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Displaying: 25 / 100 / 200 results

Ordered by: Date (newest first) / Date (oldest first)

Anschütz’s manometer

23 April 2013 Classic Kit

A compact and convenient distillation aid

Geiger's tube

25 March 2013 Classic Kit

The ticking counter of individual atomic events

Castner's electrode

1 March 2013 Classic Kit

Bringing the spark of life to the chemical industry

Coolidge’s x-ray tube

24 January 2013 Classic Kit

A light to reveal the atomic order of the world

Wedgwood’s pyrometer

19 December 2012 Classic Kit

Taming the fiery heat of kiln and furnace

Karl Fischer’s titrator

3 December 2012 Classic Kit

Putting the crunch into those moreish goodies

Penning’s vacuum gauge

31 October 2012 Classic Kit

Born not from the spark of an idea but the afterglow

Dufton's spiral column

1 October 2012 Classic Kit

The winding path to chemical virtue

Lüer's syringe

28 August 2012 Classic Kit

An innovation that launched a family empire

Chattaway's spatula

23 July 2012 Classic Kit

Trusty companion of intrepid chemical explorers

Luggin's capillary

1 July 2012 Classic Kit

Do you cringe when a relationship is described as involving ‘chemistry’?

Turing’s machine

31 May 2012 Classic Kit

Alan Turing, perhaps not often remembered as a chemist, provided the starting point for computational chemistry

Scheibel's column

30 April 2012 Classic Kit

Liquid-liquid extraction attracts a little poetic licence

Pirani's gauge

31 March 2012 Classic Kit

A 'lightbulb moment' in measuring vacuum pressure

Classic Kit: Pirani's gauge

28 March 2012 Classic Kit

A 'lightbulb moment' in measuring vacuum pressure

Classic Kit: Zsigmondy's ultramicroscope

23 February 2012 Classic Kit

Conquering vapour density and atomic weight

Classic Kit: Victor Meyer's apparatus

27 January 2012 Classic Kit

Conquering vapour density and atomic weight

Classic Kit: Hickman's still

22 December 2011 Classic Kit

Purifying the most involatile of liquids

Classic Kit: Wheatstone's Bridge

28 November 2011 Classic Kit

Of all the paradigms of science, the idea of equilibrium is one of the most fundamental

Classic Kit: Weissenberg's Camera

26 October 2011 Classic Kit

In so many societies, bread is the stuff of life the cornerstone of existence

Classic Kit: Van de Graaff generator

29 September 2011 Classic Kit

Transport systems can be great unifiers and bringers of development

Classic Kit: McLeod's Vacuum Guage

26 August 2011 Classic Kit

The simmering tensions between science and religion

Classic Kit: Griffin's beaker

28 July 2011 Classic Kit

What's in a name?

Classic Kit: The Evans balance

30 June 2011 Classic Kit

Easy to use and robust, the Evans or JM balance has been on the market in various forms since 1974

Classic Kit: Volta's piles

31 May 2011 Classic Kit

Lightning is one of the great metaphors for the creative process

Classic Kit: Hershberg's stirrer

28 April 2011 Classic Kit

A deceptively simple stirrer

Another periodic romp

30 March 2011 Review

Periodic tales: the curious lives of the elements

Classic Kit: Pardy apparatus

29 March 2011 Classic Kit

Martin Luther Kings great 1963 speech calling for racial equality and an end to discrimination

Ammonium nitrate

23 March 2011 Podcast | Compounds

This week's podcast is about ammonium nitrate

Silver fulminate and cyanate

2 March 2011 Podcast | Compounds

This week's podcast is about silver fulminate and cyanate

Classic Kit: Warburg's manometer

24 February 2011 Classic Kit

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

Salbutamol

16 February 2011 Podcast | Compounds

This week's podcast is about salbutamol

Sulfur hexafluoride

2 February 2011 Podcast | Compounds

This week's podcast is about sulfur hexafluoride

Classic Kit: Craig's rotary evaporator

31 January 2011 Classic Kit

Years ago, a non-chemist friend of mine visiting my lab asked me what a rotavap was for

Classic Kit: Töpler pump

5 January 2011 Classic Kit

Too many arm curls

Classic Kit: Gouy's tube

29 November 2010 Classic Kit

How many physical scientists can really dance?

Classic Kit: Bridgman's seal

28 October 2010 Classic Kit

The most reductive of literary critics are wont to say that there are only seven kinds of stories

Blogosphere

28 October 2010 Review

The Open Laboratory 2009. The best of science writing on blogs

Classic Kit: Saussure's cyanometer

28 September 2010 Classic Kit

In 1959, jazz trumpeter Miles Davis assembled his ideal sextet

Classic Kit: Gooch's crucible

27 August 2010 Classic Kit

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

30 July 2010 Classic Kit

Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who steered Ivory Coast to independence in 1959, was known as the Sage of Africa

Classic Kit: Morton flask

25 June 2010 Classic Kit

Baldassarre Castiglione wrote that the perfect gentleman should 'affect in all things sprezzatura' - artful effortlessness

Classic Kit: Dean-Stark apparatus

27 May 2010 Classic Kit

If there is any single substance that unites pretty much all chemists, it has to be water

Classic Kit: Allihn condenser

28 April 2010 Classic Kit

One seldom sees grown-ups in public blowing bubbles

Classic Kit: Pasteur pipette

31 March 2010 Classic Kit

Courage is not a trait that one always associates with scientists

Classic Kit: Vernier scale

26 February 2010 Classic Kit

Sooner or later, it is the fate of every scholar to be accused of pedantry

Classic Kit: Petri dish

28 January 2010 Classic Kit

When I was about 16, I came across a peculiar novel in my father's study

Classic Kit: Hofmann's voltammeter

6 January 2010 Classic Kit

As a child, I remember wondering how far one could count

Classic Kit: Keck clip

26 November 2009 Classic Kit

Sooner or later, everyone has to grow up

Classic Kit: BüchnersFunnel

28 October 2009 Classic Kit

Laboratories are noisy places. Stop and listen.

Classic Kit: Gadolins's condenser

1 October 2009 Classic Kit

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

25 August 2009 Classic Kit

Liebig's Kaliapparat. Justus von Liebig (1803-1873) was a German chemist, co-discoverer of isomerism, father of agricultural chemistry and revolutionised chemical analysis

Classic Kit: Thiele tube

28 July 2009 Classic Kit

Johannes Thiele - the Prussian inventor of a temperature-stable convection heating tube for melting point analysis

Classic Kit: Mary's bath

29 June 2009 Classic Kit

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

29 May 2009 Classic Kit

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

28 April 2009 Classic Kit

A new generation of faster, stronger and more reliable vacuum pumps

Classic Kit: Carius tube

30 March 2009 Classic Kit

The Carius tube - still the workhorse of digestion reactions

Classic Kit: Hirsch's funnel

23 February 2009 Classic Kit

Separating crystals is a cinch using a Hirsch funnel, but it was not always thus

Classic Kit: Abderhalden's drying pistol

28 January 2009 Classic Kit

Humans have been preoccupied with purity for thousands of years

Classic Kit: 'Perkin's' triangle

8 January 2009 Classic Kit

The vacuum distillation apparatus invented by Leonard Temple Thorne, but with Perkin's name on it

Classic Kit: Signer's Osmometer

27 November 2008 Classic Kit

Signer's elegant apparatus for measuring molecular weights in solution

Classic Kit: Abbes refractometer

29 October 2008 Classic Kit

The other day I found myself in the supermarket staring at a frozen cliff of buttery spreads

Classic Kit: Claisen's flask

26 September 2008 Classic Kit

In the name of effective multi-tasking, modern technology tries to combine as many functions into one small gadget as possible

Classic Kit: Raschig's rings

27 August 2008 Classic Kit

Few who have listened to the music of Richard Wagner can remain indifferent to it.

Classic Kit: Dewar's flask

30 July 2008 Classic Kit

A thing of rare beauty which every chemist should have on their mantelpiece

Classic Kit: Erlenmeyer flask

30 June 2008 Classic Kit

George Bernard Shaw once described Britain and America as being 'two countries divided by a common language

Classic Kit: Drechsel's bottle

28 May 2008 Classic Kit

Western travellers to the East fuelled a fashion for Orientalism which reached its height in the 19th century

Classic Kit: Kjeldahl flask

28 April 2008 Classic Kit

Beer has made an immense contribution to humanity generally and to chemists in particular

Classic Kit: Vigreux's column

26 March 2008 Classic Kit

Does anyone blow glass in chemistry labs any more?

Classic Kit: Mohr's burette

26 February 2008 Classic Kit

Titrations are the symbol of all that is boring in science

Classic Kit: Sprengel pump

28 January 2008 Classic Kit

It has long been said that nature abhors a vacuum

Classic Kit: Schlenk apparatus

20 December 2007 Classic Kit

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

Classic Kit: Beckmann thermometer

28 November 2007 Classic Kit

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

Classic Kit: Kipp's apparatus

26 October 2007 Classic Kit

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

Classic Kit: Bunsen burner

2 October 2007 Classic Kit

One sure-fire way of entering the chemical pantheon is to get your name associated with a piece of kit

Classic Kit: Soxhlet extractor

28 August 2007 Classic Kit

One sure-fire way of entering the chemical pantheon is to get your name associated with a piece of kit

26 July 2005: 'Pen' detects peroxide-based explosives

26 July 2005 News Archive

Researchers have developed a pocket-sized device for detecting sub-milligram quantities of peroxide-based explosives such as those reportedly used in the recent bomb attacks in London.