The Gold-Maker of the Albrechtsburg

Johann Friedrich Böttger was baptised at Schleiz in February 1682 and in the autumn of 1696, aged fourteen, was apprenticed to the Berlin apothecary Friedrich Zorn. In his master’s laboratory he fell under the spell of alchemy. On 1 October 1701, before Zorn and three witnesses, he showed silver turning into gold. How he did it has never been explained; what is certain is that word of the gold-maker spread across the country within weeks.

King Frederick I in Prussia summoned him. At the end of October Böttger fled to an uncle in Wittenberg and was arrested there by the town watch. Wittenberg lay on Saxon soil, and that decided his life. A quarrel arose between Berlin and Dresden over the supposed gold-maker, and the Elector Augustus the Strong won it. On 27 November 1701 Böttger was brought to Dresden in the greatest secrecy.

There he was given a room, a laboratory and guards. In a letter of 16 December 1701 Augustus assured him personally of his protection, and let him know that his liberty would remain restricted until he had shared his secret. A flight in June 1703 took him as far as Enns in Austria; he was fetched back and watched more closely. From then on he was spoken of only as Herr Schrader or as the person in question. In September 1705 the impatient sovereign had him moved to the Albrechtsburg at Meissen.

The search on the castle was not only for the philosophers’ stone. To obtain crucibles able to bear very high temperatures, local clays were tried out. At the end of May 1706 the firing of a red, stone-hard material succeeded. With it the principle of Chinese porcelain was applied for the first time in Europe: clays, quartz and a flux, fired at very great heat.

When Swedish troops invaded Saxony, Böttger was taken in September 1706 with other prisoners of state to the fortress of Königstein; for a year nothing happened. In 1707 the scholar Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus persuaded him to turn to porcelain research, and in June the king gave his permission. From late September 1707 Böttger lived in a palisaded house on the Jungfernbastei in Dresden, with the laboratory vaults beneath it. There, in October and November 1707, white hard-paste porcelain came into being. A laboratory record of 15 January 1708 sets down the correct mixture; the invention is dated to that day.

Who the inventor was is a touchier matter than the legend allows. Tschirnhaus had been making melting trials with slurried clays since the 1690s and sent Leibniz a sample in 1694; with his burning mirrors he reached very high temperatures. Gottfried Pabst von Ohain contributed the kaolin, the physician Bartholomäi wrote the record, and Freiberg miners and smelters such as David Köhler and Samuel Stöltzel built the kilns. Whether Tschirnhaus or Böttger was the inventor has never been settled; today the usual answer is both, with a team around them. Tschirnhaus died on 11 October 1708. Böttger found the glaze in 1709 and at the end of that year confessed to the king that he could not make gold.

The Albrechtsburg was an odd yet ideal choice for the new task. In 1471 Ernst and Albrecht of Saxony commissioned the master builder Arnold von Westfalen to raise a palace on the site of the old margravial castle. It counts as the first castle building in Germany laid out as a residence rather than a fortress: tall curtain-arch windows, a splendid stair tower, and the cell vaults developed here and widely copied. It never became a residence; after the Thirty Years War it stood empty. Only in 1676 did it receive the name Albrechtsburg.

That very emptiness and remoteness made it suitable: nowhere was the secret safer. On 6 June 1710 the manufactory began work there, and each workman was told only a fraction of the process. The secret did not hold: in 1718 the runaway arcanist Samuel Stöltzel carried the recipes to Vienna. Böttger himself had to stay under supervision in Dresden and rarely came over. On 19 April 1714 he was given his freedom back, on oath not to leave the country and to keep the arcanum. He died on 13 March 1719, aged thirty-seven; his grave has not survived.

The mark of the crossed swords, after the Saxon electoral swords in the arms, came only after his death: the blue underglaze colour was introduced in 1720, and from 1731 the sign was ordered. The manufactory stayed on the castle until 1863 and then moved to the Triebischtal. The Albrechtsburg was repaired, painted with history pictures and opened to the public; today it is a museum. Whoever climbs the Burgberg at Meissen sees cathedral and castle standing above the Elbe, and on the slopes the vineyards of one of the smallest wine regions in Germany.