As you’re reading this column, you may well be wishing that the weather were warmer. For where I live in Massachusetts, US, I can make such short-range temperature predictions with great confidence, but at least those of us doing laboratory work are probably now doing it under reasonably climate-controlled conditions.
This is certainly not the case everywhere, nor has it been the case through a good part of the history of chemistry research. I did a postdoc in a German lab that (while it had heat in the wintertime) had no provisions for cooling in the summer. Most of the time this wasn’t a great problem, the German climate being what it is (and especially as it was nearly 40 years ago). There were days, though, when opening the windows and the doorways to the hall were not sufficient for comfort – and these generally corresponded with the days where the ambient humidity made some reactions a real challenge. Small-scale work with water-sensitive reagents or hygroscopic salts was only for the brave or the foolhardy, and I generally found other things to do until the weather retreated.
My first summer undergraduate laboratory in Arkansas, US, had air conditioning, because summer conditions in most parts of Arkansas are not conducive to research (nor, on some days, to any sequential thoughts at all). But one day this system malfunctioned, and we attempted to keep on working as the temperatures rose. A fellow student was packing a large gravity-fed silica column with neat diethyl ether, because that had worked for him in the past, and anyway, it was a primitive era. Suddenly the silica bed cracked as the solvent went through it, jumping several inches and spraying the surroundings and my friend in a fountain of ether mixed with the upper layer of sea sand. We took that as a sign from the Chemistry Gods to go home.
There were days when opening the windows and doorways were not sufficient for comfort
This sort of thing shows up in the chemistry literature if you look closely. The reactions in older papers, depending on their origins, are increasingly likely to have been conducted under ambient conditions, which makes the notation ‘conducted at room temperature’ rather problematic. RT in Delhi, India, is unlikely to overlap much with that of Aberdeen in Scotland, and chemists in Arizona, US, are probably going to have an easier time isolating hygroscopic salts than either of the above. A close study of the older literature would surely reveal some climate effects (it sounds like the perfect task for machine learning, if you ask me).
But the experimental sections could surely tell us even more about the ambient conditions, or perhaps about human frailties. There are a number of problems with the synthetic literature that have made whipping it into shape through computational means a rather more fraught problem than had been anticipated, but here’s a subtle one. Years ago I proposed ‘Lowe’s Law of Diurnal Distribution’, which was more of a hypothesis at that point. I proposed that diligent search through published work and laboratory notebooks would show spikes in the reported times that reactions had been run, with increases at (for example) eight hours for the end of a working day, 15 to 20 hours for overnight reactions set up during the day and checked the next morning, and then neat multiples of 24 hours thereafter. Readers are invited to speculate on which scientific cultures would be more or less precise about such things – all I’ll say is that I know which team I’ve always played for!
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