This article is in Chemistry in Australia magazine: Issue December 2024
Author: Ian D. Rae
While I was working on David Orme Masson’s contribution to the naming of the proton, I came across the idea that there was a basic building block for the construction of atoms. It was known as “protyle”, after a suggestion by William Prout in 1815, and later in that century the concept was championed by William Crookes. Our knowledge of protons and neutrons owes much to this idea.
There were others who felt that the great variety of elements might actually be the result of different ways of combining more-fundamental particles. The most prominent of these thinkers were the theosophists, devotees of a blend of science, religion and philosophy that owed more than a little to Indian mysticism. While there have been scholarly comparisons of their line of thinking with that of more conventional science that developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the work of the theosophists has not entered mainstream science. The prime mover was Annie Besant (1847– 1923), who had studied science at the University of London but was denied the degree because of discrimination against women in English universities that prevailed until the 1920s. From 1895, she began to publish the results of her work in theosophist magazines, and she was joined by Charles Leadbeater (1854–1934), who had been a priest in the Church of England. In a form of clairvoyance, Besant and Leadbeater trained their minds to go on “the astral plane” and, while holding samples of elements or chemical compounds, see deep inside the atoms and record the shapes they “saw”. The results of their observations on 65 elements were brought together in 1908 with the publication of their Occult chemistry.
The hydrogen atom was so revealed to consist of 18 (there was never any indication of where this number came from) subparticles known as anu, arranged in six groups. A number of atoms are dumbbell shaped, like sodium shown above. For that element, 418 anu were found, indicating that it is 23.22 times the size of a hydrogen atom! Fancy that – very close to the known atomic weight of sodium. The halogen atoms are also dumbbells, and although they are only represented in two dimensions in Besant’s and Leadbeater’s book, the familial relationships between them are obvious. Leading historian of chemistry, William Brock, called it all “pretentious nonsense”.
The theosophists expressed the hopes that chemists would be able to build on their results by discovering new elements, and to help them on their way they suggested that there was “an unrecognised stranger between hydrogen and helium” that they called occultum. It consisted of 4 anu and so could be regarded as having atomic weight 3. If you think about it, there were tempting gaps between successive pairs of hydrogen (1), helium (4), lithium (7) and beryllium (9). I’m not sure if any chemist took the theosophists’ bait, although there were plenty of “new” elements “discovered” by conventional methods over the next 50 years.
As President of the Theosophical Society, Besant explained it all in her lecture tour of Australia in 1908, justifying their work with the rhetorical question: Why would not clairvoyance be used in the investigation of the atom, where chemistry had lost its way? The lectures were covered briefly by newspapers and the content was included in a book published by the Theosophical Society, but as far as I am aware there was not an outbreak of occult chemistry in Australia.
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Ian D. Rae FRACI CChem (idrae@unimelb.edu.au) is a veteran columnist, having begun his Letters in 1984. When he is not compiling columns, he writes on the history of chemistry and is an editor of Historical Records of Australian Science. |
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