Posted on 11/23/2013 8:47:19 AM PST by AdmSmith
The phrase “chemistry set” is embedded in the collective unconscious, but try to actually call one to mind. What does a chemistry set look like? What does it include? What can you do with it? If you’re anything close to being a millennial, you probably have only vague answers to these questions. If you’re a little older, however, you probably remember one of the classic sets that is responsible for our powerful (if nonspecific) connection to the concept of a chemistry set. Chief among these, in many people’s eyes, is the Gilbert Chemistry Set, which inspired untold numbers of young people to study chemistry.
Now a new Kickstarter wants to help adults and children alike recapture an excitement that most of them have never actually known. Research chemist John Kuhns has been making wood-box chemistry sets for years, mostly as gifts and small sales direct to friends and family, but now he wants to scale up the operation and bring the tools of real chemists back to the everyday home.
His Heirloom Chemistry Set is certainly focused on nostalgia more heavily than on affordability; with a box of birch including mahogany inlays, the set is hardly cheap, and is clearly meant to be kept visible within the house. This is half chemistry set, half personal statement.
I think I had the erector set. Is ‘76 your model year?
Sooner or later someone will revive the toys from the Gilbert Company. In the meantime check out the museum
After I picked myself off the ground I finally realized that this was a kickstart campaign, to get seed money, to start a business, so that eventually somesort of chemistry set could be put on the market at some unspecified time in the future.
My adolescent chemistry experiments started with saltpeter and sugar, then advanced to saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal.
Erector sets where cool though in my house there was Lincoln-Log prerequisite before getting one.
Check again, if you pledge $175 you will get a kit with the original chemicals + 8 extra. If you pledge more you will get more. Delivery March 2014.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1742632993/heirloom-chemistry-set
To change topics a little bit, can anyone recommend a good current chemistry set for a homeschooled 15-year-old? I’d like it to accommodate the experiments likely to be found in a standard high-school chemistry textbook.
I did the same, and my parents were afraid that something would happen. Sure it did, the kitchen ceiling got a new color, after that I tested everything outside.
My erector set was made out of some painful metal that made my hands stinky. My parents are now trying to pawn it all off on MY kids. They just gave my boy this 25 ton dump truck of death that I fall over and scrape my leg on every day.
Everything was there, if you knew where to look!
Do you happen to know if the $225 glassware set includes the chemicals?
I mixed up a five lb. bag of saltpeter and sugar and was burning small piles of it in the backyard. The bag was sitting too close and a spark jumped and ignited the whole thing into a mini Mt. Vesuvius.
-- inflicted dire damage on America's ability to identify and nurture young, inventive scientists and engineers-to-be.
I presume that is the case.
But we still have http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meccano, but I prefer to old kits. The ones today are too much ready-to-use.
We did it.
Made black powder, and were working toward Nitroglycerin when we figured out some of the acids we needed we not available to teenagers (legally).
That predates me by a bit. :)
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