Distillations magazine
Distillations articles reveal science’s powerful influence on our lives, past and present.
An Emerging Field
Chemist Frank Field turned a hand-me-down mass spectrometer into pioneering career.
Full Boyle
Robert Boyle is best known in chemistry classrooms for Boyle’s law, but the law was never stated outright in Boyle’s work.
Last Words
Even toward the end of his life, Isaac Newton still had questions about chemistry.
Early Solution
Was arsenic a poison or a salvation?
Fast Times: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of Amphetamine
Amphetamine didn’t cure anything, but it did make you feel better. Chemist Gordon Alles faced this paradox after patenting his discovery in 1932.
Stories of the Great Chemists
In the 1950s comic books took Mexico’s youth by storm. But alongside familiar superhuman avengers were other kinds of heroes: real-life chemists.
Industrial Vitamins
Rare earth metals are the vitamins of modern technology. How did this group of chemically dull elements become so important and so troublesome?
Factory to Farm
The 1944 Morgenthau Plan envisioned postwar Germany as an agrarian state. Fortunately, the Marshall Plan was adopted instead.
Pandora’s Secrets
You can’t tell a book by its cover.
Mesmerized
The controversy around animal magnetism.
Making the Process
By 1790 chemistry was the up-and-coming science. The products of chemistry—industrially useful salts, acids, and alkalis—would soon be measured not by the ounce (or the gram) but by the ton.
Celluloid: The Eternal Substitute
Before becoming a synonym for cinema, celluloid was used to imitate expensive materials like ivory, tortoiseshell, and linen.
Behind the Barbed Wire of Manzanar: Guayule and the Search for Natural Rubber
Faced with a sudden shortage of rubber, the wartime United States turned to an unlikely place: a Japanese American internment camp in California.
That Beautiful Theory
Joseph Black, one of the first to realize that air was composed of many gases, isolated carbon dioxide, and discovered latent heat.
The Thin Green Line
The feud between William Crookes and Claude-Auguste Lamy over the newly discovered element thallium rested on the very definition of discovery.
Pipe Dreams: America’s Fluoride Controversy
How did a seemingly benign chemical and a near-miraculous public-health initiative spark decades and decades debate?
The Smell Detectives
During the 1860s and 1870s, was a booming New York City’s stench choking the health from its citizens? Chemist Charles Frederick Chandler aimed to find out.
Vanity Unfair
A 1904 caricature from Vanity Fair is a striking example of the role images played in creating the Marie Curie myth.