The Likens-Nickerson Apparatus

People sometimes ask me where I get my ideas for this column. Some choices are obvious. Other ideas emerge from chance conversations or from the chase of something else. And then there’s social media, typically a picture captioned ‘what is this thing?’. Among the bits and bobs sent my way have been spiral gauges, isoteniscopes, osmometers of various design, bizarre stillheads and a plethora of curiously shaped flasks.

A few months ago, someone sent me a picture of a piece of glassware that completely stumped me. Resembling a cormorant drying its outstretched, but slightly unsymmetrical, wings, the device was some kind of weird distillation head, but with ground glass connections on both sides and in the wrong place. I was utterly baffled. After trying to be clever – using reverse image searches online was a total failure – someone rescued me by posting ‘it looks like the Nickerson–Likens device’. The what?