From Root To Crown · A Crystal special
The hidden history of colloidal silver
They did not bury silver because it failed.
Silver cups. Surgical wire. Apothecary bottles. Bioelectric research. The story of silver stretches far beyond a modern label, and its history deserves more than a headline.
The history, in brief
What is the history of colloidal silver?
Silver was used in vessels and medical preparations long before the development of antibiotics. Colloidal silver belongs to the later chapter: exceptionally fine silver particles dispersed in liquid, studied in the nineteenth century and sold in several early twentieth-century preparations.
This feature follows that journey from the old household and apothecary to electrical research and the independent silver revival. Our perspective keeps the question of access, ownership and commercial influence in the story, alongside the dates and the original records.
Explore the silver ingredient guide or understand what PPM means.
Follow the centuries
Colloidal silver history timeline
| Period | Development | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Antiquity | Silver vessels and household traditions | The history of the metal predates the modern colloid. |
| 1881 | Credé introduces silver nitrate eye prophylaxis | A silver salt has a documented place in medical history. |
| 1889 | M. Carey Lea publishes Allotropic Forms of Silver | An early landmark in finely divided silver chemistry. |
| Early 1900s | Named silver preparations enter the pharmacy | Colloids, salts and protein preparations occupy different shelves. |
| 1930s–1940s | Sulfa drugs and antibiotics expand | Silver’s place in prescribing changes. |
| 1978 | Becker and Spadaro publish their clinical report | Electrically generated silver is investigated in a specific wound setting. |
| 1995–1996 | Mark Metcalf’s articles circulate | The independent revival links silver with affordability and self-reliance. |
| 1999 | US rule on OTC silver drug products | A regulatory turning point in how products could be marketed. |
c. 4000 BCE · Persia · Babylon · Greece
Silver in the water, silver on the table
Silver’s story begins with the vessel. Cups, bowls and water containers appear in accounts from Persia, Babylon, Greece and Rome, long before the word colloid existed. The familiar story of Cyrus of Persia travelling with water carried in silver belongs to that older tradition.
Silver was valuable as money, tableware and a metal that resisted ordinary corrosion. Historical accounts also describe silver powders and preparations in healing traditions, including Hippocrates’ era and the Ayurvedic use of Rajata. These were different practices and materials, rather than one standard recipe.
Court tables ran to silver cutlery, goblets and plate. The silver spoon became a symbol of household wealth. Some later silver histories connect the phrase blue bloods with silver exposure, although that proposed origin is disputed. Stories of protection during plague years belong to the historical tradition, rather than a controlled comparison of households.
Coins in water casks, silverware in storage vessels and edible silver foil in India show how broadly the metal entered daily life. The modern colloid came later. The interest in silver did not begin with a 1990s mailing list.
The thread: Silver vessels and household traditions predate modern colloidal preparations.
1500s–1830 · Apothecary to kit
Lunar caustic in the kit
Silver’s Latin name, argentum, gives us its chemical symbol, Ag. As the metal moved from the table into the apothecary, the forms multiplied: powders, salts, solutions and surgical materials. They shared an element, but not the same chemistry.
In 1617, John Woodall described silver nitrate as infernal stone, or lunar caustic, in the surgeon’s kit. Historical records also describe silver feeding tubes, cannulas, syringes, wire and foil. The materials were chosen for particular tasks, and access could be expensive.
Silver nitrate belongs to the salt chapter. Silver wire belongs to the surgical-material chapter. A colloidal dispersion belongs to another. Keeping those distinctions visible is central to this history: the later debate often compresses several preparations into the single word silver.
The thread: Name the material: a salt, a surgical wire and a colloid are different preparations.
Still done · The household
A coin in the milk, two glasses on the sill
Grandmothers put a silver coin in the milk bottle so it would not turn. At Crystal we ran the same test in daylight: two glasses of milk on the windowsill, twenty millilitres of colloid in one, nothing in the other. Next morning the treated glass was unchanged. The untreated glass had curdled and stank.
That is our household observation, not a controlled preservation study or a reason to leave food unrefrigerated. It belongs to the same long tradition: silver on the table, silver in the cask, silver in the bottle.
The thread: Household observations explain the tradition; the method and setting still matter.
1881 · Leipzig obstetrics
1881: Credé and silver nitrate
Carl Credé dropped silver nitrate into newborn eyes to stop gonorrhoeal ophthalmia. By 1884 the ward dose was a 1% solution. Incidence fell from 7.8% to 0.13% in thirteen years. Countries wrote it into law. It stayed on the ward into living memory. That is not folklore. That is obstetrics. Searle later argued the colloid was kinder in that same job. The nitrate stayed anyway.
It was a salt, not a colloid — and it still worked well enough to become statute. Emil von Behring, who would take the 1901 Nobel for serum work, showed 0.25% and 0.01% silver nitrate against typhoid and anthrax bacilli in 1887. Variot, 1888, used nitrate on broken skin after puncture and incision. Bechhold records Credé’s 1896 colloid as the first metal used because it was a colloid. In 1891 the other Credé, the surgeon, had already moved on: colloidal silver on wounds, after Halsted’s silver foil. The clinic was refining the metal while the later press was still confusing it with photographic chemistry.
The thread: Credé’s chapter concerns silver nitrate, rather than a modern bottled colloid.
1889–95 · Colloid, not caustic
1889: Carey Lea and the colloidal particle
M. C. Lea’s 1889 citrate silver colloid is nanosilver in the literature, a century before the prefix. Halsted sewed silver wire and laid silver foil to keep postoperative sepsis down. Raulin, 1869, found Aspergillus niger would not grow in silver vessels — the water-cleansing effect written down. von Nägeli, the Swiss botanist who first saw what we now call chromosomes, named the oligodynamic effect: silver and copper hydrosols active in almost nothing.
Collargol, from 1897, ran at about 10 nanometres and sat on pharmacy shelves. “Colloidal” now meant what the laboratory meant: extremely fine particles held in a liquid. The older chemical routes were dear; electrolysis later became a way to make the suspension without a palace budget. This is the line Crystal belongs to — a dispersion of metal in clean water — not lunar caustic, not a protein soup.
The thread: Carey Lea’s work gives the particle story a nineteenth-century documentary anchor.
1911–40 · On the official shelf
Silver preparations on the pharmacy shelf
Crookes Chemists introduced Collosol Argentum in 1911. MacLeod, writing in The Lancet in 1912, reported it used topically, by mouth, under the skin and in the vein — tonsillitis, ulcers, ringworm, gonorrhoea, chronic cystitis. Marshall and Killoh tested Collosol in 1915 against anthrax, typhoid, plague bacillus, E. coli. Alfred B. Searle collected contemporary accounts in The Use of Colloids in Health and Disease (1920), drawing on Bechhold’s Colloids in Biology and Medicine the same year. A. Legge Roe, in the BMJ of 16 January 1915, wrote of the colloid in the eye: blepharitis, corneal ulcers, interstitial keratitis, dacrocystitis, the purulent ophthalmia of infants.
J. Mark Hovell, BMJ 15 December 1917, took it to the throat and ear — quinsy, tonsillitis, pyorrhoea, whooping cough, shingles, Menière, the eustachian tube. T. H. Anderson Wells, Lancet 16 February 1918, used it in puerperal septicaemia. W. J. Simpson, Lancet 12 December 1914, against the typhoid bacillus. Sir James Cantlie and Sir Malcolm Morris wrote of dysentery and sprue. Morris said the colloid did not irritate as the salts did; it soothed inflamed tissue and let it close. The old papers were not a hymn. They also listed organisms that shrugged it off — some Citrobacter, Enterobacter, Klebsiella, Proteus, some E. coli.
The record was a clinic, not a miracle list.
By 1940 the market held roughly four dozen silver preparations: Albargin, Argonin, Argyn, Argyrol, Largin, Lunosol, Novargan, Proganol, Electrargol, Silvol. They were not one thing. Silver salts — caustic, reactive. Mild silver proteins, sometimes 10% silver or more, the line that stained. Electro-colloidal silver — metal in water, quieter, the line Crystal belongs to. Some labels had no honest right to the word colloid. Effectiveness followed the making, not the name. That is still the point.
The thread: The old pharmacy contained several distinct forms of silver, not one interchangeable remedy.
From the archive · London, 1920
The book, in its own time
This is the original title page of Alfred B. Searle’s The Use of Colloids in Health and Disease, published by Constable as part of the Chadwick Library, with a foreword by Sir Malcolm Morris.
The date and names are visible on the page itself. That makes the book a useful anchor for the early pharmacy chapter, and gives you a route into the record rather than another unsourced quotation.
The title page is a genuine scan. The atmospheric pharmacy and research scenes elsewhere in this feature are modern editorial illustrations.
Open the digitised 1920 book
1914–18 · Silver leaf
Before the patent, this was the dressing
Silver leaf and silver nitrate belong to the history of wartime wound care. Water treatment supplied another route: silver-containing filters and coatings brought the metal into practical systems beyond the pharmacy.
NASA commissioned silver-ion water-purification research during the Apollo era. Its own later account explains that those silver-ion purifiers did not fly on NASA missions, but the technology found applications on Earth. The research history is substantial enough without adding a flight that did not happen.
Meanwhile, sulfa drugs and the mass production of antibiotics changed the medical market during the 1930s and 1940s. In Crystal’s reading, silver lost a market as well as a place in the prescribing toolkit. Ownership and commercial incentives belong in that account.
The metal itself never left wider industry: photography, jewellery, electronics, water systems, textiles and coatings. The clinic changed its toolkit. The earth did not run out of Ag.
The thread: Silver continued in practical materials and water-treatment research as prescribing changed.
1938–1940s · The replacement
You cannot patent an element
Sulfa drugs in the 1930s, penicillin in the 1940s. The clinic changed its toolkit. The metal itself remained available, but its place in the pharmacy narrowed as the new medicines expanded.
You cannot patent a naturally occurring element itself. You can patent particular processes, formulations and devices. That distinction sits at the heart of the commercial argument: an inexpensive, widely accessible material occupies a different market from a proprietary preparation.
Our reading of this history keeps ownership, funding and commercial incentives in view. Metcalf’s later articles make that argument forcefully. The shift in prescribing is a historical development; the claim that suppression was its principal cause is an interpretation of that development.
The old pharmacy also contained very different preparations. Silver nitrate, silver proteins and particulate dispersions should not be treated as interchangeable simply because their labels share the word silver.
The thread: The commercial argument turns on ownership of processes and products, rather than ownership of the element.
1965– · Burns, Becker, bandages
The 1960s: silver returns to wound care
Silver returned to prominence in specialised wound care during the 1960s. Silver nitrate dressings and, later, silver sulphadiazine became part of the burn-care story. Silver-coated dressings carried the metal into another generation of materials.
The important point for this history is continuity. Silver did not disappear from practical work when antibiotics arrived. Different forms of it remained under investigation, on dressings and in devices. The metal’s story continued beyond the familiar account of an old remedy being replaced.
The thread: The wound-care chapter shows continuity in silver’s practical history.
1978 · Robert O. Becker & Joseph A. Spadaro
Silver meets bioelectricity
Becker’s work connects silver with a wider investigation of electrical processes in living tissue. In 1978, Becker and Spadaro published a preliminary clinical report on electrically generated silver ions as an adjunct in managing chronic osteomyelitis.
The research involved a particular electrode-based treatment setting. That detail matters: a study of silver generated at a wound is a different question from the effects of an oral preparation. Naming the method makes the historical account more useful.
For readers interested in frequency, electricity and the older research traditions, this is a substantial chapter in its own right. It is worth following the original work rather than reducing it to a slogan.
Read Becker and Spadaro’s 1978 publication record.
The thread: Keep Becker’s electrode-based research in its original treatment setting.
1995–1996 · The independent revival
The 1990s revival: silver back in ordinary hands
Silver’s story did not end when antibiotics took centre stage. In articles published in Perceptions in 1995 and 1996, Mark Metcalf described a renewed interest in electrically produced colloidal silver.
Bob Beck and the question of access
Metcalf presented Bob Beck’s battery-powered generator as a turning point: a simple device that brought silver preparation within reach of ordinary households. For Metcalf, this meant affordability, freedom of choice and greater independence. He argued that commercial interests helped push silver aside and shaped the way its return was received.
Read Mark Metcalf’s articles on Quantum Balancing. Their account of commercial suppression is the author’s argument.
The thread: The independent revival joined a technical interest in silver with questions of access and affordability.
1999 · The US final rule
1999: the rule, the label and the debate
On 17 August 1999, the US Food and Drug Administration published its final rule on over-the-counter drug products containing colloidal silver ingredients or silver salts. It took effect on 16 September 1999. The rule classified those OTC drug products as not generally recognised as safe and effective and as misbranded.
That was a decision about drug products and the basis on which they could be marketed. It was not a prohibition on the existence of elemental silver. Nor was it an endorsement of every other proposed use. The scope of the actual document matters.
For independent silver advocates, this became a turning point in the debate about access, evidence and the language allowed on labels. Our interest in that debate does not require erasing the earlier pharmacy record. Read the original 1999 rule and make that distinction for yourself.
The thread: Read the scope of the original rule alongside the debate it generated.
Keep the chemistry in view
Colloidal silver, ionic silver and silver salts
A colloid contains dispersed particles. Ionic silver means silver present as dissolved ions. Silver nitrate is a silver salt; older silver protein preparations are another formulation again. A liquid can contain both particles and dissolved ions, depending on how it is produced.
That is why the name alone never tells the whole story. Preparation, concentration and the setting in which something was studied all belong in a useful account of silver history. Colour or a visible light beam alone cannot establish purity, particle size or safety.
Light and the liquid
What does the Tyndall effect show?
Small dispersed particles scatter light, making a beam’s path visible in a liquid. This is the Tyndall effect, a useful way of illustrating the behaviour of a colloidal dispersion.
The beam gives a visual clue. It does not measure PPM, identify the particles or replace a compositional analysis. Keep the demonstration alongside the specification, rather than asking one image to tell the whole story.
Crystal Health & Beauty · Now
Amber glass. Distilled water. A continuing craft.
Our place in this history is a UK family workshop making silver preparations with steam-distilled water and bottling them in amber glass. The process, the water and the finished specification matter to us.
Concentration is expressed in parts per million, or PPM. It describes how much silver is present; it does not, by itself, describe the particle size or the proportion present as particles and ions.
Keep the bottle closed and store it as its label directs, away from strong light and excessive heat. The current product page carries the specification for the bottle you are choosing.
Explore Crystal colloidal silverQuestions, answered plainly
Colloidal silver history FAQs
What is colloidal silver?
Colloidal silver is a dispersion of very small silver particles in a liquid. Depending on production, a preparation may also contain dissolved silver ions. Its history is distinct from, but connected to, the older use of silver vessels, salts and surgical materials.
How old is colloidal silver?
Silver vessels and silver-based preparations have a much older history than the modern colloid. Nineteenth-century work, including Carey Lea’s 1889 publication, belongs to the development of finely divided silver chemistry; named colloidal preparations followed on the pharmacy shelf.
Who was M. Carey Lea?
M. Carey Lea was a nineteenth-century chemist whose work included finely divided silver. His 1889 paper, Allotropic Forms of Silver, is a historical landmark in the study of forms later understood through colloid chemistry.
Who were Bob Beck and Robert O. Becker?
They were different people. Bob Beck is associated with the independent silver-generator revival described by Mark Metcalf. Robert O. Becker was a physician and researcher whose work included bioelectricity and electrically generated silver in specific clinical settings.
Why did silver use decline after antibiotics arrived?
The expansion of sulfa drugs and antibiotics changed prescribing and the market for older preparations. Independent silver writers also argue that ownership and commercial incentives influenced the change. That commercial explanation is an interpretation, rather than a single established cause.
Was silver itself banned in 1999?
The US final rule concerned over-the-counter drug products containing colloidal silver ingredients or silver salts. It was not a ban on the existence of elemental silver. The source section links directly to the original rule.
Is silver nitrate the same as colloidal silver?
No. Silver nitrate is a silver salt. A colloidal dispersion contains particles. Older protein-bound preparations and modern silver-containing dressings are further examples of different formulations that should be named separately.
What does PPM mean?
PPM means parts per million and describes concentration. In a dilute water-based preparation, 20 PPM is approximately 20 milligrams of silver per litre. PPM alone does not establish particle size, composition or product quality.
Does a Tyndall beam prove the purity of colloidal silver?
No. A visible beam shows light scattering in the liquid. It does not identify the particles, determine their size or establish purity, concentration or safety.
Where can I read the sources?
The linked sources below include Carey Lea’s 1889 paper, the 1920 record of Searle’s book, Becker and Spadaro’s 1978 report, Metcalf’s revival articles and the original 1999 US rule.
Follow the record
Sources and further reading
Read the earlier accounts, compare the methods and keep the dates visible. Some passages above describe historical reports and household traditions; others present Crystal’s independent interpretation of the commercial story.
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M. Carey Lea, Allotropic Forms of Silver (1889)
Original publication record for the chemistry chapter. -
The Use of Colloids in Health and Disease (1920)
Contemporary publication record naming Alfred B. Searle and Sir Malcolm Morris. -
Becker & Spadaro, electrically generated silver ions (1978)
Preliminary clinical report; identifies the method and treatment setting. -
Mark Metcalf, silver revival articles (1995–1996)
The independent account supplied for this feature. Its commercial arguments are attributed to its author. -
US Federal Register final rule (17 August 1999)
The original regulatory document, rather than a retelling of its scope. -
NASA, Space-Age Water Conservation (2021)
NASA’s own account of its silver-ion purifier research and terrestrial applications. -
Searle, The Use of Colloids in Health and Disease: digitised 1920 edition
Gerstein – University of Toronto copy, hosted by Internet Archive; source of the original title page shown above.
This historical feature is not a set of instructions for preparing or administering the older remedies. Images are editorial illustrations unless identified otherwise.
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