Beaker

Description:

In chemical parlance, a beaker is a cylindrical vessel, usually of glass, with a flat bottom. This example has a small beak (or pouring spout), and might date from the mid-nineteenth century.

Beakers were known by the fourteenth century and, while used primarily for drinking purposes, might sometimes have put to pharmaceutical or alchemical uses. John Joseph Griffin, a chemical supply dealer in Glasgow, began selling beakers from Bohemia in the late 1830s, explaining that German chemists use them “for holding a cold solution” and “for heating it in.” These beakers were made of thin and hard white glass that can withstand “considerable and very sudden changes of heat without cracking.” And because there was a pouring spout at the top, liquids could be poured without loss. Some advertisements noted that beaker glasses had been recommended by the Swedish chemist, Jőns Jacob Berzelius. And some argued that “When English glass makers can be persuaded to make vessels of this kind, or rather when the British government pleases to permit the manufacture of chemical vessels in Britain, they may become cheaper. The freight of these vessels from Bohemia, and the enormously high English custom house duties constitute a chief part of the price above-named.”

Ref: John Joseph Griffin, Chemical Recreations (Glasgow, 1838).

Ad for “Griffin’s Cheap Chemical Apparatus” in John W. Webster, A Manual of Chemistry (Boston, 1839).