"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all"
Hypatia of Alexandria, distillery inventor
Distillation is not a process confined to spirit production; it is a method of separating chemical substances by their volatility. Chemicals are separated from solutions by heating them until they boil and turn into gas. The gas is then collected and cooled, when it condenses into a liquid. As different chemicals boil at different temperatures, it is possible to separate them by controlling the heating temperatures.
There is evidence of the distillation of alcohol dating back to the second millennium B.C.E. although recent evidence from Pakistan demonstrates that it was not until 400 B.C.E; that the process was well understood. The idea of boiling water and collecting it as steam, which separates out dirt, salts, and bacteria, seems to have of tme 800 years later, when Hypatia of Alexandria (c. 350-415 C.E.) invented the first apparatus for distilling water. However, it was not until the eighth century C.E. that pure chemical substances were obtained by distillation. The alembic still was invented by Persian chemist Jabir Ibn Hayyan. Later, in the ninth century, petroleum was distilled to produce kerosene by another Muslim chemist, al-Razi, and the extraction of essential oils by steam distillation was invented by Avicenna in the eleventh century.
