The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 271 No 7273 p626
1 November 2003

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Bottle man [more]
Creepy-crawlies [more]
Polygraphs in the shade [more]
Voice of science [more]

Bottle man

This autumn marks the 200th anniversary of the death of a remarkable chemist. I was intrigued to come across an account of him in the October issue of Chemistry in Britain, by Colin Russell.

Peter Woulfe was born in 1727 in County Limerick, Ireland, and there seems to be considerable doubt over his early life. He was certainly deeply interested in the chemistry of minerals and unusual compounds, and had a penchant for the methods of the ancient alchemists, and a belief in the notions of the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life. In 1766 he discovered a deposit of native tin in Cornwall. The following year he was elected to the Royal Society on the strength of his chemical researches.

In the same year he published a paper on distillation in which he described a new apparatus for passing gases through liquids. This came to be known as the Woulfe bottle and was widely adopted by chemical experimenters for synthetic and analytical operations. It was a heavy vessel with two or three apertures allowing tubes or dropping funnels to be inserted for the washing of gases or their introduction as reactants. The fact that the Woulfe bottle could not be heated led to its becoming redundant in the laboratory and its replacement by more adaptable vessels using the same principle.

Woulfe’s invention made it possible for him to prepare concentrated solutions of soluble gases and to purify insoluble ones. With it he prepared ethyl chloride by reacting hydrogen chloride gas with alcohol. By reacting nitric acid with indigo and other natural pigments he made picric acid for the first time.

Woulfe’s rooms in Barnard’s Inn were untidily packed with chemical apparatus of all kinds, which he showed to friends at unearthly hours. He was in the habit of breakfasting at four in the morning, and devised a system of secret signals by which visitors might gain admission to his rooms.

All his habits were eccentric. He generally spent his winters in London but his summers in Paris, and after 1784 most of his scientific papers were published in the Journal de Physique.

Alchemy remained a fascination for Woulfe. In 1771 he investigated the compound “mosaic gold”, which was really stannic sulphide, but which he believed to be gold transmuted from base metals. And it is said that he was deeply religious and sometimes attached a written prayer to a piece of equipment in order to avert the risk of fire or explosion.

He had a theory that the way to cure any illness was to take a journey by stagecoach from London to Edinburgh and back. It was after one of these ventures that he developed a fatal sickness and died alone and obscurely in London in 1803 aged 76.

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Creepy-crawlies

Spiders are often close associates of humans, since many live in our homes, often without due recognition. Others lurk in spun tubes and on delicate sheets of web in the open, and yet others scurry through the grasses in pursuit of food. There is even a water-spider that spends time within an air bubble inside a woven diving-bell in ponds.

What alerts us to the presence of a spider is not the creature itself so much as the web it spins, which may drape itself among our household possessions or drift into our faces.

The fear that many people have of spiders at close quarters has never been satisfactorily explained. It is true that they have poison in their fangs. Indeed the Anglo-Saxon name for the spider was attercop, which means “poison head”. But the poison is for use in the hunting of prey, and spiders will only attempt to bite people if hard pressed.

Even the famous tarantula of Italy, reputed to convey the dancing disease, produces less irritation than a bee or wasp, and only the female has a nasty bite. It is strange that individuals bitten by the tarantula and given no antidotal therapy find relief from pain by vigorous exercise, which may explain the virtue of the famous tarantella dance.

There is a belief that spiders enjoy music, but this derives from the fact that the vibrations imparted to a web by a tuning-fork or a violin note suggest to the spider that a bluebottle or other prey has been captured.

Spiders have a substantial folk-lore. To kill one has been said to bring misfortune. To have a tiny money-spider on your garments spells good fortune, and the creature should be removed by being thrown by its thread over your left shoulder.

One ancient cure for fever was to hang a spider from one's neck in a bag. Spiders were eaten with jam for curing the ague. Alternatively, the web made into pills with bread had the same effect when eaten. And cobwebs were once a popular means of checking bleeding from a wound.

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Polygraphs in the shade

There has always been serious doubt about the justification for submitting individuals to some sort of polygraphic test when they are concerned with work that calls for honesty and integrity. The critics of the polygraph have been most active in the United States, where the Department of Energy has recently bowed to criticism and is curtailing its use of polygraph testing among individuals working in situations calling for scrupulous security precautions.

According to a note in Science for 12 September, the agency is to shrink its potential pool of employees required to take lie detector tests from about 20,000 to 4,600. This has not eliminated the critics, however, who still insist that the polygraph has scant scientific credibility.

The data determined by the polygraph machines available include blood pressure, pulse, respiration and skin conductivity. These are estimated while the person examined answers various questions, and the advocates of the procedure believe that they can detect whether that person is lying or not. Courts of law, however, usually bar the data from trials because of their unreliability. And it is believed that reliance on such data could offer a false sense of security. Random tests on some 6,000 employees are to be conducted, and it is claimed that failure in a single test would not constitute grounds for dismissal, although it would promote further investigation. There is a belief that the mere fact that such tests are performed might act as a deterrent.

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Voice of science

Scientists have influenced our life profoundly, and they do so increasingly today. However much they may try to be objective about particular facts their own personalities inevitably influence the general shape of their message. — Mary Midgely: ‘Science and poetry’ (2001).

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