Distillations magazine

What most frightened the Nobel Prize–winning chemist and explorer of Earth’s deep past?

Whale oil has been used in soap, explosives, and even margarine. Has it also fueled space exploration?

What does a world short on phosphorous look like?

The early 20th century was an especially rich time for creating ways to process and preserve food.

Mix a 19th-century chemist with a South American roader builder. Add cows and boil.

Discover the history of the EpiPen.

During the Civil War necessity drove the North and South to develop different strategies for dealing with malaria.

The magnetic connection between sailors, adultery, and garlic.

Three Hungarian scientists who survived the Nazi occupation of their country and escaped Soviet oppression.

Follow the birth, life, and demise of the Hercules Powder Company, which once dominated the explosives industry in the United States.

In the 1950s hearing aids shrank from the size of a cigarette packet to the size of a lighter. The secret behind this shrinkage? The mighty transistor.

For more than 100 years scientists have been discovering and creating bizarre, exotic ices. Ices that can even burn a hole in you!

Many scientists devised periodic systems in the 1860s, but Dmitri Mendeleev is today recognized as the father of the periodic table. How did this Russian provincial come to possess one of the most famous names in science?

For thousands of years silk symbolized wealth and style. But in the 1930s DuPont gave Americans the next best thing.

Do you think of poison ivy as a scurrilous weed to be avoided at all costs? Think again! There was a time when the daring and curious found promise in poison ivy and its rash-inducing relatives.

In the early 1950s French physician Henri Laborit experienced a moment of serendipity that would fundamentally alter the landscape of psychiatry and mental illness.

How did the Hanford nuclear facility become one of America’s most vexing environmental challenges? Jennifer Weeks explores the history and future of the site.

Coal fueled the cities of the Industrial Revolution. But coal did far more than power steam engines and heat homes.