I get what you're saying, but that's the origin story of the scientific method--develop a theory, test it, repeat the test--not the origin of modern chemistry. Even pre-Renaissance alchemists didn't think what they were doing was "magical," they thought it was purely physical. (The church disagreed, and well...let's just say that they owned most of the printing presses.)
The field of thermodynamics was one of the rare sciences that "flipped the script," where experimentation actually drove the theory. It's a pretty cool bit of history...or at least I think it's cool. And now that I think about it, those inventors tinkering around in their workshops are probably closer to the D&D idea of "artificer" than pre-Renaissance alchemists were. So maybe I should have just said "inventor" instead of "alchemist."