Descroizilles’ Berthollimêtre

For some, titrations are the great bores of school chemistry. As a medic I met at a party recently put it: ‘The sheer pointlessness of it – and the repetition – turned me right off chemistry’. In my own department. titrations have steadily disappeared from the undergraduate laboratory to be replaced by sexier practicals. At their inception, however, titrations were seen as an extraordinary advance: a huge time-saver compared with the more common gravimetric analysis and as they spread, titrations came to underpin both the economics and the regulation of industry. It can even be argued that the titration was one of the reasons for the growth of chemistry as an academic discipline through the 19th century.