Chinese Dean-Stark

A Chinese person commented on the Dean-Stark post:

‘I am using the apparatus and looking for the information of inventor to write dean-stark apparatus for chinese wikipedia.Thank you for your answer.’

Here is the Chinese entry. The only Dean-Stark entry that gives the reference to the original paper and gives the names of the inventors. The fact that somebody uses this blog as information source proves the unreliability of Wikipedia :-)

Not a rotavap.

I this the first rotavap? Een of andere vent asked here.

The Alchemist in Search of the Philosophers Stone, by Joseph Wright of Derby, 1771

The answer is most likely: 'No'.

It is a concentrating device without a condensor and most likely without rotating abilities.

The painting shows Hennig Brand the german alchemist (c.1630–c.1710) who discovered phosphorus around 1669 by conentrating urine and heating the phosphate-containing residue. On this painting Brand is concentrating a solution containing the glowing phophorus.

Top 5 Chemist statues

1) Joseph Priestly
Birmingham, Birstall, Leeds,UK

2) Justus von Liebig

Giesen (destroyed during WOII), Munich, Germany

3) Robert Bunsen

Heidelberg, Germany

4) Antoine Lavoisier

Paris, France

5) Benjamin Silliman
Yale's Sterling Chemistry Laboratory, USA

There are more chemist statues. For instance Mendeleev has two in Russia (Moscow and St. Petersburg), Marie Curie in Japan (Soka University, Japan) and Kekulé in Bonn, Germany.

What they said; Cycling scientists

A synthetic environment - reloaded

Two weeks ago I mailed syntheticenvironment@gmail.com to tell Een of andere vent that I hoped he would not delete the blog and should continue to post things every now and then. He replied: ‘Do it yourself.’ I said that had no access to the blog. He gave me access. It turned out that I knew him.

He is my supervisor now. He wants me to call him Sir now, so we have a strict professional realationship. I do the work and he will say it was his idea. In the meantime Vent is just doing nothing besides having an Ellen Swallow Richards obsession and a special interest in facial hair. I will probably post less often than Vent did, but I’ll do my best.

Well this was his idea I must admit, a new category: What they said…

With Einstein on the beach

Vent demanded two other 'What they said' things in this post.

Deductive technique

Vent demanded facial hair things as well.

Recognize a genius

Vent spoke about his urinating behavior and I wonder if he could help me with this reduction I am working on.

JACS, 1900, 22, 309

New author

Yep, someone is prepared to continue this blog for some time. He promised to publish the same kind of nonsense I did. I hope I do not have to sack him next month because of incompetency and being too serious, we'll see.

Get on with it, Snaack. (Silly name.)

Final post...

Well.. The final post.

This blog will not be deleted, but it will be silent here now. I had plenty of ideas left though. I never wrote on named-reactions, and never searched for the original papers.

There is a lot more nonsense to write about facial hair of dead chemists and I could look for chemist hair style changes.

August Wilhelm von Hoffman

I could be searching for old pictures and old patents to collect autographs.

Beistein, Erlenmeyer

And I could do a 'top 5 chemists in front of blackboard'.

Schiff, Burns Woodward, Pauling, Nernst

There are other things that will keep me busy right now. A few months from now I might do the 'once a month posting thing'. Maybe some time I will start Synthetic environment - the sequel (or think of a less dull blog title). I don't know yet. If so, you'll hear.

So, I cease posting, now. I will not leave you, and will still be reading all the nice blogs that are out here.

A peasant from a plague village once said: I'm not dead!.

Decision... I quit.

I started this blog 4 months ago and wrote 66 posts now. The amount of visitors has increased ever since. This blog reached the top 5 on chemical blogspace now, but I quit anyway. I do not have to write a thesis or lost my job, but I think I have done my trick. Sure, there are still a lot of 'top 5 lists' I can make up, and there is still a lot of science history to tell but that will be more of the same stuff....

Blogosphere is quite amazing. The moonshine post still attracts visitors, directed here by google and most blogs I read have this blog on their blogroll.

I really enjoyed writing all the nonsense like the Top 5 bearded chemists, LCMS analysis of coffee and Ageing and poses in chemistry. (My personel favourite is the article titles analysis-post.) I am fond of discovering the origins of the Vigreux collumn, the Rotavap and Markovnikov's rule, but when I have to think and do research for another post I think it is over.

So... this is the end... Well... the end for this blog, but not for blogosphere, one in ten thousand just started and you should go there. Carbon base curiosities will find new topics, I am sure. Chemical musings will post irony forever, a great blog as well! Jungfreudlich, very amusing and Kutti promised to write more in English, I am looking forward to it. Oh yeah, visit Homebrew and Chemistry, Chemgeek knows the meaning of life, beer is more important than chemistry.

Derek and Paul will be there forever, I think.

Visit the whole blogroll, kinasepro, tot. synth. etc. etc.

Ohhh shit, ψ*ψ, happy birthday!... a bit late... sorry.

I hope all you people enjoyed this blog.

The final post will be here within a week.

Cheers!

Listed list

I discovered that the Top 5 dead chemists who died in really lousy ways, is now listed at listerate.com.

Another 'amazing discovery': this blog entered a top 5 itself, here at Chemical Blogspace. I do not know how the ranking is calculated. Maybe this post will kick me out of this top 5.

Top 5 lousy chemist graves

The great chemists deserve a great grave.

Dmitri Mendeleev, August Kekulé

Some had their graves a bit overdone.

Louis Pasteur

A chemist can die in a lousy way, but a chemist can have a lousy grave as well.

Top 5 lousy chemist graves

1) Rosalind Franklin

Deserved a Nobel Prize and a decent grave.

2) Lise Meitner
Deserved a Nobel Prize and a decent grave as well.

4) Richard Adolf Zsigmondy
Received a Nobel Prize and a lousy grave.

4) Friedrich WöhlerWas elected number 1 of the dead chemists but has a simple and plain grave.

5) Sir William Henry Perkin

I have no picture. Simon Garfield was unable to locate the grave at the time he wrote the book Mauve. Someone found the neglected grave a few years later.