His was one of the most brilliant minds of the past five millennia, and yet for centuries,

his notebooks had remained locked away in private hands.

It wasn't until an auction in 1936 that many of the notebooks, annotations, and papers

of Sir Isaac Newton were finally made available to the world, helping us to better understand

how the man worked and fought.

But there was more.

Among those papers auctioned off in 1936 were a collection of items pertaining to alchemy,

that ancient predecessor to modern chemistry.

Notes about his experiments to transform base elements into gold through arcane methods,

a blending of science and magic that was the primary goal of so many medieval researchers.

Now remember, Newton wasn't some random guy with a chemistry set.

He was a professor of mathematics at Trinity College in Cambridge.

He put to paper the laws of motion and gravity that became the core of pre-modern science

all the way until Einstein's theory of relativity.

He wasn't a slouch or a hack or a crackpot.

Despite all of those credentials, Newton spent years dabbling with alchemy, attempting

to transform one thing into another.

He experimented with all sorts of metals, including mercury and lead, often running his equipment

for days at a time with little food and no sleep.

When he did rest, it was in a bedroom set up in the adjoining room.

And while he never managed to succeed, he did manage to change his own body.

He had a full head of grey hair by the age of 32 and was riddled with health problems

...