The Night to Make Crystals…

Reader, have we got a treat for you! Earlier this year, Iain Patterson, a technician in the chemistry teaching lab at the University of St. Andrews — yes, that one in Scotland, founded 1413 C.E. — reached out to your intrepid editors. He asked if he could obtain permission to circulate more widely a fondly remembered poem that was posted in his lab, a tear-out from the December 1978 edition of the Chemical Bond.

“Wha?,” you might well exclaim, as we did.

With foresight that we might not be able to lay our hands on a 33-year-old newsletter, Iain shared a photo of the page, taken before the sun- and chemical-aged original crumbled away. And so, in the spirit of the winter holidays, the St. Louis section is delighted to republish John F. Hansen’s “The Night to Make Crystals”. And grant Iain permission to retweet it (or whatever) with attribution.

’Twas the night to make crystals, and all through the hood,
Compounds were reacting; I’d hoped that they would.
The hood door I’d closed with the greatest of care,
To keep noxious vapors from fouling the air.
The reflux condenser was hooked to the tap,
And the high vacuum pump had a freshly filled trap.

I patiently waited to finish my task,
While boiling chips merrily danced in the flask.
Then up from the pump there arose such a great clatter,
That I sprang from my chair to see what was the matter.
Away to the fume hood! Up with the door!
And half of my product foamed out on the floor.

Then what to my watering eyes should appear,
But a viscous black oil which had once been so clear.
I turned the pump off in a terrible rush,
And the oil that sucked back filled the line up with mush.
The ether boiled out of the flask with a splash,
And hitting the mantle went up with a flash.

My nose turned quite ruddy, my eyebrows went bare,
The blast had singed off nearly half of my hair.
I shut the hood door with a violent wrench,
As acid burned holes in the floor and the bench.
I flushed it with water, and to my dismay,
Found sodium hydride had spilled in the fray.

And then ere the fire got way out of hand,
I managed to quench it with buckets of sand.
With aqueous base I diluted the crud,
Then shoveled up seven big buckets of mud.
I extracted the slurry again and again,
With ether and then with dichloromethane.

Chromatographic techniques were applied
Several times ’til the product had been purified.
I finally viewed with a satisfied smile,
One half of a gram in a shiny new vial
I mailed the yield report to my boss,
Ninety percent (allowing for loss).

“Good work,” said the boss in the answering mail,
“Use same conditions on preparative scale.”