The death of Becker's father, a Protestant minister, left him at the age of eight with the need to help support his mother and brothers. The lack of money for a formal education forced Johann to educate himself, mainly by traveling through Sweden, Holland, Italy, and Germany. He developed interests in a wide- range of subjects including alchemy, medicine, politics, economics, theology, history, and mathematics. In 1661, Becker's first published book appeared, and the University of Mainz awarded him a M.D. A restless individual, Becker served for a short period of time as court physician to the Electors of Mainz and Munich before turning to economics and politics. Emperor Leopold I in Vienna appointed him alchemical advisor and imperial economic counselor in 1666. In this capacity, Becker instituted educational reforms, including the establishment of technical schools and proposed a Rhine-Danube canal and colonial settlements in South America. During this period he produced his most important work Physica subterranea in 1669 and two supplements in 1671 and 1675. After some of his policies provoked imperial disfavor and a short prison sentence, Becker moved to Holland in 1678 where he submitted to the Dutch parliament a plan for extracting gold from sea sand.
A small- scale test of the process in 1679 proved successful, but Becker moved to England before it could be tried on a larger scale. In England he wrote the third supplement to Physica (1680) which included the gold extraction process. From that time until his death in London in 1682 he toured mines in Scotland and Cornwall and completed several books including Chymischer Glückshafen, which detailed fifteen hundred chemical processes. Although Becker was presented a book and was a candidate for membership, to his dismay he was never elected a fellow of the Royal Society.
Becker's theory of the elements was a melding of alchemical ideas with the growing chemical knowledge of the seventeenth century. He believed that the three basic substances were air, water, and earth and that all inorganic bodies were composed of water and earth, with air serving only as a mixing instrument. To explain the differences, Becker proposed the presence in varying amounts of three distinct types of earth: vitreous earth ( terra fusilis ,) which gave a body substance and made it virtually incapable of alteration, combustible earth (terra pinguis), a moist, oily substance which gave a body odor, taste, color and combustibility, and mercurial earth (terra fluida), which provided weight, ductility, and volatility. He insisted that every flammable body contained combustible earth, but he had no definite position on how this substance played a role in the burning process. This was not a new idea, and Becker did little to attempt to prove it by experimentation. His great contribution to the matter lies in the influence he had upon Georg Stahl, who half a century later expanded Becker's idea of combustible earth into the phlogiston theory of combustion.
Becker supported the theories of spontaneous generation, metallic transmutation, and the belief that metals grow in the earth. Among his more practical suggestions were that sugar and air were needed for fermentation and that coal could be distilled to produce tar.
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