Distillations magazine

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 to 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.

Joseph Black, one of the first to realize that air was composed of many gases, isolated carbon dioxide, and discovered latent heat.

The feud between William Crookes and Claude-Auguste Lamy over the newly discovered element thallium rested on the very definition of discovery.

How did a seemingly benign chemical and a near-miraculous public-health initiative spark decades and decades debate?

During the 1860s and 1870s, was a booming New York City’s stench choking the health from its citizens? Chemist Charles Frederick Chandler aimed to find out.

A 1904 caricature from Vanity Fair is a striking example of the role images played in creating the Marie Curie myth.

The impact of the Civil War can still be seen politically, socially, and economically, but its influence on medicine is often obscured.

When the EPA needed a way to identify and measure pollutants, Robert Finnigan, an ex–Cold War engineer, offered his computerized mass spectrometer for the job.