Decoding the Secret of the 16th-Century’s Purple Bang

Oi, mate, have you ever stumbled across the term ‘fulminating gold’? Nah, it’s not some fancy gizmo out of a comic book, but it is a blast from the past, yeah? We’re nattering about the very first high explosive here. Picture yourself back in the day, the 1500s or summat, where everyone and their mum was trying to whip up gold from lead—alchemy, that was the big deal then. Then WHAM! Out of nowhere, you’ve got this concoction of gold mixed with ammonia and chlorine that’s dead finicky and goes off with a whopper of an explosion. It’d even make old Barney turn green with envy over the purple smoke puffs it belched out.

Skip a few centuries to not so long ago, and you’ve got the boffins who’ve been scratching their noggins for yonks, finally figuring out why this stuff leaves a cloud like it’s straight out of Woodstock. Picture this bunch of eggheads pouring over dusty books and peering through the latest gizmos, and then it’s like, BAM, they hit upon the answer.

Rewind a bit, and the alchemists were like your original nutty professors, right? They’re pottering about, hoping to strike it rich by turning cheap metal into gold. Lo and behold, instead of filling their pockets, they go and stumble upon the ‘holy moly’ that is high explosives. Fast forward to 1585, and you’ve got this bloke, Sebalt Schwärtzer, penning down the recipe for this bangy stuff. Then you get celebs like Robert Hooke and Antoine Lavoisier in the 17th and 18th centuries putting their own twists on it, and here we are now, with modern science whizzing the whole process down to just minutes.

But I hear you ask, why the purple cloud? It’s just like the sky’s turned all Purple Rain, but how come? There was this old guess that teeny tiny bits of gold were the little blighters causing it, all hitching a ride on the smog and flaunting that royal hue. Even the 17th-century chemist Johann Rudolf Glauber was onto it, gilding stuff with smoke leftovers from our posh explosive gold. It had the whiff of a bedtime story, but no one had the hard evidence.

Cue the modern-day heroes, Simon Hall, a proper chemistry boffin over at the University of Bristol, and his sidekick, Jan Maurycy Uszko. These lads whipped up their batch of fulminating gold, set off a teeny controlled kaboom with just 5mg, and let the smoke drift over some copper meshes. Then they get all eagle-eyed with this transmission electron microscope (TEM), and bish bash bosh, there they are—the tiny gold bits, just hanging out.

Turns out, this isn’t just nifty for solving the case of the purple haze, but it’s also a cheeky shortcut to making metal nanoparticles, and that’s a big deal because usually, that’s a right song and dance with all sorts of chemicals needed.

So, with the mystery of the purple smoke sorted, Hall and his pals are off to muck about with other metal bangs to see what else they can stumble upon. It’s like they’re in their own science whodunit, where every clue might lead to something smashing or just a good spectacle.

And just so you know, all this hot gossip comes straight from a shiny new press release out of the University of Bristol. So don’t go betting the house on it, it’s hot off the press and not peer-reviewed yet, you get me? So, let’s not go daft and set it in stone just this second…