‘Creative destruction’ in the chemistry lab

New technologies come along all the time – at least, that’s how we’re all used to living, and how everyone in the industrialised world has been used to living since at least the Industrial Revolution itself. That means that we are pretty familiar with the concept of ‘creative destruction’ (as popularised by Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter) having seen it over and over. No one’s making mechanical adding machines any more, although I well remember the one that my father used to keep the books for his business in the early 1970s, just as no one’s making cathode-ray tube televisions and any number of other defunct items.