Johann Rudolf Glauber

Industrial chemist who built mineral-acid manufacturing, named the salt that still bears his name, and chased the Stone on the side.

Glauber pioneered the manufacture of concentrated mineral acids — hydrochloric, nitric, sulfuric — at scale, and his furnace designs ran in European chemical works for two centuries. He isolated sodium sulfate (Glauber's salt, still sold as a laxative) and characterized dozens of metal salts. Furni Novi Philosophici (1648) is essentially the first chemical-engineering textbook. He also wrote treatises on the philosopher's stone and a panacea universalis, neither of which materialized. The factories he designed kept running. The Stone never showed up.