The other day I was reading Derick Lowe's Blog, "In The Pipeline", and he made a comment that struck a chord in me. Actually, he made the comment in the comment section based on one of my comments, but it is still a comment worth elaborating upon. Got that? Good. To continue, he mentioned that it had been over twenty years since he'd had to do a titration. And then I though about it: how many of those old wet chemistry methods we learned in college are still in use? I hardly ever do titrations. In my field it isn't needed much. But I used to do them all the time over twenty years ago.
The sad truth of the matter is that a lot of those old time-consuming methods have been automated. There seems to be a robot for just about every wet chemistry technique imaginable. Total Base Number? Done. PH? Ditto. And I really can't say that I mind too much. Because I hated those things. Sitting around waiting forever for the color to change in a flask and - Oh No!- I just missed the endpoint. Now start over again. Some people did turn it into an art form. There's really nothing like watching an elderly chemist in his seventies showing you how to do it RIGHT.
Beyond lost techniques, I wonder about the eventual destination of all those triple-beam balances we used to employ. Will they end up in antique shops? This seems to have been the fate of the microbalances that every analytical lab use to have. The old microbalances were things of beauty, made out of brass, kept in wood and glass cases. I've seen them on display in living rooms right next to the metal compass.
I've seen a few of the old optical balances floating at the places I've worked. They always have that sickly blue-green plastic case and never work right. Even when I used them in college they were a pain. I always made sure to check the things before I weighed anything. Often as not, I'd have to "thump" the side to get the scale to work properly. They'll all likely end up in the trash.
And there's the chart paper IR's. About fifteen years ago, cheap FTIR's made reading an infrared chart a whole lot easier. Hook them to a PC and suddenly everyone was an IR specialist. It's now possible to run an IR on a sample and instantly compare it to a mega-database. No more of the old "Uhm, I think that peak might be the amine group." And you can store the results in a hard drive, so no longer do you see chemists hauling around bound books of IR charts.
Years ago, I had the dubious privilege of touring an industrial junk yard. The place was filled with ancient card sorters and all kinds of vacuum tube relics. Perhaps that will be the final resting place of old lab equipment.