The silent rise of the robots

You can find a lot of pictures of people in old chemistry labs, and I’ve sometimes tried to imagine what it was like to work in one of them. But I know that I’m not creating an accurate mental picture, because the more I think about things, the more I have to refine the one that I already have. Depending on the age of the photograph, you may well be looking at people who had to blow a fair amount of their own glassware, who had to distill all their own solvents, and who most definitely had to make many of their reagents themselves. Modern synthetic chemists do some of those things occasionally, but it’s safe to say that it’s become more and more rare.