In his youth the German chemist Johann Rudolph Glauber (1603/4–70) passed through Basel, where he met a philosophically minded man who showed him his own dead child preserved in the water from a nearby spring. Although this child had died some time before, its corpse remained untouched by putrefaction. Glauber never saw the source in Switzerland from which this water came, but he happened upon a similar spring in Vienna-Neustadt. The water in this spring transmuted everything placed in it into stone, preventing all things from rotting. Moreover it cured Glauber of a long and difficult fever. Glauber stayed the whole winter observing this spring and found that it prevented the swamps from freezing, kept the grass green around its edge, and supported numerous turtles and other amphibious animals during the cold winter.

Later, after many years of reading and experimenting, Glauber claimed to have discovered the makeup of the salt that gave this spring it powers. He called it sal mirabile, for the wonders it could work, and claimed that he produced it from common salt and sulfuric acid. He first announced his discovery in 1658, publishing a book about the nature of salts in general. In it he praised the manifold virtues of salt: it was the nutriment of all things, a symbol of eternity, the crucial ingredient in alchemical transmutation and in aurum potabile (potable gold), the cause of spontaneous generation, and the principle of all life. All salts, including common cooking salt, partook in the wondrous qualities of the elemental salt, but the sal mirabile was truly miraculous.