MEDICAL, LABORATORY FITTINGS AND FIXTURES
LAB ACCIDENTS: FAILS AND WINS Those of you watching Strange
world’s most ubiquitous pieces of lab
famed rocket science pioneer
true characters. His eccentric
Angel, the CBS series about (and all-round weirdo) Jack
Parsons, might be disappointed to learn that (spoiler alert) Parsons blew himself up in a home laboratory accident. While working on a rush order of explosive material for a film set, Parsons miscalculated so severely that paramedics discovered him minus a forearm and most of his face. Thankfully, not all lab accidents lead to calamity. Thanks in large part to today’s stringent modern safety and hazard control measures, lab accidents have become few and far between. Some have even been instrumental in the history of science and human progress. BUNSEN DISCOVERS
BURNER, CHEATS DEATH Robert Bunsen, the
inventor of one of the
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Healthcare Design 2020
equipment, was one of chemistry’s personality resulted in enough humourous anecdotes to fill a book, entitled Bunseniana, produced by his students after his death. But Bunsen was equally famous for escaping death in a series of lab disasters. His discovery that cyanogen gas can be formed in blast furnaces, for example, came about largely because he opened a test tube embedded in a furnace and nearly choked to death on its contents. He was prone to eye-related accidents – while working with organoarsenic compounds a tube of cacodyl and dimethylarsine cyanide blew up in his face, permanently blinding him in one eye. The other eye almost suffered the same fate when Herr Professor brought a lit candle too close to occluded hydrogen gas. Thankfully his remaining eye recovered and Bunsen could continue his completely safe practice of climbing into Icelandic water geysers and measuring their temperatures.
