Forever Skills

3Conversion

We have always engaged with the skills of conversion: turning seeds into bread, coal into power and ideas into innovation.

Many years ago, before the names Harry, Hermione and Ron were anything more than the kind of names you might hear being called on a rather unremarkable prep-school register in the UK, human beings were sharing secret rumours, carrying out clandestine experiments and searching ancient texts — all in the pursuit of the Philosopher’s Stone.

Of course, the Philosopher’s Stone was no less a work of fiction than the Harry Potter novel of the same name, but its effects on the real world have been felt for generations.

Mentions of the Philosopher’s Stone and alchemy go back hundreds and perhaps even thousands of years to ancient Greece, China, India and Egypt. The imaginations of alchemists, proto-scientists and fortune hunters have long been captivated by tales of this red, powdery substance that was believed to transmute base metals into gold!

In fact, this pursuit, whether driven by greed or the quest for knowledge, helped spark the scientific revolution that would ultimately relegate the story of alchemy and the Philosopher’s Stone to the fairytale section of the bookstore and elevate science to the position of respect that it enjoys today (at least in some parts of the world).

What was so captivating about the story of alchemy, aside from the promise of being able to produce gold on demand, was the concept of conversion: being able to take something ...