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Those would iridium, platinum, mercury, and thalium. For varying definitions of "early", these alchemists only knew about mercury and maybe platinum (there was platinum in Egyptian gold, but it isn't clear they knew it was in there or thought of it as anything more than an impurity). Mercury they did try to turn to gold. They thought of it as an ur-metal from which all other metals came.

But as the sibling poster states, no, they didn't know.






I think that Gold/Platinum alloy is one of the plot points of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and it's in relation to Newton's alchemical experiments.



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