A letter from the Chemical Heritage foundation in the USA triggered this one off (http://www.chemheritage.org/ ) I remembered some ancient chemical samples lying (largely neglected) in our archives. I took a few minutes out today to photograph them (not very well, with a digital camera); the results are here http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/heritage/ One of them is a sample of the original isolated elemental bromine, apparently dating from 1826. We also have samples of SCl2, AsCl3, elemental Si, and CCl4, but they have no date, and may or may not be originals. It occured to me to ask how much more chemical heritage people have put on the web? For example, of the 109 of so elements characterised, how many samples of the original actually exist? I would put the number at 20 at most, and perhaps a lot less. There are probably a few in the Royal Institution of Great Britain (K, Na, etc), perhaps the Noble gases (?), and some of the lanthanides and actinides in Sweden? Does anyone know more? chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)