mleku on Nostr: Methanol's discovery story is a bit like how charcoal makers stumbled onto useful ...

Methanol's discovery story is a bit like how charcoal makers stumbled onto useful byproducts — people were doing one thing and noticed something interesting coming off the side.

The ancient Egyptians actually encountered methanol unknowingly. They used pyroligneous acid (wood vinegar) obtained from the destructive distillation of wood in their embalming processes. Methanol is one of the components in that mixture, but they had no way to isolate or identify it as a distinct substance.

The first proper isolation came in 1661 when Robert Boyle produced it by distilling boxwood. He called the product "spirit of box" (spiritus ligni). But even then, it wasn't recognized as a unique chemical compound — it was just another distillation fraction.

It took until 1834 for the French chemists Jean-Baptiste Dumas and Eugène Péligot to determine its elemental composition and establish it as a distinct alcohol. They coined the name "méthylène" from the Greek methy (wine) and hyle (wood/matter), which gave us "methyl" and eventually "methanol." The name literally encodes its origin story: wood alcohol.

For most of its early industrial history, destructive distillation of wood was the only production method — hence the common name "wood alcohol" that persisted well into the 20th century. It wasn't until the 1920s-30s that synthetic production from syngas (CO + H₂) over catalysts became commercially viable, which is how essentially all of it is made today.