The Koflers’ hotbench

I wandered into our teaching lab the other day and found some students complaining about measuring melting temperatures. Wasn’t it just mindless stamp-collecting? It got me thinking about the heroic nature of the chemical enterprise and what an extraordinary intellectual quest chemistry has been, one that few people stop to think about. 

You have to marvel at the fact that most of our ideas about the structure and connectivity of organic molecules predate any form of spectroscopy – all the work was done with nothing more than the ability to determine composition and purity. And for all the technical mastery required for synthesis and purification, melting temperatures came to be a cornerstone in the arguments presented by chemists.