Word: alchemist
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Almost everything has been tried for controlling the sex of unborn children, including the drinking by the woman (while an abbot prays) of thrice-blessed wine mixed with lion's blood by an alchemist. The New York Daily News in its salad days even had a sex-control editor. But nothing worked. Parents who wanted boys got girls, and vice versa...
Meissen china got its start through alchemy, which produced no gold but bred generations of chemists. The kings of Europe regularly hired alchemists not only to try to produce the elusive gold, but also to discover what made Chinese porcelain superior to European kinds. In 1709 an alchemist named Boettger found the secret (based on using kaolin, a white clay that he found in his wig powder). He made the secret known to Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. Augustus established a ceramics works at Meissen, destined to dominate European porcelain for the next 41 years...
...Calgari, the Mummy, and even Frankenstein are gone. In their place are The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The Thing, and Lobo. In The Bride of the Monster, one of Bela Lugosi's last movies, the virile fiend of Dracula has become a rather prosaic old alchemist. It is as if Lugosi, like Varnoff, had at last capitulated to the modern emphasis on drawing the blood from healthy vampires...
...Fields of Praise. Among modern writers, Kazantzakis is a unique literary alchemist. As a master mythologizer, he constructs a plot not unlike an old-fashioned American western, and then fills it with a strange power and plausibility...
...alchemist's laboratory full of bubbling test tubes and retorts to intrigue the audience, and the apparition of a beauteous brunette to tease the hero...