Pre-Spring Break Lecture

Being in the middle of spring-break season and with Easter on the horizon I make my annual admonition to my students on the proper use of spring-break.  To this end, I tell them of a 18 year old student of organic chemistry at the Royal College in London who used his Easter Break to undertake in his parents home the synthesis of a compound of great importance to the health of his nation and the world.  He failed to synthesized the drug, but discovered a compound that would change the world.

Of course I am speaking of William Henry Perkin.  The drug was quinine and the compound he discovered was mauve or aniline purple.

I point out to my students that young Perkin quit school, against the advice of his faculty mentor, and started a dye works, where like today's internet entrepreneurs, he became extremely rich.  So rich in fact that he retired at age thirty-seven to devote the rest of his life to the study of organic chemistry.

Of course the dye industry begat the modern synthetic pharmaceutical industry and modern organic chemistry, so Perkins 1856 Easter-Break serves as the model of what the break should be.  Kind of makes the bellybutton shots most student have planned seem like a wast of time, doesn't it!?

T.S. Hall

Google Translate

This morning I was looking for a procedure and kept coming across papers that referenced the same 1959 Helvetica paper.  While I have no problem with older literature, reading experimental's written in German gives me nightmare flashbacks to my undergraduate days and the four semesters of German language study required to earn a chemistry degree.  (Six semesters in my case, but only four semesters of classes)  Just as German made me think about changing my major, the prospect of trying the navigate an experimental with my long lost Scientific German skills made me think about trying another method.  

Thankfully, just when I was about to put on my lederhosen and dig into the experimental one of my labmates suggested I try Google Translate.  A quick copy and paste, a few corrections of OCR errors, a bit of educated guessing, and some revision of wording later and I have a complete experimental in English.

It makes me wonder if I can get rid of my Fortran textbook and those spare punchcards.  (That's a joke.  If you kids don't know about Fortran or punchcards, GET OFF MY LAWN!)

T.S. Hall