This "will-o'-the-wisp" cooked from urine is half life and half death

If you were to go back to Hamburg, Germany, in 1669 and walk into the basement of the alchemist Henning Brand, you would be so fumed by the smell that you would pass out on the spot.

Because this madman, in order to find the legendary "Philosopher's Stone" (the magic stone that turns everything into gold), collected 50 barrels of human urine.

His logic is very touching: gold is yellow, urine is also yellow, and human beings are the spirit of all things, and the essence of human beings must be in urine. So, just boil the urine and you will get gold.

So, he boiled urine day and night in the airtight basement.
After boiling it, he didn't get gold, but a white, waxy solid.
When he blew out the candle, he sat down on the ground in fear:
This thing emits a faint green light in the dark, and has no heat.

He thought he had caught the "cold fire."
He named this thing Phosphorus, which means "carrier of light" in Greek (Lucifer also means this).

Humans never dreamed that this thing extracted from urine would become the real Lucifer (the devil) in the following hundreds of years.

1. The little match girl? No, it's the little girl with a bad chin

When phosphorus was first discovered, it was prohibitively expensive. But later people discovered that this thing has an awesome feature: It works with just one stroke.
Thus, Match was born.

In that era without lighters, matches were light, heat, and civilization.
However, early matches used White Phosphorus (White Phosphorus). This thing is highly poisonous.

In 19th century London, countless girls from poor families worked in match factories. Their daily task is to dip wooden sticks into a paste containing white phosphorus.
It was an era without any protection. The girls worked and ate lunch, their fingers covered in white phosphorus.

Slowly, a terrifying and strange disease began to spread in the factory.
It started as a toothache. Pulling out the tooth didn't work, the wound wouldn't heal, and foul-smelling pus oozed out.
Then, the gums begin to fester, and the mandible begins to turn black and become necrotic.
Eventually, the entire jaw bone will fall off like rotten wood.

This is the famous "Phossy Jaw".
The most terrifying thing is that because white phosphorus can glow, these poor girls' rotten chins will emit a faint green light in the dark after turning off the lights at night.

It was a real “zombie” déjà vu.
It was not until the famous "Match Girls Strike" broke out in London in 1888, and the subsequent invention of safe red phosphorus (now Matchhead), that this man-eating white devil was driven out of the factory.

2. "Eternal Fire" on the battlefield

Although white phosphorus left the factory, it found a place more suitable for it: battlefield.

If you are a military fan, you must have heard of a frightening name: White Phosphorus Bomb (Willie Pete).

In World War II, the Vietnam War, and even in modern Middle Eastern battlefields, white phosphorus bombs were soldiers' worst nightmare.
It will spontaneously ignite when exposed to air, with a flame temperature as high as 2700℃.

But that's not the scariest thing.
The most terrifying thing is: It cannot be destroyed.
White phosphorus is sticky, and once it explodes, it sticks to people's skin like burning snot and cannot be shaken off.
Water cannot extinguish it, it will keep burning and burning. Until it burns through the skin, burns through the muscles, burns to the bones (the bones contain calcium phosphate, which is flame retardant), or until the oxygen is exhausted.

Many veterans recall: For a comrade who was hit by a white phosphorus bomb, you could only watch as his whole body smoked and he was burned into a coke while screaming. The only first aid is to use a knife to cut out the burning piece of flesh.

Because this thing is so inhumane, its use is now strictly restricted by the Geneva Convention.
But in the gray zone of war, the white death fireworks still occasionally bloom in the night sky.

3. The Revenge of the Burger: It’s the Mother of Bombs

History is sometimes full of dark coincidences.
Remember Brand who boiled urine at the beginning? He discovered phosphorus in Hamburg, Germany.

More than 270 years later, in 1943, during World War II.
The Allied forces launched the largest incendiary bombing raid in human history on Hamburg, Germany - "Operation Gomorrah".
This time, the Allies dropped phosphorus bombs.

Thousands of tons of phosphorus and napalm rained down. The city of Hamburg was transformed into a giant steel-making furnace.
Because the fire was so intense, a terrifying "Firestorm" formed in the center of the city. The heatwave sucked all the oxygen out of the surroundings, and the asphalt in the streets melted and flowed like lava.
People were either burned to death or suffocated in the heat.

Phosphorus was discovered in Hamburg and eventually turned into fire, burning the city to ashes.
It's like a cruel parable about the cycle of cause and effect.

4. The ultimate reversal: without it, you wouldn’t be you

Having said so many bad things about phosphorus, now comes an extreme reversal.

Although white phosphorus is a highly poisonous demon, the phosphorus element itself is the cornerstone of life.
Please take a look at yourself.

The double helix structure of DNA, the long "skeleton", is made up of phosphates and sugars connected together.
Without phosphorus, DNA strands would collapse.
Without phosphorus, not even a single bacterium would be born on earth.

Each of us is essentially a carbon-based organism built from such "flammable and explosive" elements.

5. The truth about will-o’-the-wisps

When I was a child, I heard old people telling stories that there would be "will-o'-the-wisps" chasing people in the mass graves at night.
The science teacher will tell you: It is phosphine gas that is decomposed from the phosphorus in the bones, and it ignites spontaneously.

But why do will-o'-the-wisps "chase" people?
This is actually fluid mechanics.
When you run in terror in front of you, you move the air behind you, creating a low-pressure area. The phosphorus fire suspended in the air is so light that it is sucked by the airflow and flies behind your butt.

The more you run, the closer it follows.

You see, even after death, Phosphorus never forgets to scare humans one last time.

Conclusion

This is phosphorus.
It was the surprise that medieval alchemists found in buckets of urine;
It’s the green light that glowed from the chin of a Victorian workingwoman;
It is the unquenchable white death on the modern battlefield;
It is also the most critical link in the DNA chain in your body.

It is not only "Lucifer" who brings light, but also "Satan" who brings destruction, and at the same time, he is also "God" who breeds life.

The elements in this universe have never been divided into good and evil.
The so-called good and evil are nothing but cruel and charming jokes played by originally unrelated atoms in different arrangements and combinations on human beings.