“Consider the chem flask deemed conical;
Of glassware, example canonical.
Or: name Erlenmeyer
Cohesive-inspires.
Both names, in lab ways: economical.”
The 7 April 2023 Twitter limerick focused on a common piece of glassware found in the laboratory setting.
“Consider the chem flask deemed conical; /
Of glassware, example canonical.”
I’ve written before about the “lab check-in day,” in which students evaluate the contents of their lab drawers to make sure they have all the different pieces of lab equipment they will need throughout a semester. It can be an overwhelming introduction, given the general novelty of both the materials and the vocabulary.
Often, labeled charts of glassware are helpful in matching name to item for these long lists, as with this outstanding resource available on the blog Compound Interest. (The post title semi-acknowledges this, but it primarily was chosen due to its rhyme with the more common saying of “task list”!)
The “chem flask deemed conical” (#4 at the link above) often has one of the most familiar shapes, in terms of its use in a lab setting. It is a classic, “canonical” example of scientific glassware. Typically, students checking into their labs will find that they have a wide variety of these flasks (100 mL, 250 mL, 400 mL, etc.), in order to be able to work with a wide variety of volumes of reagents on common laboratory tasks such as filtration and recrystallization.
“Or: name Erlenmeyer /
Cohesive-inspires. /
Both names, in lab ways: economical.”
A conical flask is also known as an Erlenmeyer flask, named for its inventor (Emil Erlenmeyer). The two names reference the same piece of glassware, which (as noted above) is one of the most prototypical pieces of equipment in an introductory lab.
Thus, by either name, the flask “cohesive-inspires”: its image and name can stand in as visual, “economical” shorthands for the equipment used in a wide variety of scientific experiments and endeavors.
Chemphasis 