The story of Quickfit, part three: Scorah’s Quickfit

A few years ago, one of my department’s alumni, Isidore Levy, gave me a photograph dating from his PhD work around 1949. The photograph shows a handsome young man, in shirtsleeves, wearing a tie and a waistcoat, leaning with his forearm on the edge of a tiled fumehood, starting intently at a reaction. If the absence of safety glasses grabs your attention, it is the glassware that is at once strangely familiar, yet on close inspection, totally alien.

The three necked flask is equipped with a mechanical stirrer, possibly one of Hershberg’s, which are seldom seen in small-scale synthetic labs these days (I rescued one from a bin a few weeks ago). The glass stirring rod passes through a mercury seal. But most striking of all is the absence of ground glass. All of the connections are made through rubber bungs that Levy must have laboriously drilled using a cork borer. That the photograph was taken a few years after the second world war is a testament to the slow spread of standard ground glass joints that had existed in Britain for over 30 years.

My colleague Alwyn Davies, one of Levy’s contemporaries who came to University College London as an undergraduate in 1944, does not remember using ‘Quickfit’ glassware until much later. ‘It was too expensive,’ he says. But could its slow adoption also have been a reflection of a certain conservatism? ‘Why should we spend money on this new stuff when we got on just fine with the old?’