 As we rebuild ourselves the history and civilization we now enter the crossroads of mysticism and science with the birth of alchemy. Alchemy laid the groundwork for chemistry but it also included a lot of lesson scientific aspects. One substance discovered by alchemists was the so-called oil of vitriol, a strange substance capable of dissolving pretty much anything including flesh. So today we're going to explore this ancient potion and see if we can make something capable of dissolving human flesh. Let's see what the old masters could do. Everything we use comes from 8,000 generations of collective innovation and discovery but could an average person figure it all out themselves and work their way from the stone age to today. That's a question we're exploring. Each week I try to take the next step forward in human history. My name is Andy and this is how to make everything. But first thank you to today's sponsor. Colby Parker is committed to providing exceptional vision care online and in stores, offering eyeglasses, sunglasses, eye exams and contact lenses. Glasses start at $95 including prescription lenses, sunglasses, progressives and blue light lenses are also available. Choosing your frames is super easy with our quiz. Just answer a few questions. You can start choosing a set of frames that best fits you. Let's try out a few different glasses online, even use their app to try them on on my face and then got five different pairs sent to me. I'm going to try them on, show them to all my friends and see what was the best look for me. Ships free and includes a prepaid return shipping label. Their styles range from extra narrow to extra wide, so they can fit pretty much any face shape. Try five pairs of glasses for free at home at warbyparkter.com slash htme. What is today the science of chemistry had its early roots as a branch of philosophy called alchemy. Likely tracing its origin back to Hellenistic Egypt sometime in the first century AD, many exact details of its history are shrouded in mystery due to the tradition of using cryptic and symbolic language. Both modern chemistry and ancient alchemy covered many common areas of trying to understand the natural world and the fundamental states and behaviors of matter. Over alchemy was primarily focused on more mystical goals of transforming base metals into gold and producing ways to extend life. Central to the alchemist belief was the philosopher stone. The what? The philosopher stone is a legendary substance with astonishing powers. It will transform any metal into pure gold and produces the elixir of life which will make the drink remortal. Needless to say these lofty goals were never achieved. Over alchemy did discover a lot of legitimate chemical processes and methods that were later incorporated into the science of chemistry. It's believed that Chinese alchemists accidentally invented gunpowder in their pursuit of creating an elixir of life. With the emergence of the scientific method, sometime starting around 1600s, chemistry began to supplant alchemy as a trustworthy science. But one of the early discoveries of alchemists was the substance of sulfuric acid. Sulfuric acid is incredibly important today known as the king of chemicals and a nation's sulfuric production indicator of their industrial strength. It is incredibly useful for many industrial processes like mineral extraction, production of fertilizers, synthetic resins, detergents, and pharmaceuticals. Also once you produce one acid, it is relatively easy to turn it into other types of acid like hydraulic acid or nitric acid. Acids are such an important chemical for so many uses that I have been trying to produce it many times through several methods in the past. In the anime Dr. Stone, to which this channel is often compared, they use sulfuric acid to produce a pharmaceutical drug, sulfonylamide. In one of our previous videos we actually attempted recreating the primitive gas mask they made in the anime to help them harvest a naturally occurring sulfuric acid from a volcanic spring, which was surrounded by poisonous gas. Natural sources of sulfuric acid are relatively rare, but I did visit one such place in Yellowstone. Most water in the park is alkaline, but a few are highly acidic due to hydrothermal vents under the surface. Supposedly these lakes have even caused the death of a tourist to try to take a bath in what they thought was a regular hot spring and wound up completely dissolving their body. pH of some of these pools can reach as low as 3.5. But not looking to get banned from national parks, I opted not to collect from the source. Over a crucial ingredient to sulfuric acid is sulfur, which I was able to collect in your death valley at an old sulfur mine. This area was home to a small mining town started in the 1920s. In 1953, a sulfur dust explosion destroyed the main mill site. It was mined off and on the following years, but today remains abandoned. So we're working with some potentially dangerous chemicals, so you want to make sure you wear proper protection. So you want things like goggles, gloves, robes, and of course your wizard hat. Now we're ready for some alchemy. In the ancient art of alchemy, there is a collection of compounds known as vitriol. There are things like blue vitriol, green vitriol, and all of them you can turn into oil of vitriol or sulfuric acid. This is blue vitriol or copper sulfate, and this is iron sulfate or green vitriol. But really any compound that contains sulfur will likely work. So just straight sulfur that we've collected in California would also work. Then we've also gotten iron pyrite, which is another form of iron sulfate. A lot of sulfate compounds are really likely crystallized really nicely by just dissolving some of the powder and laying it dry out and recrystallize. And a lot of alchemy is about looking for mysterious stones like the philosopher's stone. So it feels fitting to start from some crystals, but any of these should work. So the process for all of them is basically heating them up until the chemical compound on each of them break apart releasing sulfur, which then reacts with oxygen in the air to produce sulfur oxide. Then when it's reacted with water, produces sulfurous acid, which is a weak acid, but over time it will react to oxygen producing sulfuric acid, which is a much stronger acid. And the entire process is going to be probably pretty dilute, but if we do a large amount of quantity, we can hopefully then boil it down to relatively concentrated sulfuric acid. We'll see how high we can get it. Right here I'm going to plant a red cabbage, and sexual purpose is going to be the fact that it has the nice characteristic that it can indicate pH. And we can use this to test different samples to measure acidity. But into this one a little bit, but it still works. So we have the red cabbage from the garden, and this contains a chemical called anthocyanin, anthocyanin, anthocyanin, which is a pH indicator. So whether it's neutral, basic, or acid, it will change color, basically, to tell you. This is a really easy way to test the pH. So you're going to grind this up into a paste, and then we're going to test a few different compounds and see if they're acidic or basic or neutral. So there's just water in there, so that should be neutral, for the same purple. Concrete is basic, and you can see it's already turned blue when it touches that. This is vinegar, so this should be acidic. Ooh. So that's acidic. It starts to turn red. Then we have some ammonia, which is basic. This should turn it blue, I believe, and green. And this is just water, so it should remain purple. Yep, pretty. We previously were able to do distilling to make moonshot using a ceramic distiller. However, needing to reach much higher temperatures, there's going to be a high risk of cracking and failure if we use it for this. So to save some headaches, let's substitute it with a metal alternative. My original plan was to blow a glass retort once we had mastered glass blowing, but with the workshop fire, my glass making is a bit on hold. However, using store-bought glass retort reveals that glass probably wasn't going to work too great with these temperatures either. All right, so we'll start with the first chemical, and that's the copper sulfate, originally blue, and we heated it over the coals, and that turned it white. The reason for that is because it originally is attached to several molecules of water, so we basically dehydrated it and removed it, which turned it into a white powder, which goes one step closer to the next step, which is heating it even further to break down the chemical bond, to release the sulfur, portrait with the oxygen, and then get pushed out of the retort into the water. Ideally, we wanted to try and make this out of our own cast metal, but with the fire, we're a little limited in doing that, so I'm going to substitute it with some just store-bought pipe, but this should offer a much higher level of success and actually screw it airtight. It should also be a little bit safer and a little bit less likely to break on us. This will work, but just load it up, put in the coals, and then dip this end under water to get the reaction with the water. I'm going to use the glass speaker so you can see a little bit better of one of Bubbles. That tells us it's still neutral based on our homemade pH detector. I'm going to use these more accurate ones to get a more definitive reading, because that's about neutral at seven. Then we wait. All right, so it's been going for a few hours now, so hopefully we have some reaction going on in the water. Hopefully it's dropped its pH, at least a little bit, so take one of these pH strips that are a little bit more accurate. Dip it in there. The tub of water is starting to get a little cloudy, especially at the bottom, so that might be a good sign. Looking pretty solidly at a six in pH, which means slightly acidic, because pH is logarithmic. It's going to take a pretty large production to get anywhere stronger than that. We're not even as acidic as like orange juice. We have a bit of a ways to go before we get anything too concentrated, but I think this is basically the process to just do it over and over again, get a large supply with it in the water. Over time it should react and turn more acidic, and then we can also boil it down and concentrate any of the sulfuric acid that's in it. It's going to be a decent amount of work, but hopefully we can boil it down and get a decent yield. So let's cue the montage. Over the next few weeks I ran this process over and over again using the different ingredients, and each time you lean a pretty similar result. Each time I reacted it into a roughly 1000 ml of water, and the result was somewhere between 5-6 pH each time, meaning a result around 1 mg of sulfuric acid for each run. How long the oxidization to actual sulfuric acid took was something that still kind of remains unknown to me, but containers of the reacted water that I left out did seem to lower in pH over time. I likely could have used the same water each time and gotten more and more concentrated, but to be safe I used fresh water each time and then boiled it down and combined them. A lot of the coloration that came from it I assume is iron oxide which settled out. This process is actually pretty much the same process that causes acid rain. Compounds containing sulfur are burned, releasing sulfur dioxide into the air, which then reacts with water particles in the clouds, forming sulfuric acid which then gets rained down. So the big challenge with this process is that the yield is pretty low, and without much details to go from it's hard to figure out the best way to maximize my yield. And because pH works on a logarithmic scale, going down a single unit of pH requires me to either produce 10 times as much acid or concentrate it to 1 tenth of volume. So after repeating the process a little over a dozen times I was able to yield a concentrated amount that was about a pH of 2, which is pretty acidic, but it's a very small quantity for a large amount of work, but this is something I can start actually using for industrial purposes. Sulfuric acid is a pretty corrosive compound, but to actually dissolve flesh requires a surprisingly high concentration of it. I've burned myself plenty of times in various experiments using sulfuric acid, so I know even a little amount will hurt. But I ran an experiment with some chicken wings to see how much different strength of sulfuric acid will dissolve the actual flesh, even with some pretty low pH amounts. Only the nearly pure sulfuric acid made a huge dent in the flesh. So that's the end result of all of this work, just a very small amount, but enough to really burn yourself if I were to spill it. Not enough to really dissolve flesh, considering how really inefficient this process is, it's very surprising that early alchemists were able to even identify this as a unique substance. Likely they had better processes to maximize their yields and that knowledge has just kind of been lost to the ages. So an interesting thing is that over the past several years I've enlisted several chemists to try and help me find a way to produce acids from scratch, and the reality is it's not that easy. We've tried a few different methods, and none of them really yielded a high amount. A lot of modern methods are very industrial scale, use catalysts that if you're trying to make everything from scratch it makes a little bit more difficult. One other way that's been going long term in the background is taking some of the iron pyrite we collected and just soaking it in water. For a while we were just heating this under a low temperature and just adding more water to it, and this is kind of the reaction that happens in a lot of mining sites where various sulfides are left in water and then some of the sulfur leaks out and ends up forming sulfuric acid. It's a very slow process and this has been sitting around in solution for at least a couple years now. All right, so let's take a little reading from this guy. The pyrite has been pulverized, so it's kind of sits in the solution, but it's probably a three. So that's a process that's taken several years and it's still not caught up to the reaction we just did. So here we have the red cabbage that's been ground up to use as a pH indicator, and we have our acid that we are able to manufacture and we can prove it's an acid because it turns red. So confirmation, we have made acid. So sulfuric acid is a really important chemical to have for variety uses. It makes it really easy to produce a bunch of different acids from it and they'll be really useful for two main purposes that I have in mind, a lead acid battery. And finally, it returned to the camera project. So we can finally finish up and make camera film using nitric acid and silver. Thanks again to everyone for watching and all of our supporters on Patreon and everyone who participated in a recent auction. We'll have a new video in the next couple weeks updating on the status of the workshop and everything. So stay tuned for that and thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics. Also, if you've enjoyed these series, consider supporting us on Patreon. We are largely a fan-funded channel and depend on the support of our viewers in order to keep our series going. Thanks for watching.