Most people knew something about alchemy.
At its core, alchemy was the search for a method to turn lead into gold. Countless people had been obsessed with it since ancient times, both in the East and the West.
Why had people back then wanted to turn lead into gold?
The reason was simple. Lead was cheap, gold was expensive, and lead and gold shared fairly similar properties in many respects. Their only obvious difference was color—lead was bluish-gray, while gold was yellow.
Someone then wondered: if they could add the property of "yellow" to lead, would lead become gold? Would that not make them rich? But how could "yellow" be added? Brass was fairly close in color, so perhaps adding some copper would work.
Sulfur was fairly close in color too, so perhaps soaking it in sulfur water would work.
And there were other methods as well...
And so, countless people searched bitterly and researched for centuries, even millennia, without success.
Why had they failed? Because those researching it had no idea that the reason lead was lead and gold was gold lay in the differences in their atomic composition. Unless lead's atomic structure was fundamentally altered, it could never become gold.
The direction was wrong. The harder they worked, the farther they moved from success.
Because they did not understand the most basic atomic structures, even when alchemy later developed from simply refining gold into attempts to create panaceas, Philosopher's Stones, and artificial humans, it might have looked astonishing, but it produced no results. It was merely going in circles.
Only as time passed did people begin researching the foundations of chemistry. Dalton first proposed Atomic Theory, then Mendeleev established the Periodic Table of Elements, and in the end, alchemy evolved into modern chemistry and began developing at high