Classic kit
2012
Classic kit: Scheibel's column
Liquid-liquid extraction attracts a little poetic licence
A 'lightbulb moment' in measuring vacuum pressure
Classic kit: Zsigmondy's ultramicroscope
Conquering vapour density and atomic weight
Classic kit: Victor Meyer's apparatus
Conquering vapour density and atomic weight
Purifying the most involatile of liquids
2011
Classic kit: Wheatstone's Bridge
Of all the paradigms of science, the idea of equilibrium is one of the most fundamental
Classic kit: Weissenberg's Camera
In so many societies, bread is the stuff of life the cornerstone of existence
Classic kit: Van de Graaff generator
Transport systems can be great unifiers and bringers of development
Classic kit: McLeod's vacuum gauge
The simmering tensions between science and religion
What's in a name?
Classic kit: The Evans balance
Easy to use and robust, the Evans or JM balance has been on the market in various forms since 1974
Lightning is one of the great metaphors for the creative process
Classic kit: Hershberg's stirrer
A deceptively simple stirrer
Martin Luther Kings great 1963 speech calling for racial equality and an end to discrimination
Classic kit: Warburg's manometer
It is probably fair to say that for all its crucial importance to the smooth running of society, accountancy seldom generates great excitement or wide acclaim
Classic kit: Craig's rotary evaporator
Years ago, a non-chemist friend of mine visiting my lab asked me what a rotavap was for
Too many arm curls
2010
How many physical scientists can really dance?
The most reductive of literary critics are wont to say that there are only seven kinds of stories
Classic kit: Saussure's cyanometer
In 1959, jazz trumpeter Miles Davis assembled his ideal sextet
Many years ago, a friend of mine teased me about how I, as a chemist, would probably die young of some dread occupational disease
Classic kit: Haldane's blood gas analyser
Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who steered Ivory Coast to independence in 1959, was known as the Sage of Africa
Baldassarre Castiglione wrote that the perfect gentleman should 'affect in all things sprezzatura' - artful effortlessness
Classic kit: Dean-Stark apparatus
If there is any single substance that unites pretty much all chemists, it has to be water
One seldom sees grown-ups in public blowing bubbles
Courage is not a trait that one always associates with scientists
Sooner or later, it is the fate of every scholar to be accused of pedantry
When I was about 16, I came across a peculiar novel in my father's study
Classic kit: Hofmann's voltammeter
As a child, I remember wondering how far one could count
2009
Sooner or later, everyone has to grow up
Laboratories are noisy places. Stop and listen.
Classic kit: Gadolin's condenser
Chemistry is often compared to cookery, and the pages of a typical cookbook read like the pages of the wonderful compendia Organic- and Inorganic Syntheses
Classic kit: Liebig's Kaliapparat
Liebig's Kaliapparat. Justus von Liebig (1803-1873) was a German chemist, co-discoverer of isomerism, father of agricultural chemistry and revolutionised chemical analysis
Johannes Thiele - the Prussian inventor of a temperature-stable convection heating tube for melting point analysis
Approximately 2nd century AD. One of the earliest alchemists, inventor of the 'bain marie', the kerotakis apparatus and the tribikos still
Classic kit: Ostwald's viscometer
One man who took little on trust was Wilhelm Ostwald. Born in Riga, Latvia, he studied chemistry at the University of Dorpat (now Tartu, Estonia).
Classic kit: Gaede's diffusion pump
A new generation of faster, stronger and more reliable vacuum pumps
The Carius tube - still the workhorse of digestion reactions
Separating crystals is a cinch using a Hirsch funnel, but it was not always thus
Classic Kit: Abderhalden's drying pistol
Humans have been preoccupied with purity for thousands of years
Classic Kit: 'Perkin's' triangle
The vacuum distillation apparatus invented by Leonard Temple Thorne, but with Perkin's name on it
2008
Classic Kit: Signer's Osmometer
Signer's elegant apparatus for measuring molecular weights in solution
Classic Kit: Abbé's refractometer
The other day I found myself in the supermarket staring at a frozen cliff of buttery spreads
In the name of effective multi-tasking, modern technology tries to combine as many functions into one small gadget as possible
Few who have listened to the music of Richard Wagner can remain indifferent to it.
A thing of rare beauty which every chemist should have on their mantelpiece
George Bernard Shaw once described Britain and America as being 'two countries divided by a common language
Classic Kit: Drechsel's bottle
Western travellers to the East fuelled a fashion for Orientalism which reached its height in the 19th century
Beer has made an immense contribution to humanity generally and to chemists in particular
Does anyone blow glass in chemistry labs any more?
Titrations are the symbol of all that is boring in science
It has long been said that nature abhors a vacuum
Classic Kit: Schlenk apparatus
In one of the more memorable passages from his memoirs Heinrich Schliemann - the infamous Russian-German archaeologist, adventurer and gold-digger - describes entering a shaft tomb...
2007
Classic Kit: Beckmann thermometer
There was a time, long ago, that few of us remember, when you couldn't just head down to the basement and get a quick NMR or mass spectrum of your latest compound
If there's one piece of glassware other than a conical flask that spells the word 'chemistry' in the minds of most people it is Kipp's apparatus
One sure-fire way of entering the chemical pantheon is to get your name associated with a piece of kit
Classic Kit: Soxhlet extractor
One sure-fire way of entering the chemical pantheon is to get your name associated with a piece of kit
