Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Colorful but lousy glassware for sale!

A lot of companies try to sell their lab equipment by sending those glossy catalogs with colorful pictures.

Glassware is always filled with some colored solution.

Okay, a few colors for a nice picture, I can understand that. But why all those silly pictures that makes you wonder if they know what they are selling?

The blue solution was refluxed in an erlenmeyer equipped with an Allihn condensor.


And there are things that are really weird.

Okay.. They are doing an extraction and one layer of the yellow solution is collected in a red erlenmeyer. The collected layer is stirred with a magnetic stirrer, while the distillate from a red solution in a retort on a burner is allowed do drip into the collected layer. This is done while enjoying a blue cocktail on dry ice. (Who uses a retort nowadays?)


I really think these guys want to tell you how bad their equipment is.
Distill a blue solution and the distillate is just as blue. This must be the most lousy distillation equipment there is.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

LOOOOL

This post made my day!

Anonymous said...

Great post!!!

Jordan said...

You used "reflux" as a verb. Minus 10 points!

Ψ*Ψ said...

What, reflux isn't a verb? Of course it is...

synthetic environment said...

Flux can be used as a verb according to my dictionary, so reflux can be used as verb too. I performed a search in JACS and reflux is often used as a verb there.

More important, I use it as a verb which simply makes it a verb :-)

dilutedmagnetics said...

The creative directors of the ad-agency are not chemists. Besides, it's easy to make and use copper sulphate solutions - lots of people like the colour too.

I once helped a friend set-up glassware some stuff so that he could take pictures for a church newsletter. I put up something very standard - simple distillation with the rbf inside a heating mantle etc. He said it looked too boring and asked if I could make him a nice blue solution for the rbf and the receiving beaker at the end of the liebig condensor. Then he said my heating mantel looked too beat up for the picture and he told me to remove it. So in the end, we had the rbf clamped on a retort stand with no heat source underneath it. It featured a blue liquid distilling into the same blue liquid... if that's not enough, he asked me to pop some dry ice-chips into the copper sulphate solution in the receiving flask. I got the feeling I was only there to make sure nothing explodes.

So now you know...

Anonymous said...

Great collection.....Have shopped at Anna's Linens for stylish and colorful glasswares.....!