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# Newton's alchemical laboratory in his Cambridge years stood in the garden of Trinity College, between the chapel and the college gate; its exact location is unknown, but the approximate site was established by excavations, in which were found…
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- Published: 2024-08-05T08:12:32.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:33:03.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archaeology, Archive, Science, Education, People

Newton's alchemical laboratory in his Cambridge years stood in the garden of Trinity College, between the chapel and the college gate. Its exact location is unknown, but the approximate site was established by excavations, in which waste from chemical experiments was found. It is known that Newton devoted his nocturnal labours chiefly to the transmutation of metals.

When in 1696 Newton became Warden of the Mint, it grew awkward to mention his connections with alchemy. Yet only a few years earlier he had suffered a serious nervous disorder, usually ascribed to prolonged exposure to noxious substances, heavy metals and mercury vapour. There is, however, a more original view of the mental derangement that upset Newton's life in 1690-1693: it is held to have been the consequence of a fire in the laboratory, which destroyed years of accumulated work and notes. According to legend, the fire that destroyed the alchemical workshop was the fault of Diamond, Newton's little dog. Many of his surviving manuscripts, letters and papers bear traces of fire and soot. The mathematician Wallis reported that the proofs of Newton's own discovery of the calculus of fluxions had perished in the laboratory.

The student Abraham de la Pryme left a record of the incident to the following effect:

"Among all the books he had written there was one on colours and light, founded on thousands of experiments which he had carried out over twenty years, spending many hundreds of pounds upon them. This book, which he prized so highly, and of which so much was said, perished and was irretrievably lost just when the learned author was almost finishing it, in the following manner: one winter morning, having left the book with other papers on his work table, he went to chapel. A candle, which he had unfortunately left burning, somehow set fire to the papers, from them the book caught, and with it other valuable manuscripts; most astonishing of all, the fire went no further. When Mr Newton returned from chapel and saw what had happened, everyone thought he had gone out of his mind: he was so shaken by the event that it was a month before he recovered himself."

Yet the nervous illness and the fire coincided in time with the most intense work on the text of the *Principia*.