July 24, 2010

Tincture of Mars



The salmiac sublimed with Mars oxide.

Under alcohol.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi friend. we have spoken again at vitriolum.net, but as this site seems to be down these days, I came here cause I want to ask your advice. Very nice blog by the way.

I am trying to perform the extraction of lead's sulfur experiment. I put 90 grams of sal ammoniac with 30 grams of lead chloride at an 1 liter beaker. I used a funnel at the top of a beaker to catch my sublimate. I used an electric stove as my heating source.

The bad thing is that I wasn't able to accomplish a good sublimation. I don't know if my stove wasn't too strong, or if I had to use smaller quantities of the salts. In any case, I left my stove at max power for about an hour and at the end I took only a very small quantity of the sublimate at the sides of my beaker. Almost all the quantity of the mixture of the salts had stayed at the bottom of the beaker and had taken the appearance of a stone- mineral, like the one you have posted at the first photo of this article, with only difference that it was white at the top and grey at the bottom, when your mineral seems yellow brown.

What do you believe I have to do, to increase the yield of the operation? I have thought to buy a more powerful stove or try to perform this experiment under vacuum. Or I have to work with less grams of initial matter? What is your opinion and sorry for that big post.

.: Salazius Hermès D'Artigné :. said...

Hi friend :) Thank you !

If you heat is not strong enough, you will not have a full sublimation, but just a lower one, which is good too, and it will give the result you can see on my pics, a kind of fleece. It works too.

If you use commercial salamoniac, beware, it's not at all pure ... it is indeed very dirty even if it is said 99%pure... I had bad experiments with that. Make it with muriatic psirit and urine's spirit + freezer.
Mine is Mars' sublimation and then it is indeed yellow/brown, your's can be different since the colour of the sulfur of lead is different too.
It can release gazes, so under vacuum I don't know.
Of course a greater heat is always a good thing in this kind of operation. But I don't think you failed your experiment. That's the good news :)
For lead you can also try minium if you can.
Since I have not conducted exactly the same operation (mars oxide instead of lead chloride) I cannot be 100% sure of the colour of your salamoniac, but it always extract it.
No problem for big posts ... :)
Enjoy your lab work !!

Anonymous said...

Hi. Thanks for your answer.

I bought my sal ammoniac from a chemicals store. I don't know how pure it is. If I understand your words right, it is not necessary to sublimate all the quantity of the sal ammoniac and make it to ascend and attach itself at the higher sides of my beaker and at my funnel at the top. The mineral which I can see at your first photo, was detached from the sides of your apparatus, or it had stayed at the bottom in this mineral form?

PS: As I shall repeat the whole experiment this week, is there any way to publish photos of my results to help you better understand my work?

.: Salazius Hermès D'Artigné :. said...

It all sublimed, but just of a cm high, I don't think it is necessary to make it fly very high (I can be of course wrong, but since it works...).

I think you can create a photo album online like picasa or something, & put the direct link to the image in your comment, maybe will it works ? Maybe with a [url] [/url] it could be ok.

Be well and I hope your experiment will work as you want.

Anonymous said...

Do you believe it's better to mix the salts or to put the sal ammoniac at the bottom and the lead salts at the top of them.

All that residual which I can see at the bottom of the bottle at the second photo is the sulfur of Mars? Have you ever tried to project it at molten metal?

.: Salazius Hermès D'Artigné :. said...

I believe it's better to mix the salts. When the heat is applied, if you put your lead in the bottom, salamoniac will not fuse correctly with it, if your lead it at the top, salamoniac will rise witouth ingres over lead. You need to mix them.

The residual at the bottom of the bottle at the second photo is not completely the sulfur of Mars, since it is in the alcoholic "golden solution", and a little in the upper part of the matter in the bottom (under it is the oxide of mars). It would not work over metal, simply because it is a volatile compound and it would take the sulfur of mars with him, there is also the fact that salamoniac is not able to penetrate a fused mass of metal. Then, it is impossible to transmute.

I thank you very much for your interest and your comments on this blog !
Be well, and Lab' well too :)

Anonymous said...

I mean if you have ever tried to tinge any metal, especially gold, with the Martian sulfur, as Fulcanelli proposes at the last chapter of the first book of Dwellings.

.: Salazius Hermès D'Artigné :. said...

No, this experiment is far too complicated for the result we have. Fulcanelli makes thing very very hard to make, wheareas he perfectly knew the easiest ways for producing gold from an archemical point of view, he explained this method more to stress upon archemical/tinctures concepts than actually proposing a valuable gold making process.

Anonymous said...

I am referring to the operation which is described by Vincent de Paul and especially to the exaltation of gold with the sulfur of an imperfect metal. What do you mean that the experiment is too complicated? Fulcanelli says that we simply have to project little by little the sulfur which we have extracted form lead or iron to molten gold to perform the tinging of the metal. Why do you believe that the operation shall not work?

.: Salazius Hermès D'Artigné :. said...

Yes I know which experiment you refer to.
I never said this operation do not work. It does (maybe my english is not clear, sorry).

But frankly, why bother to put some sulfur of an imperfect metal upon gold since you can make gold by the same process with imperfect metals and a little concoction ? As I said, I'm sure he stressed out a principle in archemy, more than the technique.
But you know, if you try to put some sulfur of mars, dry like that, on gold, it will never work effectively, it can, and will work on a little scale, but not a big one. All this comes from the *different* natures of the principles used.

It is simple and complicated at the same time. But that's all archemy and it's not very important, that's not Alchemy.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for that definition. As we don't communicate in our native languages sometimes is hard to understand each other.

I haven't ever heard about that operation which produces gold by a little concoction of the imperfect metals. Can you give me some more details about that?

And yes I know that all these are not alchemical but archemy is interesting too. It can help us to understand the inner constitution of the metals and their affinities. Except from that, when we are working at the archemical domain we have ready recipes to put them to the test.

.: Salazius Hermès D'Artigné :. said...

You can find some examples of archemical works in the works of Sir William Digby "Chemical Secrets" in the first part, using for example red precipitate of mercury plus mercury + concoction = gold.