Bader, then well into his 1970′s would visit chemistry departments and gave talks about the untold story of four coordinate carbon and the structure of benzene. The villain in the story was Kékulé, by all accounts an insecure egomaniac who may, perhaps, have got some of his best ideas from others. Bader’s disdain for Kekulé was palpable and infectious.

A hero in the tale was Richard Anschütz who spent many years trying to piece together the stories of Archibald Scott Couper and Johann Josef Loschmidt. Anschütz gathered much of the evidence that they had both preceded Kékulé in their proposals, but never got the credit they deserved.

So this month’s Classic Kit is a tribute both to Anschütz – whose little book “Die Destillation unter vermindertem Druck in Laboratorium” I have drawn on previously (see Claisen’s Flask and Perkin’s Triangle) – and to Alfred Bader, a great benefactor of British chemistry teaching. He is now too elderly and frail to travel any more, and who will probably never read this. He is widely remembered across the UK.

Anyway, here is Anschütz’s manometer. If you’re a chemist, you’ve used it.

Check out the “What’s On List” for the events which you can start booking from 22 April (unless you’re a member in which case you already know about it). In addition the BBC will bringing their own parallel sessions to their own tent – we won’t know their programme for a while yet.

Why should you visit the CSF? Because I think it’s the Ngorongoro Crater of science festivals: although the terrain is very varied, the action is all focused in a relatively small area, so you don’t have to cross town to go from one thing to another. And the relaxed atmosphere means you have a good chance of seeing, if not chatting with one of the Big Five if you hang around in the Gardens in the afternoon.

C’mon down.

The lecture is free and open to the public under the auspices of our Department’s Chemical and Physical Society. It’ll be in the UCL Chemistry Auditorium, WC1H 0AJ. If you can’t make it there are other opportunities to see it again in Cambridge, London, Edinburgh and Cheltenham in the coming months.

So I went into our teaching labs today to see what was going on and to talk to the students. Slightly to my surprise, multiple boxes of disposable gloves had been issued, and perhaps as a result, over half of the students in the lab were wearing them. Here are two photographs of students who were making organic-soluble nickel complexes.

The hands of two undergraduates half way through a lab class in our Department. The question I put to them was: “Would your hands have this much stuff on them if you weren’t wearing gloves?”

I talked to them, and each one suggested that they probably wouldn’t have spilled as much had they been not been wearing gloves.  I also noticed that half of the students I spoke to (three out of six) used their gloves to adjust their hair while we talked. Another wiped his faces on the sleeve of his lab coat. None of them were aware of it until I pointed it out to them.

You might argue that this is a training issue and that we should spend more time spotting when students have dirty gloves and when they scratch or run their gloves through their hair. I would argue that these students need to take more responsibility for their own safety.

We have now received several hundred pairs of reusable Anson Sol-Vex nitrile gloves (shop around as prices vary wildly). For some reason they haven’t been issued to students in our teaching labs. We’ll see what happens over the next few days.

Children mixing citric acid and bicarbonate at a Salters Festival in a few years ago. Do the children need to be wearing gloves in this situation?

A few days I wrote about my worries about students wearing disposable gloves in the lab. I started discussing it with colleagues in the department, including several who sit on our safety committee. One of the comments that came out of these discussions was the number of incidents we’ve had over the past few years involving students transferring chemicals from their gloves to their face, neck, and elsewhere. In fact, if you stand and watch students in the lab – as I had occasion to this week – you see them contantly adjusting their safety specs and scratching their neck, nose, ears at regular intervals. All wearing gloves, of course. And because they are wearing the gloves, they are blissfully unaware that there might be anything on the outside of the glove.

The students, secondary school students,  who were dissolving zinc in quite dilute HCl were, of course all wearing disposable gloves. It’s true that they had to boil the solution to driness, but it’s hard to imagine anyone getting hurt doing that, especially as the procedure was carried out in a fumehood. Nevertheless they were instructed to wear gloves in addition to safety glasses and lab coat. I stood around and watched. The students didn’t have much to do while the solutions boiled and they stood and chatted. Their hands went up and down, touching, fiddling with mobile phones, onto benches and, inevitably, onto their faces.

When I question them, the students  were horrified at the suggestion that maybe they should take their gloves off. Until, that is, we talked about it, and during the coversation I’d drawn attention to the fact that each one of them had touched their chin, cheeks, neck etc. with the gloves. Not to mention their phones, their pens, their notebooks.

But in a way, with an aqueous solution, you know that the gloves are an actual barrier. But we don’t do that much aqueous chemistry. We use solvents. You should try this a simple experiment: squirt some solvents – acetone or dichloromethane, say – into some nitrile or latex gloves and then wait to see how you soon you could smell the solvent. When I did it last week, the answer was “instantly”. In other words the gloves (and you only have to do is look up the manufacturers’ specifications to see that this is the case) provide no protection at all. Indeed what they do is trap the solvent between the glove and you, giving your fingers a little more quality time to interact. Your hands being damp, you aren’t even aware that it’s happening.

In the labs our students get solvents on their gloves all the time, especially when washing up.  It’s clearly nonsense. By providing gloves we are actually lulling our students into a false sense of security. They get stuff on their gloves and even if they’re aware of it, they just assume that because they have gloves on “it’s OK”. Risk compensation works in mysterious ways.

It’s very different if you don’t wear gloves. Today a colleague and I spent some time electrolyzing first molten potassium hydroxide (KOH), and then potassium carbonate at red heat (if you’re interested, it’s something to do with Brian “Delia” Cox). The spray from the bubbles generated in the electrolysis was intense and after a while everything was coated in a thick layer of KOH. We fiddled a little with the electrodes knowing full well that we had some ferociously caustic material a few centimeters from our hands.  And while doing so, I got some KOH on my skin. It stings. It feels soapy. But the sink is there, right behind you. You rinse. It’s sorted.

Now I’m not saying that one shouldn’t wear gloves under any circumstance. Far from it. Clearly there are issues of scale and of context. But what I am saying is that for the vast majority of procedures like the ones we conduct in our teaching labs, gloves may look smart but they have precisely the opposite effect to what we intend.

It’s wrong, it’s wasteful, and it’s expensive. And we have plenty of, for the most part, fairly minor incidents to deal with that probably would not happen if our students didn’t wear them.

So the plan is to go even further and actively discourage students from wearing gloves as a matter of routine in our labs. Why? Because, completely contrary to “common sense”, we believe they’ll be safer and actually work better in the lab.

Will it catch on? I wonder. It’s not going to be easy.

Why do we use disposable gloves?  In the lab our concern is to keep “chemicals” away from our skin, so the gloves are supposed to be a barrier between our glassware and us. This is rather different from the function of the gloves used by people in both the medical arena and the food industry where there is a two-way traffic – such workers can contaminate what they are working with as much as the reverse. In that case therefore, having scrupulously clean gloves is pretty important.

But in a chemistry lab, I’m not so sure that having super clean gloves is so crucial. All that matters is that you keep stuff of yourself, in much the same way as you might use gloves when doing the gardening or the washing up in the kitchen. Indeed if you work with air sensitive materials in an inert atmosphere dry box, you don’t replace your gloves every time you do some work – the gloves are the gloves, and you wipe them down regularly to keep them fairly clean – they’re not really supposed to get very dirty anyway.

The consequences of using reusables is substantial. First of all, they are moderately comfortable so people wear them continuously – this leads to students wandering all over the place while wearing them – out students use them on the lab computers and spectrometers, the scales and so on, contaminating pretty well everything. Yup, it’s bad practice and that’s what we tell them. But it still happens. Secondly because they are comfortable they lead to some rather thoughtless behaviour – it’s common to see students put a gloved finger onto a hotplate to check to see if it’s hot. A few times they melt the rubber onto the tip of their finger. It doesn’t seem very bright, but more worryingly, it’s probably an indication symptom of risk compensation, the tendency of an individual to alter their behaviour when they feel safer, much as if you play football you’ll tackle that little bit more aggressively if you’re wearing shin pads than if you’re not. But students will also slop a lot more solvent onto their gloves while cleaning up, not realizing that gloves have a certain permeability. Does wearing disposable gloves as a matter of routine in a chemistry really reduce accident and injury significantly? Is there any data? Would students operate more cautiously without them? Ironically, one of the things it has done is to slightly increase the number of cases of itching and irriation that the Safety Committee deal with each year. At UCL we’ve now abandoned latex gloves  (which, after all, are only a barrier to aqueous solutios but not to dichloromethane and other solvents) in favour of blue or purple nitrile which is supposed to be neutral. It clearly isn’t.

But there is another dimension to this: waste disposal. By using disposable gloves we end up having to send a quarter of a million gloves a year to be incinerated each eyar. These have been used once, and a careful student shouldn’t really have got anything onto the gloves anyway, so they are probably pretty clean. Isn’t it incredibly wasteful? For the sake of an unknown and possibly questionable increase in personal safety we end up spending tens of thousands of pounds for items that could be reused. And then have to pay for someone to take all this stuff away.

So my plan is to try an experiment. Can I convince our Safety Committee and our researchers to go over to reusable gloves? The APS have a nice webapge on glove selection. We issue each student with a pair of gloves at the start of the academic year. Like their lab coats and safety glasses, they write their names on them and they last until they slash them or they perish (the gloves or the student). And let’s see what happens to our rubbish disposal costs and to our not so disposable income.

In Avery Morton‘s amazing book “Laboratory Technique in Organic Synthesis”, the triangle-type receiver is still attributed to Thorne as shown below:

But here in the UK there is no question that its connexion with Perkin had become firmly entrenched and Thorne, though still alive, had been cast into obscurity. 

Shortly after Perkin’s death in 1930, at a special meeting of the Chemical Society convened on October 16th, the stereochemist Norman Haworth (as in the projection/representation of sugars) reminisced about Perkin’s contributions to chemistry. It is a moving speech in which he paints a very detailed picture of the man and his love of lab work. The small extract is given below mentions the triangle:

If you want to read more of it, you can find it in Proceedings of the Chemical Society, 1930, C079.  doi:10.1039/JR93000BC001

And another one about how to dissolve gold using mercury and aqua regia.

Only nine hour to go until kick off. It’s going to be a fun night.

In preparation for the hi-jinks on June 22nd at the Wellcome Collection, here’s a short brain dump of why I think tin, element number 50, is one of the most remarkable elements around.