The spaghetti junction of glass tubing bubbling with noxious liquids and gases would look perfectly at home in Frankenstein’s laboratory. But I am standing in the chemistry labs at Imperial College London, and my companion is no mad scientist. He’s not even that into chemistry – his heart is in the glass.
is a lab technician, but of a special kind. When a chemist needs a novel reactor vessel for an experiment, Ramsey heads to his workshop and fires up his precision flamethrower. Starting with a metre-long cylinder of glass, he heats it until it begins to soften. Twirling it quickly and deftly, he blows into it, forming it.
What emerges can be anything from a delicate vial to the thin, snaking tubes of specialised vacuum pumps. Atop a cabinet in Ramsey’s office is a galloping horse he once blew out of glass. But with lab budgets under pressure worldwide, there are few scientific glassblowers like him left. Can chemistry cope without them?
Advertisement
Glass is the reactor material par excellence. The borosilicate glass that forms most chemical vessels is inert and hugely durable, so you can heat, cool and react the brews within knowing the glass won’t explode, deform or interfere with the reaction. And you can see what the chemicals are up to, especially useful for spotting one of those characteristic colour changes that set chemists’ pulses racing.
Chemical glass was itself something of a left-field discovery. A century or so ago US railway companies started to introduce electric lamps in railway signals. But they faced an unexpected problem: on cold nights, the sudden temperature change when a light was switched on shattered the surrounding glass. Chemists had already been experimenting with new types of glass infused with small amounts of additive, and discovered that adding a pinch of boron could improve the material’s heat resistance. It was a chemist at the Corning glass company, W. C. Taylor, who found the solution, concocting a borosilicate recipe that retained its size and shape at a far wider range of temperatures.
Pyrex cookware, introduced in 1915, is perhaps the most famous offspring of this revolution. But the effects reached furthest in the chemistry lab – making the professional glassblower a linchpin of the discipline.
The Frenchman Henri Narcisse Vigreux was an early master. The now ubiquitous Vigreux reflux condenser is formed of two concentric cylinders of glass. Water flowing through the outer tube cools a gas whipping through the inner tube, allowing it to liquefy. Vigreux’s genius lay in making the tubes’ inner surfaces delicately and intricately wrinkled, to maximise the contact area for cooling.
Even now scientific innovation relies on the glassblower’s art in unexpected ways. When physicist at Princeton University was developing devices for measuring tiny magnetic fields called SERF magnetometers in the early 2000s, he turned to Mike Souza, the university’s resident glassblower. A crucial part of the device is a glass cell that needed to be made from aluminosilicate glass, as it is less permeable than borosilicate to the helium that fills it. But there’s a catch – aluminosilicate requires a higher temperature to become malleable, but undergoes unwanted chemical changes in oxygen-rich fires. It takes all the glassblower’s skill to heat it briefly to the threshold of pliability, and quickly form it before it solidifies again.
Romalis is in no doubt about the importance of glassblowing to his science. “Mike Souza has amazing skills and likes the ‘impossible’ projects,” he says. “There are a number of experiments that we couldn’t do without him.”
Back in the Imperial lab, the tangle of tubing I’m looking at is known as a Schlenk line, an assemblage chemists use to suck gases from one flask to another. Ramsey is responsible for repairing the Schlenk ranks in the cavernous teaching laboratory. But his real business goes on behind the closed doors of smaller research labs busy with chemists. One of them is Alastair McIntosh, who is investigating how various chemicals cross an oil-water interface rather like that at the wall of a biological cell. He is using a bespoke vial that he designed – and Ramsey made a reality.
“Even now science relies on the glassblower’s art in unexpected ways”
Yet when it comes to the future of Ramsey’s craft, the glass is definitely half empty. Photos from the annual get-together of the show a small collection of mainly white-haired men. In 2015, the society listed only 14 student members among its ranks. Getting funded to train as a glassblower is virtually impossible, says , a glassblower at the University of Oxford, and the society’s secretary. It’s a similar story in the US. In Australia, there are only two apprentices. New Zealand has none.
It’s no secret why glassblowing is a dying art. “It comes down to cost,” says Ramsey. Most chemical glassware is now available as cheap, standardised components, and it just doesn’t make financial sense for many research labs to keep on a dedicated glassblower for a few bespoke projects.
It is easy to feel a pang for an artisan craft that could soon be no more. But chemists will still need bespoke reaction containers for experiments no one has tried before. , a chemist at the University of Glasgow, UK, has been looking for an alternative. He has been printing reactionware – filling a 3D printer with a polymer used in some superglues, and having it turn out a small vessel. “This is about reconfiguring what a reactor looks like, and it’s got us thinking in all sorts of new ways,” he says.
For instance, after printing the vessel the printer can refuel with chemicals and squirt those into the reactor. By the same chemicals react together to produce different stuff. And by making a series of small boxes, linked by small holes, chemicals can undergo several different reactions in sequence by . You can even embed catalysts directly into a reactor’s surface rather than have them float freely in solution, so you don’t have to fiddle about cleaning vessels and purifying chemicals after each reaction step. In as-yet-unpublished work, Cronin has sent instructions to a printer in a lab he heads in China and remotely synthesised ibuprofen.
This feat might herald a world where we can all download instructions to synthesise our own personalised drugs in an appropriate reactor vessel at home. Even so, Cronin still thinks there will be demand for the traditional glassblowing craft. For a start, the melting point of the sort of plastics you can use in a 3D printer is low, and delicate items like the Vigreux column aren’t easily replicated in plastic.
In Ramsey’s lab at least, glassblowing seems to have a viable future. He has just designed a glassblowing workshop for a new research building Imperial College is constructing. At 63, overseeing the move will be the final challenge of his career – along with the delicate task of finding the right glassblower to follow him. “Hopefully, I’ll be allowed to do that and have an apprentice in place,” he says. “That will be a fantastic end to my career.”
This article appeared in print under the headline “Blowing, blowing, gone”
