— Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), An Outline of Philosophy, 165.
This spirit, hitherto unknown, which can neither be retained
in vessels nor reduced to a visible policy … I call by the new name “gas”
— Jan Baptista van Helmont (1577 – 1644).
I used to take advantage of this property when somebody came
into my lab looking for a job. At an inconspicuous signal, one of my henchmen
would drop the finger of an old rubber glove into a flask containing about 100
cc of mixed acid — and then stand back. The rubber would swell and squirm a
moment — and then a magnificent rocket-like jet of flame would rise from the
flask, with appropriate hissing noises. I could usually tell from the
candidate’s demeanor whether he had the sort of nervous system desirable in a
propellant chemist.
— John Drury Clark (1907 – 1988), Ignition!
An informal history of liquid rocket propellants. New Brunswick, N.J.,
Rutgers University Press 1972.
This peculiarity is characteristic of chemistry in
contradistinction to physics, where the more simple continuous and gradual
transition from one state to another prevails. This difference between the two
sister-sciences has often caused controversies in the domain of physical
chemistry. The occurrence of discontinuous changes and of multiple proportions
has been frequently assumed, when a closer investigation has found nothing of
the sort.
— Svante Arrhenius (1859 – 1927), to the Royal Institution, 3 June, 1904.
It appeared to have been fitted up as a chemical laboratory.
A double line of glass-stoppered bottles was drawn up upon the wall opposite
the door, and the table was littered over with Bunsen burners, test-tubes and
retorts. In the corner stood carboys of acid in wicker baskets. One of these
appeared to leak or to have been broken, for a stream of dark-coloured liquid
had trickled out from it, and the air was heavy with a peculiarly pungent
tar-like odour.
— Dr Watson describes Bartholomew Sholto’s chamber in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
(1859 – 1930), The Sign of Four.
Tellurium and its compounds are probably toxic and should be
handled with care. Workmen exposed to as little as 0.01 mg/m3 of air, or
less, develop ‘tellurium breath’, which has a garlic-like odor.
— Robert C. Weast (ed.), CRC Handbook of
Chemistry and Physics, 58th edition, 1977, B-51.
The morning after, the chloride is gathered and set to
drain: and you must be very careful not to touch it with your hands or it
saddles you with a truly disgusting smell. This salt, in itself, is odourless,
but it reacts in some manner with the skin, perhaps reducing the keratin’s
disulfide bridges and giving off a persistent metallic stench that for several
days announces to all that you are a chemist.
— Primo Levi (1919 – 1987), ‘Tin’ in The
Periodic Table (1985).
Lord Salisbury once declared that the strength of a nation
can be measured by that of its chemical industry. To-day our leaders have even
better reason to reflect on the direct connection between military and chemical
power. It cannot be too strongly emphasised that the chief physical resource of
Germany in the present World War is her planned synthetic chemical industry,
based on raw materials which need not be imported.
— Sir Robert Robinson (1886 – ?), ‘Atoms and Molecules’, from Science Lifts the Veil, 1942, first
delivered as a radio talk in 1942.
The wise see that there is action in the midst of inaction,
and inaction in the midst of action.
— Bhagavad Gita, 4:18, in the
translation of Eknath Easwaran, Arkana Books, 1985.
The term crude oil can only be used in a very general sense.
There are almost as great differences between various types of crude oil as
there are between the various kinds of vegetable oils, such as castor, linseed
olive, etc. Crude oils may be as limpid as water or as viscous as molasses, as
pale in colour as sherry or as black as tar, sweet smelling or very much the
reverse, containing much, little or no gasoline, rich in, or free from, wax and
capable of yielding on distillation little or a very large percentage of
semi-solid or solid asphaltic bitumen. In chemical characteristics they also
show great diversity …
— Members of the Royal Dutch-Shell Group, A
Petroleum Handbook, issued for private circulation, December 1933.
You will find an index to this blog at the foot of this link. Please be patient: I am pedalling as fast as I can.
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