I have neglected this chemblog too long. I'm going to try and post more often. The problem was, a friend reccomended the "Game of Ice and Fire" novels by George R. R. Martin. Now I'm hooked. I just finished #2 and will be starting on #3 tomorrow. #4 comes out this Christmas. I may pre-order that one as well. It took awhile, but I seem to have entered the Harry Potter universe.
Anyway, back to the Wonderful World of Chemistry. Better living. "The future is now!" All those wonderful things we would hear back in the glory days of the sixties, before someone started noticing the muck behind the factory.
Among my many hobbies, is the collecting of old chemistry textbooks. They are similar to old technical data sheets in that you can get access to information not given out any more. My early interest in the field of chemistry came from sorting through my father's old high school chemistry textbook from the early 1950's. To this day, I cannot fathom why someone would try and make a nuclear reactor look so easy to build. But those were different times, Jim.
So here we have DYNAMIC CHEMISTRY, a textbook from 1937 and you can hear the glassware clink just by leafing through it. It was written by two Cleveland High School teachers and published by Rand McNally. The chapter headings are descriptive and even the section headings are amusing. One is entitled "Smelling the lightning" (it's about ozone). Here on page 207 is a drawing of the too-young Michael Faraday cleaning up some mess in Sir Humphrey Davy's lab. And it does warm my little polymer chemist heart to see a picture of Leo Hendrik Baekeland on page 337. Page 556 has a picture of a "platinum refinery." The book also has a set of questions at the end of each chapter and easy to understand reaction mechanisms.
Books such DYNAMIC CHEMISTRY give the reader an insight into where the field stood right before WW2. What is suprising is how little has changed.