“Chemical Magic” Chemistry Set, London, c. 1920 (Inv. 92768). Would you play with this chemistry kit?

Name: Jane

Age: 61

Occupation: Teacher

From: Oxford

Object: Chemistry Set

Story: My friend and I would go into her dad’s garden shed and play with her brother’s chemistry set. We knew we shouldn’t so we had to wait till no-one was at home. I think we were about 10 years old. I came joint first in my chemistry exam at grammar school but chose not to take chemistry and further! I eventually married a chemistry teacher.

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Age: 21

Occupation: Student

From: Surrey

Object: Crystal Growing

Story: At school we grew crystals in chemistry. I loved watching all the different formations that grew.

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One of Joanna’s great photographs of the crystal garden in a jam-jar she made last week.

Name: Joanna

From: Oxford

Object: Crystal Garden

Story: As a child, in the 1950s, encouraged by my father I set about making a crystal garden in a jam-jar. The brilliance of the colours and feathery forms of the crystals was probably one of my first experiences of chemistry and the sense of wonder has stayed with me through the years.

Who was to know that much later, in my twenties, I would find myself in a laboratory at the University of Oxford, growing crystals as part of my job. My aim was to grow a crystal of rabbit troponin C, a key protein vital in muscle contraction. With a crystal, chemists can work out the structure of very complex molecules such as proteins and find out much about how they operate in the body.

Amazingly after only a few months of working on this project, one morning, on examining my tubes of solution, I discovered the first ever recorded crystal of rabbit troponin C glistening in the bright morning light. It was a spectacular crystal and you can see a photograph of it published in Nature (Mercola, D., Bullard, B., and Priest, J., Nature Vol. 254 p 634-635 April 17 1975).

Dorothy Hodgkin, who had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1964) for her work on the use of crystals to discover the structure of biological molecules using X-ray diffraction, just happened to be in the department that morning. To my intense pride, she came and looked down my microscope at the precious crystal!

Close up of Joanna’s crystal garden.

For fun last week I made a crystal garden once again and have included some photographs with this recollection for any reader who has never made one!

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Boom! Photo credit: DSCF1311s by deradrian (license)

Name: Ben

Test Tube Stand with Test Tubes, Mid-19th Century (Inv. 34639)

Age: 15

From: Newcastle, UK

Occupation: Student

Object: Chemistry Kit

Story: When I was five my grandparents bought me a large chemistry set. Doing the proper experiments was boring, so I just mixed everything together in a flask and pushed a cork into the top. After a minute or so the cork blew off the flask and sprayed the contents all over the ceiling of my bedroom.

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Gauze Top Bunsen Burner, c.1874, (Inv. 45602). Who else used Bunsen Burners similar to this when heating things at school?

Name: Priyam

Age: 12

From: London, UK

Object: Jelly babies

Story: We did screaming jelly babies at school – we added potassium chlorate, a heated substance, to the jelly babies and they turned a lilac colour and screamed and then blew up.

Mmmmm, tasty. Photo credit: jelly babies by Sam Greenhalgh (license)

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