If you had been a resident of Speyer in the mid 1600s, you would probably have known about Johann Joachim Becher, who was the leading intellectual of that area. The city of Speyer is still around, and now it’s in Germany. When Becher was born, on May 6, 1635, it was in the Holy Roman Empire.
Becher became responsible for supporting his family (his mother and two brothers) when his father died — Becher was just 13 at the time. He learned several crafts, and spent his evenings studying everything he could find. In 1635 what he could find might have been sparse, and although science and what we regard as medicine didn’t really exist yet, by 19 he had learned enough to publish his own Discurs von der Großmächtigen Philosophischen Universal-Artzney / von den Philosophis genannt Lapis Philosophorum Trismegistus. That’s “Discourse about the almighty philosophical and universal medicine by the philosopher called Lapis Philosophorum Trismegistus.” He might have worried that nobody would be interested in a text by some 19-year-old, so he used the pseudonym Solinus Salzthal of Regiomontus. It does sound more impressive than “Jo Becher,” right?
Pseudonym or not, highly placed people must have noticed his work, because he was appointed professor of medicine at the University of Mainz by the time he was 22. He kept writing, and started signing his own name to his publications. They were very wide ranging; he designed a universal language, wrote a book about metallurgy, and one on animals, plants, and minerals. Then in 1666, having reached the age of 31, he switched careers entirely and became the “councillor of commerce” at Vienna. He wrote about statecraft, trade, and commerce — today he’d probably be called a political economist. He was the leading proponent of “Austrian cameralism,” a system of public administration intended to help that area of Europe recover from the Thirty Years War.
While he was working in public administration, he was also the personal physician for at least one leader of Bavaria — and he also kept writing about everything from regulating the heat in furnaces to how pendulums worked (there was even a controversy about whether Becher was actually responsible for work attributed to Christiaan Huygens). He visited England and Scotland, presented scientific papers at the then-new Royal Society, and became one of the leading chemists of the time.
His work in chemistry is what he’s most remembered for, including his theory of how fire worked. Nobody knew about oxygen at the time, and Becher came up with a theory of fire that was sensible, consistent, predictive…and completely wrong. He suggested that there was a substance he called “phlogiston” that was contained inside any material that could burn. Combustion was the result of the release of phlogiston from “phlogisticated substances.” Phlogiston was similar enough to oxygen that it also caused rust. People’s bodies contained phlogiston, too — breathing was the process of expelling it.
The phlogiston theory stuck around for about a century, until oxygen was discovered in 1777. Becher’s work in medicine was similarly superseded by later advancements and discoveries. His work in chemistry was very highly regarded at the time, but since it depended on now-obsolete ideas about matter and materials, none of it is useful today. His ideas about cameralism are said to be partly woven into modern thinking about bureaucracy, but they’re not identified with him. Becher was a product of his time, and the intellectual world centuries ago was so different from today that only a handful of thinkers are still well remembered. Becher isn’t one of them, but he was just as brilliant, and at least as accomplished, as those who are. His work in chemistry came pretty close to being as significant as that of Robert Boyle, who lived in the same era, but was still just a bit too close to alchemy to remain important. Becher wrote that given the right materials, it would be possible for a person to become invisible. And look at that — he kind of succeeded.
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