6th April ’17: Science bottles & books

Happy Thursday, people 🍎🦊🦁🌼🍏🐬👤👾☂️
When I was a little girl, I’d occasionally make a school holidays sojourn to the university where my dad was a science lecturer (see glorious #throwbackthursday pic). I was mesmerised by all the bottles of coloured compounds clustered in cabinets in the lab and fascinated by the library with its shelf after shelf of mind-blowingly complicated books. Knowing how much I loved colour, Dad found one volume containing a picture of titanium, multicoloured and vibrant, and offered to photocopy it for me. But, being the 1970s, it turned out to be a black and white copy and my excitement immediately evaporated (sorry, Dad, I know you tried…). Black and white didn’t cut the mustard even back then.

My dad at work in the 1970s

Finding these Penguin Science News volumes rekindled those childhood memories of labs and libraries, and luckily our modern world allows me to share them with you, not in monochrome but in their full, colourful glory. And don’t they look happy with the various chemistry bottles I’ve collected over the years?

PS I’ve always wondered what Hanst. Nigr. (on the stoppered bottle) is. In spite of extensive googling, I’m none the wiser. Any thoughts?

Martha, The Colour File x

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