

If you reference any of the content on this page on your own website, please use the code below to cite this page as the original source.

Link will appear as Hennig Brand Facts & Worksheets: https://kidskonnect.com - KidsKonnect, February 17, 2021

Use With Any Curriculum

These worksheets have been specifically designed for use with any international curriculum. You can use these worksheets as-is, or edit them using Google Slides to make them more specific to your own student ability levels and curriculum standards.

Related Resources