When they weren’t trying to make gold, alchemists at the end of the 17th century kept busy with an altogether different quest: finding the secret to porcelain. Europe’s monarchs and nobles had been obsessed with Chinese porcelains since the early 1600s, and they spent fortunes to discover how to make delicate translucent ceramics with blue-and-white enamel beneath the glaze. In 1708 experimenters employed by Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony, hit paydirt. Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, a famed mathematician, and Johann Friedrich Böttger, a young alchemist, worked out that mixing 43% kaolin from the German town...

Source: Wall Street Journal July 28, 2020 22:52 UTC