St. Emil

Germany has the most chemist statues. Perhaps Germany just has the most statues, could well be. There are statues with some similarities. Like these statues.

Justus von Liebig Denkmal, Giessen

Emil Fischer Denkmal, Berlin

Some similarities are obvious, both statues are German chemist statues in Germany. Another similarity is that you will only find black and white pictures of these statues. The reason is because of another similarity; both statues were destroyed in WWII. That's a shame...

The Fischer statue has been reproduced as a bronze statue (instead of stone, like the original). So we can look at the reproduction in color.
Emil looks like a monk, or better: a saint. Was Saint Fancis from Assisi his great great great grandfather perhaps?
St. Emil... Yes he was a holy chemist..

Another blog

A synthetic environment is on the blogroll of this blog.

www.chem-station.com/blog/

I like that!

Ehhh... You might want to use this link.

The Dehn-Hartman apparatus

Have you ever heard of the Dehn-Hartman apparatus. It is a great piece of equipment.
Do you know the purpose of this thing? Here is a hint: Dehn and Hartman are those guys, and the device is described here:

JACS 1914, 36, 2114

I'll explain the thing. In case you need it one day.

Urine in flasks A is dispensed with siphons into bottle B where the urine is passed through an ether layer. The water layer is dispensed into flask C with a siphon. Flask C is heated so that ether that came with the water layer is vaporized and condensed in the condser on top of bottle B. The ether layer is dispensed with a syphon into flask D and concentrated, leading the vaporized ether into the condenser back into bottle B.

So what we have is something like an continuous urine extraction and concentration device. The Dehn-Hartman apparatus is just brilliant.

Amazing and expanding blogosphere

Have a look at this new blog: totallyretrosynthetic.

http://totallyretrosynthetic.blogspot.com/

Lavoisier's mercury gasometer

The Lavoisiers were number 5 in the Top 5 husband and wife chemists excluding Curie.

I just noticed that on the table they have the number 4 of the Top 5 chemistry relics, the mercury gasometer, used to identify chemical properties of oxygen (1774).

Musée des arts et métiers - Cnam, Paris, France

It's a pity that the tube that goes into the gasometer and the mercury is missing.

Friedrich Wöhler gallery

It's not complete, but it's a start.

Urinod

You may think that concentrating urine on large scale is just for alchemists in the 17th century... well, it's not.

Have a look at this lovely paper.

J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1914, 36, 2136

In order to isolate the so-called Urinod they concentrated a lot of urine.Unfortunately they do not tell how they obtained the urine.

I'm very pleased that I do not have to reproduce their experiment.

And I am very happy that I didn't work in that lab at that time.

After fifteen months they were just unable to smell anymore I think.

And what is this Urinod that makes our urine smell?

I can't believe it... and I'm not the only one.

Escher epoxide

Chemists already made a molecular Moebius strip.

Who will make the first Escher epoxide? (Well... sometimes you see papers that draw the stereochemistry as if they made such a compound.)
Who will make the first molecular Escher cube? (Ohh, what a poor drawing I made there...)

Another nice quote

Chemists are a strange class of mortals, impelled by an almost insane impulse to seek their pleasure among smoke and vapor, soot and flame, poisons and poverty, yet among all these evils I seem to live so sweetly, that I'd die before I'd change places with the Persian King.

Johann Joachim Becher, Physica Subterranea, 1669

Top 5 chemist caricatures

1) Lavoisier experimenting on Napoleon (James Gillray, he used the same scene for this caricature)2) Mendeleev dreaming over his potential election to the Russian academy of sciences (Strekoza, 1880, reprint here) 3) Joseph Priestley as Doctor Phlogiston4) Robert Wilhelm Bunsen (William Barry Jensen)5) Curie (Vanity Fair 1904)