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I think that most chemists will agree that doing
melting point determinations sucks big time. Especially when you have been putting it off for 6 months and have to do 22 in one day (yes I learnt my lesson and it took two days). Until recently I only knew of a few ways to determine melting points. My preferred method was to get a rough melting point using a
Kofler Hotbench followed by an accurate determination using a full-on old school Reichert melting point microscope. The microscope beats getting your compound into a melting point tube and watching it melt through a crappy magnifying glass. Firstly, you place your crystals between two wafer thin glass plates (very simple). Secondly, you get to see your beautiful crystals through the microscope. On one occasion I managed to have a small rainbow in my crystals which sure beats staring at a melting point tube. Nevertheless, melting point determinations suck so I have toyed with the idea of having a camera record the melting in my absence and then come back a couple of hours later and fast forwarding the movie to the melting point and recoding the numbers. Now that would be easy.
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As always someone else got the idea first and where I work now melting point determinations are fully automated using an
OptiMelt system. It records a little movie and prints out the numbers while you are at home watching
Buffy. Amazing stuff!
So what happened to the redundant Kofler Hotbench? I found it on display in the Departments historical collection of hopelessly ancient relics. Strange to think that where I worked only two months ago this was state of the art equipment. D!