#classickit — Public Fediverse posts

I finally finished the latest story for #ClassicKit that took me onto yet another journey across Mitteleuropa searching for the traces of a man who transformed cycling (and, yes, science too) through what some called “an accident”.
And then, last night I started reading Olga Tokarczuk’s utterly enthralling novel The Empusium, which takes place about 30 miles from where my hero raised Leghorn chickens…
Small world.

It’s awfully tempting to write another spoof article, inspired by this marvel of artistic and technological creativity. #ClassicKit

KLAXON! I hope that @helenczerski will get her butt down to Genova for what looks like an amazing exhibition centred around Moby Dick. And for those of you both with butts and in Italy, don’t miss it.
Infuriating that it ends too soon for me to get there. My only quibbles are that absence of Argand lamps (#ClassicKit) and the clunky typography and translations of the catalogue, which is the closest I’ll get to this show. https://palazzoducale.genova.it/mostra/moby-dick-la-balena/

Does anyone remember Letraset, the scratch and print sheets that could be used to apply professional lettering to sheets of paper? They were part of the pain of writing a scientific thesis before the arrival of the Macintosh and the democratization of (admittedly often second-rate) graphic design.
anyway it's some pre-Christmas #ClassicKit

https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/letrasets-transfers-and-placing-precision-back-on-the-drawing-board/4022562.article

Looks like the last #ClassicKit of 2025 is done. It is inspired by Marty Feldman's brilliant Four Yorkshiremen sketch that was immortalized with Monty Python. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATCWBuieTzI

@Birk_lab
"When I were a lad" doing A-levels, we pipetted our aliquots for titrations by mouth. That's what got me interested in the tastes fo the acids in the lab - nitric hydrochloric sulfuric and phosphoric are quite distinct. I also learned that 0.1 M HCl was by no means "dilute", at least not in the mouth…

And your mention of Eppendorf reminds me that the inventor of the mechanical pipette, Heinrich Schnitger invented it for a reason: https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/schnitgers-pipette/7789.article #ClassicKit

Yesterday I put the finishing touches on the latest instalment of #ClassicKit that will be out on November 1st.
It was a bit of a fluke. I stumbled across the marvel shown in the picture while learning about extinct distillation glassware. And then to my disbelief I learned that its inventor was responsible for one of the greatest advancements in French public health. But I bet you've not hear of him. #dephlegmator

To my absolute astonishment today, while handing over a few items from our archives to the #UCL200 team, I spotted this: a letter from John Thomas Way's mother telling Thomas Graham (Professor of Chemistry at UCL among other things who discovered colloids, effusion, hydrogen absorption by palladium and more) that her son would be turning up in his lab as a pupil on Monday!
What else is lurking in there. John T Way would establish the phenomenon of ion exchange. #watersoftening #ClassicKit

To my absolute astonishment today, while handing over a few items from our archives to the #UCL200 team, I spotted this: a letter from John Thomas Way's mother telling Thomas Graham (Professor of Chemistry at UCL among other things who discovered colloids, effusion, hydrogen absorption by palladium and more) that her son would be turning up in his lab as a pupil on Monday!
What else is lurking in there. John T Way would establish the phenomenon of ion exchange. #watersoftening #ClassicKit

To my absolute astonishment today, while handing over a few items from our archives to the #UCL200 team, I spotted this: a letter from John Thomas Way's mother telling Thomas Graham (Professor of Chemistry at UCL among other things who discovered colloids, effusion, hydrogen absorption by palladium and more) that her son would be turning up in his lab as a pupil on Monday!
What else is lurking in there. John T Way would establish the phenomenon of ion exchange. #watersoftening #ClassicKit

To my absolute astonishment today, while handing over a few items from our archives to the #UCL200 team, I spotted this: a letter from John Thomas Way's mother telling Thomas Graham (Professor of Chemistry at UCL among other things who discovered colloids, effusion, hydrogen absorption by palladium and more) that her son would be turning up in his lab as a pupil on Monday!
What else is lurking in there. John T Way would establish the phenomenon of ion exchange. #watersoftening #ClassicKit

To my absolute astonishment today, while handing over a few items from our archives to the #UCL200 team, I spotted this: a letter from John Thomas Way's mother telling Thomas Graham (Professor of Chemistry at UCL among other things who discovered colloids, effusion, hydrogen absorption by palladium and more) that her son would be turning up in his lab as a pupil on Monday!
What else is lurking in there. John T Way would establish the phenomenon of ion exchange. #watersoftening #ClassicKit

@timwaterman I hope you also paused, in Fitzroy Square, to pay homage to the Blue Plaque to August Hofmann, who was lured to Britain by that tech need Albert of Saxe-whatnot (apocryphally of the Prince Albert…but I digress) to head up the new Royal College of Chemistry on Oxford Street.
One of my #ClassicKit heroes. https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/hofmanns-voltammeter/3004920.article

@Catvalente Thank God for scribes, copyists and translators who keep such wonders in our collective memory. #ClassicKit

Just submitted a #ClassicKit column that muses about book burning and the risks of losing knowledge and accumulated human thought.
It is in my thoughts for many reasons, but not because my elderly mother has about 12,000 volumes in her flat.

@MrInappropriate @rmartinnielsen @fulelo One of the first chemists to advocate the use of lachrymators for military purposes, Walther Nernst, would go on to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on thermodynamics - his low temperature calorimeter led him to formulate the 3rd Law of Thermodynamics that allows absolute entropies to be measured. His daughters married Jews and fled Hitler's Germany and he was eventually forced into retirement. https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/nernsts-calorimeter/4017475.article #ClassicKit

#ClassicKit takes me to amazing places. Today it's a journal published in Cairo, MIDÉO, Mélanges de l'institut dominicain des études orientales (Miscellanies of the Dominican Institute for Oriental Studies in Cairo).
I mean, seriously, what an amazing thing to dip into. But infuriatingly there isn't a library in the UK that holds it…
I'm written to them hoping they'll take pity.

We're just past the 200th anniversary of Michael Faraday announcing his discovery of bicarburet of hydrogen (that Mitscherlich would call "benzine" and Liebig would rename "benzol") a molecule that would <ahem> resonate intellectually and industrially. for 200 years and counting.
A single phrase in his description caught my eye. He says that "a stoppered bottle… was brought home". It a phrase that speaks volumes. He was a lab rat, pure and simple. #ClassicKit https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/faradays-laboratory-manual-and-the-isolation-of-benzene/4021734.article

@luddchem Meh! Tenor schmenor. Your list of Italian themed minerals won't be complete until you've covered #Sellaite.

If you don't know who Sella was, I've written about him indirectly in my #ClassicKit on William Hyde Wollaston. https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/wollastons-reflective-goniometer/7711.article

@luddchem Meh! Tenor schmenor. Your list of Italian themed minerals won't be complete until you've covered #Sellaite.

If you don't know who Sella was, I've written about him indirectly in my #ClassicKit on William Hyde Wollaston. https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/wollastons-reflective-goniometer/7711.article

@luddchem Meh! Tenor schmenor. Your list of Italian themed minerals won't be complete until you've covered #Sellaite.

If you don't know who Sella was, I've written about him indirectly in my #ClassicKit on William Hyde Wollaston. https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/wollastons-reflective-goniometer/7711.article

@luddchem Meh! Tenor schmenor. Your list of Italian themed minerals won't be complete until you've covered #Sellaite.

If you don't know who Sella was, I've written about him indirectly in my #ClassicKit on William Hyde Wollaston. https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/wollastons-reflective-goniometer/7711.article

@luddchem Meh! Tenor schmenor. Your list of Italian themed minerals won't be complete until you've covered #Sellaite.

If you don't know who Sella was, I've written about him indirectly in my #ClassicKit on William Hyde Wollaston. https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/wollastons-reflective-goniometer/7711.article

The latest #ClassicKit is about a lab rat. A man who is remembered for many discoveries for fabulous explanations but who, deep down, liked nothing more than to go "home" to the lab.

It is the end of the Age of #Mercury in our Department. To celebrate this, I give you the story of how John T Way (the "father of soil science") built a mercury light so brilliant that he sailed with it across the Solent, in the darkness, hoping to catch the eye of the Prince Albert. As he did so, he conducted the first mass demonstration of #fluorescence, causing all the #mauve ribbons on the ladies' dresses and bonnets to light up in the darkness. #ClassicKit

https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/ways-electric-light-and-flashes-of-brilliance/4021523.article

It is the end of the Age of #Mercury in our Department. To celebrate this, I give you the story of how John T Way (the "father of soil science") built a mercury light so brilliant that he sailed with it across the Solent, in the darkness, hoping to catch the eye of the Prince Albert. As he did so, he conducted the first mass demonstration of #fluorescence, causing all the #mauve ribbons on the ladies' dresses and bonnets to light up in the darkness. #ClassicKit

https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/ways-electric-light-and-flashes-of-brilliance/4021523.article

It is the end of the Age of #Mercury in our Department. To celebrate this, I give you the story of how John T Way (the "father of soil science") built a mercury light so brilliant that he sailed with it across the Solent, in the darkness, hoping to catch the eye of the Prince Albert. As he did so, he conducted the first mass demonstration of #fluorescence, causing all the #mauve ribbons on the ladies' dresses and bonnets to light up in the darkness. #ClassicKit

https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/ways-electric-light-and-flashes-of-brilliance/4021523.article

Today is the anniversary of the D-day invasion across the Channel in 1944. With news that newly released papers suggest that Churchill was worried about supplies of penicillin, you might want to learn some of the backstory to that supply chain. Walter and Władzia Podbielniak developed revolutionary separation methods that made the scale-up of the purification of penicillin by solvent extraction, all based on a rapidly spinning rotor. It's #ClassicKit. https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/podbielniaks-contactor/4014234.article

If you;'re wondering where the idea of water softening comes from, it has its origins in a curious observation made by an ambitious farmer who started puzzling about his manure heaps. That led a very rigorous analyst, trained by Thomas Graham (of effusion, colloid, etc etc fame), to dig into the problem and realise that the soil beneath the manure heap was swapping one "base" for another.
Inauspicious beginnings, but the seed of modern water treatment. #ClassicKit
https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/ways-double-silicates-and-what-else-he-dug-up-from-the-soil/4021403.article

I should be marking or writing an op-ed. But instead I'm deep down a #ClassicKit rabbit hole about glass formulations in the early 20th century. It's been something I've poked about trying to figure out a few times. And suddenly the whole thing has begun to unfold. Tomorrow we mark. #mañana Always #mañana

@temptoetiam @temptoetiam Brown-Séquard avait des idées bien bizarres mais il est à l’origine de nos conaissances des hormones et de l’endocrinologie. Il est aussi un personnage clé dans mon article sur la méthode de déstillation Kugelrohr, l’histoire tragique de Salomon Kober et de sa famille. #ClassicKit https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/kobers-kugelrohr/4018107.article

Another edition of #ClassicKit put to bed today, about the man who tried to convince the Prince Regent to back his new invention and failed. But on the way he accidentally did the first mass demonstration of fluorescence. At sea, of all places. Tragically the Illustrated London News didn't bother to make a dramatic illustration of the wild event.

The story will be available on all good browsers in about ten days' time.

In the latest #ClassicKit I start to trace the prehistory of ion exchange and zeolites. Along the way I found a completely forgotten UCL Chemistry alumnus, John T Way, who is sometimes referred to as "The Father of Soil Science", who made the first real investigation of how soil affects metal ions and does ion exchange, now a major techology.
But he did something else that I am reserving for another episode, to celebrate an environmental milestone for our Department.

https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/ways-double-silicates-and-what-else-he-dug-up-from-the-soil/4021403.article

@wavesculptor Marvellous. I have a Klein bottle made by our glassblower a few years ago. It occurs to me that htis could turn into an episode of #ClassicKit. the problem is that i have such a surfeit of items in the queue that it may be some time before I get to it.

My latest #ClassicKit article is out, inspired by @roller. This is the prehistory of what you suggested: the Paneth mirror method.
Fritz Paneth showed that methyl radicals were not only possible but could be made to react in interesting ways. He made and erased lead mirrors made from tetramethyl lead as a means to measure the lifetime of these very very ephemeral beasts.
He was a remarkably deep thinker; my article just scratches the surface of the myriad things he did. https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/paneths-mirrors-and-the-isolation-of-methyl-radicals/4021165.article

As science gets trashed and manipulated in the US, I was reminded of the chemist Richard Willlstätter, who uncovered the structures of plant biomolecules, not least the anthocyanins and other indicators. An ardent patriot he signed the Declaration of the Ninety-Three just before WW1, but refused to develop poison gases with Haber - he developed gas masks instead. In the late 30's he resigned his post when a Jewish colleague was refused promotion. A lesson? #ClassicKit https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/willstätters-nail/4016589.article

@SusiArnott

Mirror mirror on the wall,
who's the least stable one of all?

#ClassicKit

When you read it, you will find a glaring glaring omission that is entirely deliberate.

Every so often one should pay homage to the man behind the big chemistry number. #Avogadro Not sure it’s #ClassicKit, but inspiration anyway. #Oropa

Every so often one should pay homage to the man behind the big chemistry number. #Avogadro Not sure it’s #ClassicKit, but inspiration anyway. #Oropa

Every so often one should pay homage to the man behind the big chemistry number. #Avogadro Not sure it’s #ClassicKit, but inspiration anyway. #Oropa