Melting point then and now - Kofler Hotbench vs. OptiMelt

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.

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!