In the spring of 1992, Texas A & M University Professor of Chemistry John Bockris received a friendly phone call from a man named Joe Champion. Champion said he was a Tennessee inventor who had developed a method for turning silver into gold. Gold is worth 20 times more than silver, so Champion's discovery, if legitimate, would be better than owning a gold mine. Besides offering to share this valuable secret with Bockris, Champion also offered $200,000 for Bockris to investigate and test the potentially lucrative new technique. It was an offer that Bockris couldn't resist, and he soon had the members of his laboratory testing Champion's technique.
Champion came to Texas to show Bockris and his assistants how to mix the right chemicals (which included one of the components of gun powder) to create gold. As long as Champion was helping out in the lab, the technique seemed to work. But when Champion left town, the technique mysteriously failed.
Bockris' colleagues at Texas A & M were acutely embarrassed. What Bockris was attempting was plain old-fashioned alchemy---an ancient pseudoscience one of whose aims was to turn "base" metals, such as lead or copper, into silver or gold (Figure 2-1). Alchemy reached the height of its popularity during the Middle Ages (about 700 years ago) and was completely discredited in the 19th century. Silver, gold, copper, and lead are all elements---substances that cannot be reduced to simpler substances by chemical means. In this chapter we will see why no element can be transformed into another element by chemical reactions.
What happened to Champion and Bockris? Champion spent a couple of years in jail, charged with criminal fraud in another case. A third man, who provided the $200,000 to Bockris, was charged by the federal Securities and Exchange Commission with fraudulently selling unregistered stocks to innocent investors. Texas A & M froze Bockris' research account, refusing to give him any more of the probably ill-gotten $200,000. And 11 of Bockris' 38 colleagues in the chemistry department formally demanded that Bockris resign from the university, charging that he was ruining their reputations as chemists. Bockris kept his job, however, while still arguing that elements could be changed one into another by chemical means. Ultimately, he abandoned his researches in alchemy and turned to more conventional studies of the chemical bond.