Making It and Using It

White Vitriol was gathered as colorless to faintly yellow or greenish crystalline crusts on weathered zinc ore, most notably from the Rammelsberg mines near Goslar, whose vitriol works supplied much of central Europe from the Middle Ages onward. Unlike green and blue vitriol, which were tied to well recognized metals, white vitriol's parent metal was for centuries poorly understood; European metallurgists knew zinc mainly as an ingredient of brass and calamine and did not isolate it reliably as a pure metal until the sixteenth century in India and the eighteenth in Europe, so white vitriol was for a long time simply the vitriol that is not green or blue, identified by its color and taste rather than by its metal. It was used in medicine as an astringent styptic to stop bleeding and, in stronger doses, as an emetic, and later in dyeing and as a mordant.

As with the other vitriols, roasting and distilling white vitriol yielded a share of the acid spirit that chymists collected as oil of vitriol, though green vitriol remained the preferred feedstock for that operation since it was far more abundant. White vitriol's zinc content also meant that when it was included in metallic reduction experiments, the regulus recovered was a metal early chemists struggled to classify at all, sometimes calling it a bastard or false metal rather than admitting an eighth true metal alongside the seven of the planets.