This graduate was made by Whitall Tatum Company. The glass graduate is a form of glassware used for measuring precise volumes of liquids, particularly by pharmacists. Over time, the graduate has been produced in a variety of shapes, from a flat-bottomed, beaker form to a footed cylinder, tumbler, or cone.
Whitall Tatum Company was among the first American glass companies to manufacture chemical glassware, starting as early as the late 1870s. Based in Millville, New Jersey, the company’s factory produced chemical and other glassware for over 150 years, finally closing its doors in 1999. The company sold glassware under a variety of trade names, among them Acme, Phenix, and Duplex. Phenix was generally regarded as the higher-end brand. Its Duplex-branded glassware featured marks in two standards, with metric on one side and U.S. fluid on the other.
Whitall Tatum donated this object to the Museum in 1921, at the request of Charles Whitebread, assistant curator in the Division of Medicine. Whitebread planned to use the object as a part of an exhibit to illustrate pharmaceutical methods used in the manufacture of medicine. He hoped to “illustrate some of the operations to which crude drugs are subjected to get them into a form suitable for administration.” The methods he planned to display included: vaporization, distillation, sublimation, comminution, desiccation, sifting, levigation, precipitation, dialysis, expression, percolation, solution, lotion or displacement washing, decantation, collation or straining, filtration, and separation of immiscible liquids.
Sources:
American Druggist and Pharmaceutical Record. 1900. Vol. 36. American Druggist Publishing Company.
Harrison, Charles. Cumberland County, New Jersey: 265 Years of History. The History Press, 2013.
Levy, Bernard. “Pharmacy Graduates in Use from 1880 to 1920.” Pharmacy in History 26, no. 3 (1984): 150–54.
National Museum of American History Accession File #67053
Rosenfeld, Louis. Four Centuries of Clinical Chemistry. CRC Press, 1999.
Whitall Tatum & Company. “Whitall Tatum & Co. Glass Ware,” 1879.
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