Distillations magazine

Joseph E. Snodgrass’s poetry memorably reflected the public faith in bloodletting as medical treatment.

Vanadium was a rare metal, but for 100 years after its first discovery in 1801 no one cared—until a chemist discovered it strengthened steel.

Neither medicine nor food, the vitamin pill was born in the early 20th century and came of age during World War II. Now, vitamins are here to stay—and so is the controversy that swirls around them.

Electricity and Enlightenment go together like Benjamin Franklin and 100-dollar bills.

A mother’s dogged search for the cause of her babies’ mental decline led to the discovery of a new disease.

Chemist Frank Field turned a hand-me-down mass spectrometer into pioneering career.

Robert Boyle is best known in chemistry classrooms for Boyle’s law, but the law was never stated outright in Boyle’s work.

Even toward the end of his life, Isaac Newton still had questions about chemistry.

Was arsenic a poison or a salvation?

Amphetamine didn’t cure anything, but it did make you feel better. Chemist Gordon Alles faced this paradox after patenting his discovery in 1932.

In the 1950s comic books took Mexico’s youth by storm. But alongside familiar superhuman avengers were other kinds of heroes: real-life chemists.

Rare earth metals are the vitamins of modern technology. How did this group of chemically dull elements become so important and so troublesome?

The 1944 Morgenthau Plan envisioned postwar Germany as an agrarian state. Fortunately, the Marshall Plan was adopted instead.

You can’t tell a book by its cover.

The controversy around animal magnetism.

By 1790 chemistry was the up-and-coming science. The products of chemistry—industrially useful salts, acids, and alkalis—would soon be measured not by the ounce (or the gram) but by the ton.

Before becoming a synonym for cinema, celluloid was used imitate expensive materials like ivory, tortoiseshell, and linen.

Faced with a sudden shortage of rubber, the wartime United States turned to an unlikely place: a Japanese American internment camp in California.