624 



NATURE 



[July 14, 192 1 



Large-scale Chemistry at the Imperial College of Science and Technology. 



IT is now generally recognised that a student 

 in chemistry who wishes to rise to any posi- 

 tion of prominence in his profession, either in the 

 industry or in academic life, must first obtain a 

 thorough grounding in his subject by passing 

 through a recognised honours school, and that he 

 must then devote one or two years to training in 

 the methods of research. It is usually during the 

 third year of his honours course that the student 

 first comes in contact with the realities of organic 

 chemistry, and a considerable portion of his time 

 during this period is devoted to a series of pre- 

 parations in the organic laboratory. The organic 

 laboratory is generally fitted with every type of 

 glass and porcelain apparatus necessary for the 

 student's needs, and he learns here the usual 

 operations and requirements involved in the pre- 

 paration of a number of typical 

 organic substances. This train- 

 ing is undoubtedly of the greatest 

 value, yet, because someone at 

 some time ordained that there 

 should be two kinds of chemistry, 

 namely, that carried out in glass 

 vessels and that effected in 

 vessels of metal, the unfortunate 

 student, who must needs satisfy 

 a board of examiners who have 

 passed through the same course 

 as he, is instructed in the former 

 kind of chemistry, and left 

 either to imagine the fundamental 

 conditions underlying the latter 

 kind or to learn them in sorrow 

 and tribulation under the more 

 exacting conditions of the fac- 

 tory. 



Owing possibly to his early 

 training as an engineer, the 

 present writer has always felt 

 acutely the anomaly of this 

 position, and has sought 

 for an opportunity to erect a laboratory which 

 should contain, like the ordinary small-scale 

 laboratory, types of appliances suitable for all pur- 

 poses — reduced replicas of those used on the in- 

 dustrial scale, but sufficiently large to render the 

 usual industrial operations essential. This oppor- 

 tunity has now arisen owing to the generosity of 

 an old student of the Imperial College of Science 

 and Technology, Mr. W. G. Whiffen. 



A laboratory of this kind will serve several pur- 

 poses. It will, for example, enable the student, 

 and especially the research student, to familiarise 

 himself with operations carried out in vessels into 

 which he cannot see and the contents of which he 

 cannot transport by hand. He will become 

 acquainted with factors, such as heat transference, 

 cost of production, etc., fundamental in large-scale 

 work, but which are of minor importance in 

 ordinary laboratory practice and usuallv ignored. 

 NO. 269S, VOL. 107] 



He will learn, moreover, in the small fitting-shop 

 attached to the laboratory how to make the neces- 

 sary metal connections and to erect plant of 

 metal in the same way as he is taught to build up 

 apparatus of glass in the small-scale laboratory. 

 Knowledge of this kind cannot fail to be of the 

 greatest service both to students intending to 

 enter industry and to those who have decided 

 to follow an academic life. Indeed, the laboratory 

 is not a " technical laboratory " in the strict sense 

 of this much misused term, but rather the 

 logical outcome of any adequate system of train- 

 ing in chemistry, and ought, therefore, to find a 

 place in the equipment of every chemical school of 

 university standing. 



Again, the advantage to the research student 

 will be very great, because he will be able to pre- 



FiG. I. — Staging showing filter presses and mixing tubs. 



pare his initial material on the large scale, and it 

 will be possible for him to carry out, if necessary, 

 any new preparation which he may have dis- 

 covered on a scale approaching that required for 

 its commercial production. 



Two questions have frequently been asked, 

 namely : (i) How will it be possible to initiate a 

 large number of students into operations such as 

 those which it is proposed to carry out in this 

 laboratory ? and (2) How can the material prepared 

 l)e disposed of? The answer to the first question 

 is that the third-year students will work in batches 

 of six or eight under the direction of one student 

 as foreman, and, of course, under the general 

 control of the demonstrator in charge of the 

 laboratory. Each batch will carry through one 

 complete preparation, say nitrobenzene — aniline — - 

 acetanilide — />-nitroacetanilide — p-nitrophenol, and 

 will obtain the pure product. It will be possible. 



