Chemistry · a Light

A philosopher wrote a hundred recipes for perfume

Al-Kindi, the first of the major philosophers to write in Arabic, also wrote the Book of the Chemistry of Perfume and Distillations. It survives in a single manuscript in Istanbul and was edited and translated into German by Karl Garbers in 1948. It holds more than a hundred recipes and methods: aromatic waters and oils, the apparatus, the timings, and a section of substitutes, cheaper imitations of costly scents and medicines for people who could not pay for the real thing. He treated smell as a manufacturing problem with quantities in it. He did something similar in another work on compound drugs, trying to put numbers to how the strengths of the ingredients in a mixture add up, one of the first attempts to make pharmacy arithmetic rather than judgement.

Al-Kindi · Baghdad, 9th century