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A repeat, but I doubt any ayleur has energy to document that fact.
From Brewer:
Prince Rupert's Drops Drops of molten glass, consolidated by falling into water. Their form is that of a
tadpole. The thick end may be hammered pretty smartly without its breaking, but if the smallest portion
of the thin end is nipped off, the whole flies into fine dust with explosive violence. These toys, if not
invented by Prince Rupert, were introduced by him into England.
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Explosive violence = something associated with "these toys"?
Who plays with 'em?
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Dear WW. When I was ten, Prince Rupert drops were great for impressing "the girl next door".
No doubt today's tenyear olds hand her something else to entertain her.
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Dear wwh:
Well, I, for one, at five times ten years of age and then some would like to be impressed with these Prince Rupert drops. Can you still find them anywhere?
WW
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Dear WW: With a little practise, they are very simple to make. You just get a glass rod, but not
Pyrex, perhaps 3/16" diameter. Have a one liter beaker of room temp water. Heat glass rod in Bunsen
burner flame until it begins to melt, and heat until tip thickens, and starts to have large drop form with
rapidly thinning tail, and let it fall into the water. If too hot, molten glass shatters on contact with
water. But with a bit of practise you should be able to have them remain intact. The point is that
the glass cooled suddenly like this has enormous internal strains, and any fracture propagates in
every direction. I guess same principle is involved in automobile windshields. When I was in highschool
an idiot smashed his 1927 Essex into front of bus I was riding in. The windshield bowed out towards me,
then became concave and broke into several large pieces. One of the pieces hit lady passenger on the
cheek like a sword, and her cheek hung down over her breast. When she yelled, I could see both sets of
tonsils. To keep this from happening, windshields were made of two layers of glass with layer of plastic in
the middle. I saw at BCH morgue remains of a kid who hitched ride on trolley, and when he jumped down
went up onto hood of car, put his head through the windshield, and jagged hole cut his head off. So now
windshields are a single sheet of glass so treated that when it breaks it make hundreds of fingernail sized
pieces unlikely to cause injury. This is similar to Prince Rupert drops. Science marches on. Flourish of trumpets.
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Gotcha, wwh!
Now where to find a bunsen burner...
Science marches on!
WW
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this came up before, but not at prince rupert.. i think it was in a words about glass, or tension, or fractures... (in other words we got to the same place, but with different word!) in any case, some one, (might have been you Dr Bill!) found a web sight showing some..
and instead of a bunsen burner you could just use a propone canister.. that is what glass workers used for melting glass rods! Home depot or Lowes and or anyother hardware store caries small canisters of propane for soldering copper pipes, etc..
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of troy:
Is this a project you'd try to demonstrate to your nieces and nephews? [You sound like a great aunt to me from the couple of things I've heard you mention about doing with them.]
I'd love to try this. Not with my kids at school viewing, but still it sounds like something pretty cool to try.
WW
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Dear WW: perhaps you might have butane cylinder with burner nozzle, such as plumbers use
for small jobs. Incidentally, at one point my second daughter took care of widow of guy who
invented Pyrex glass. She gave my daugher a desk he had handcrafted for himself. I wish I
still had it. When I was ten, you had to be very careful to heat urine specimen to test for
sugar, with Benedict's solution. If you had hot flame with green cone in center, and almost
invisible pale purple outer flame, and put test tube right into it, it would shatter every time.
You had to use reducing flame, meaning lower amount of oxygen, giving gellow color to flame,
and only slowly move test tube into flame, taking it in and out. Just the addition of a small
amount of borax makes the glass wonderfully fracture resistant. That guy ought to have gotten
a Nobel Prize for it. It's just as important as stainless steel, for instance. I think I'll try to look
up the guy's name. Something like Kieve. May he be on a particularly comfortable cloud in the
Hereafter. PS your hardest problem is going to be finding soft glass rod.
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wwh:
All you have to do is google "soft glass rod" + price, and you get two hits. I checked one of the hits and at the bottom of the page was a list of glass suppliers.
If I really set my mind toward trying this trick of Prince Rupert, it seems it would be possible.
Ain't the internet just great?
WW
P.S. I saw some stained glass windows from the Middle Ages today in a Richmond Museum. The color just blew me away the way it does every time I see them. And the Tiffany lamps are super-extraordinary. There were these types of Tiffany lamps on display: dragonfly, begonia, peony, wisteria, peacock, autumn leaves, cobweb (my absolute favorite!), and lily pads among others I can't remember.
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O Tempora, O Mores! What is the Internet coming to? yesterday, and again today I search
for something innocent, and get a porno site! I just now searched for Pyrex Glass inventor
and get a place that specializes in dildos. And what in hell is a "cock ring" for? I was too
nauseated to look.Please don't be cruel and tell me a Live Saver would fit me.
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Now, wwh, I can't stand the idea of bear-baiting and using animals in do-or-die contests, but a cock ring is simplay a circle in which two cocks fight.
There. Think on that and set your mind to rest.
WW
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"chemist William C. Tyler Corning Glass vice president (1943-54); co-inventor of Pyrex glass
expired 11-2-1958 in Corning, New York age 72"
Is this the guy you're looking for, wwh?
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"Born Corinne Dibos in Paris to a wealthy family in 1925, Calvet studied criminal law at the Sorbonne before becoming an actress. Her mother, a scientist, was the inventor of Pyrex, a sturdy glassware that can be used in an oven. "
So, there's someone else on the Web who is said to have invented Pyrex.
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Dear WW: I give up. Got to find something with better prospects to hunt for.
Back to Brewer, to see if I can find some interesting words there.
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"Two routes by which Ostwald's efforts had an effect in America are interesting to trace. The earliest involved the well-known text, "Quantitative Chemical Analysis", by Albert B. Prescott and Otis C. Johnson of the University of Michigan, which went through a number of editions beginning in 1874. Prescott was one of the founders of the American Chemical Society and was its president in 1886. He is also reputed to have been the analyst who arrived at the figure of 99.44% for the purity of a common brand of soap. For the fifth edition of the book (1901) Eugene C. Sullivan (1872-1962), then a young instructor at Ann Arbor, was asked to prepare a section on Solution and Ionization according to Ostwald's ideas, which he did very well in about 4 pages. Sullivan had studied at Michigan, Göttingen, and Leipzig, receiving his PhD. under Ostwald in 1899 on trivalent iodine compounds. After teaching three years at Michigan, he was with the U.S. Geological Survey until 1908, when he went to the Corning Glass Works. There with W.C. Taylor he developed the low-expansion glasses later known under the brand name Pyrex, which did so much to simplify laboratory work." http://web.esf.edu/dljohnson/fch380net/history/history 11.htm
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Dear WW: My compliments to you on a superior job of searching.
I didn't know so many people were involved. Still can't remember my guy's name.
He was prof at MIT. Anyhow, he made enough dough that his widow really lived in style
for many years, in a mansion with many servants. MIT salary could not have paid for it.
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Prescott was one of the founders of the American Chemical Society...also reputed to have been the analyst who arrived at the figure of 99.44% for the purity of a common brand of soap.
In 1959 my organic chemistry professor Louis Feiser made that same claim for himself, right after describing his synthesis of Chlorophyll and invention of napalm (which he then gave to the Isrealis in 1948). He said the soap manufacturer had asked him for an analysis of their product, but because of rounding errors the results totaled only 99.44%, not 100%. Making a virtue of a necessity Madison Avenue did its thing, and the rest (as they say)...
Professor Feiser concluded his comments with the observation "99.44% what? 99 and 44/100ths percent matter, that's what...! So what's the other 0.56% ?"
I have no corroboration of either chemist's claim.
Anybody know when the slogan was popularized? Prescott must have died in the early Twentieth Century. Maybe that would distinguish.
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Pooh-Bah
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Per Symbols of America:
The idea for Ivory soap came to Harvey Proctor (son of one founder of Proctor & Gamble) during a Sunday morning service in 1879, while the congregation was reading from Psalms 45:8,
All thy garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, and out of the ivory palaces whereby they have made thee glad.
James Gamble (son of the other founder) had recently perfected a hard white soap intended to compete with imported castille soaps. Proctor convinced P&G to rename the soap "Ivory," and hired a chemical consultant to analyze the soap for impurities and compare it to three leading castille soaps. The chemist found the Ivory the purest, with only .56% of its weight in impurities, and so Proctor started marketing the soap as 99.44% pure.
In 1881, a batch of the soap was accidentally left in the stirring machine too long, and it dried with a small amount of air inside. As a result, the soap bars floated, and the floating bars were an accidental marketing success.
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