Rzepa's message regarding chemical heritage is of great interesting. I have opportunity to encounter many very old chemical samples. Two years ago, the Nobelist J.-M. Lehn's laboratory at the France College in Paris had many chemical samples for our organization. We only removed organic samples. I remember there are many pure element samples, one of them is sodium in a sealed glass tube. It must be over 150 years old.
Shu-Kun Lin
I wonder if an inventory of such samples exists anywhere. We also appear to have a sample of potassium still in perfect condition that must date from around 1840-50. Of equal interest is whether these samples can be traced to a named scientist. For example, bromine was discovered by Balard, and a sample bearing his name has particular resonance. Our sample of crystalline silicon too bears the name of its discoverer, DeVille, and very probably dates from 1854 when it was discovered. But many samples do not bear the names of the scientists who prepared them, nor the dates they were prepared on. Unlike art works, scientists of that period seem to have not had a sense of history when labelling their samples! Finally on the theme raised by Shu-Kun Lin, I wonder if there is any sort of catalog of samples of interesting organic molecules bearing the name of their disoverer and first person to synthesise them. I rather suspect that the majority of organic samples do not survive the ravages of time particularly well. But interestingly, during the 1920s, Imperial College Chemistry was very well known for its natural product chemistry, and at one time we had a library of perhaps 1000 compounds isolated from nature. The folk lore was that the organisms which had originally produced these species by metabolism had long since mutated, and that these samples were now unique (ie no organism now known produced them any more). By and large, such libraries tend to get dissipated,and I rather fear that the heritage of organic chemistry is not in good shape. 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)