fusso
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How amateur chemistry would look like nowadays if the internet isn't a thing?
How amateur chemistry would look like nowadays if internet isn't a thing? Would getting chemicals be easier or harder? Would people like/hate chemists
more? Would laws be more/less restrictive? Would crimes involving chemicals be more/less common?
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woelen
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It's very difficult to give meaningful answers to these questions. The presence of the internet has changed our society very very much. Society, when
I was a teenager (1975 - 1985) was so different. Everything needed to be done with local shops, you simply did not think of ordering anything from a
company far away in another country. Communication with others was possible (telephone), but international contact was very expensive (e.g. $1 or even
more per minute).
Only because transfer of data and processing capacity is cheap nowadays, we can have webshops for all kinds of rare items, forums and social media for
communication. A world without these is different. Probably there would be less fear for terrorism, but getting rare/special items also would be much
harder.
If I look back at 1980, at that time, on one side, I could buy KClO3 and HNO3 locally in a drugstore as a teenager. So, that was much easier than it
is nowadays. On the other hand, now I can get e.g. ruthenium salts, chlorosulfonic acid, ethylene diamine, and many other chemicals without any
application in everryday life, which would have been impossible in 1980, even with a very helpful shop owner who did his best to help me getting
interesting compounds.
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SWIM
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Quote: Originally posted by fusso  | | How amateur chemistry would look like nowadays if internet isn't a thing? Would getting chemicals be easier or harder? Would people like/hate chemists
more? Would laws be more/less restrictive? Would crimes involving chemicals be more/less common? |
There'd be less chatter?
That would probably lead to some chemists being liked more as well, but it's hard to tell.
It would make things awfully boring though.
@FUSSO, Is it true that you can get a little short tempered when people mispronounce your name? https://youtu.be/PQyD53xG9BE
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G-Coupled
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Why would a local chemist shop back in the day have problems ordering things like ethylene diamine and Ruthenium salts, as a matter of interest?
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12thealchemist
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Where would the chemist order them from?
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morganbw
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I would guess that many of us would have a valid library card to a well booked library.
The information that can be found on the internet is pretty sweet.
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fusso
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@SWIM isn't ur question a bit too early?
[Edited on 191103 by fusso]
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G-Coupled
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Chemical supply houses that they had accounts with, i presumed?
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SWIM
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I did chemistry then in the USA, and here drug stores weren't always helpful.
I think some in smaller towns and more rural areas might have been more helpful, but around the SF bay area you'd often get blank looks or worse if
you tried to get a pharmacist to supply you with any unusual chemicals.
There were chemical supply shops though.
They'd sell the more ordinary chems to anybody, but might be more difficult for hazardous stuff.
Tact and good people skills were vital to get the good stuff if you were a private individual, and if you drove a Harley, you didn't park it out
front.
Some of them would sell me mercuric chloride, LAH, etc, but others would look askance if I wanted potassium bromide or other relatively innocuous
things. And you had to sign for most of the dangerous stuff (sodium, LAH, don't recall on the mercuric chloride though.)
Some time in the 90s they passed a law (US, or maybe just California) that required you to show an ID if you bought more than $100 worth of
equipment/chems at a time.
I started buying smaller bottles of chemicals more often, and bought my organic glassware piecemeal.
Things were being clamped down more and more, but the internet really turned that around.
Not just the chemicals which were easier to get, but equipment that in the 90s was hard to find and incredibly expensive could be easily bought used.
Suddenly you could buy the kind of equipment necessary to make and purify all sorts of chemicals yourself without breaking the bank.
And places like this made finding the information to do so much easier too.
But using the internet does leave a trail.
All those years in the 90s I only made a handful of purchases where there were any records.
Maybe a dozen at the outside.
That'd be hard to do today, because there aren't as many brick and mortar places to buy these things.
And the REALY cooperative ones are long gone, as far as I know.
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woelen
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Those companies didn't buy from chemical supply houses. They had other sources, geared more towards hobby usage and home usage of certain chemicals.
In those days, much more pure chemicals were used in the household. Something like NaClO3 was sold as general purpose weed killer, CCl4 was sold for
degreasing clothes and I still remember the times when my dad degreased dirty spots on the horse's saddle with CHCl=CCl2 (we simply called it 'tri')
and then reapplied some vaseline-like stuff to keep it in good condition.
A chemical like e.g. RuCl3, rhenium salts, and many other exotics simply had no application in households and hence you could not buy them from local
drugstores.
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