h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The absolute worst thing about organic chemistry, is that despite the mind boggling number of possible reactions available, you always end up with either a colourless liquid or a white powder. In my opinion, the only fun to be gained from the study of organic chemistry is the "How much solvent can you inhale before you get a headache" game.

At least inorganic chemistry sometimes makes lots of pretty colours!!!!

I always ended up with some blackened and burnt crud stuck on the bottom of my distillation flasks. That stuff wouldn't come out if you sandblasted it...

Organic chemistry is the black crud. that's the point of it, supposedly.as for getting off the flaks try something with the words "ACID" on it., ususally works ,

Inorganic Chemistry does have lots of pretty colours, it also involves a nice lot of carcinogens, elements with cumalative toxic effects and so on. Cleaning up coloured stains off the bench however is easy, just squirt on a nice lot of acetone, it removes quite a lot of stains, plus you get the nice solvent vapours coming off.

Thats all well and good, unless the person who used the desk the year before you was some kind of filthy hermit who enjoyed living in a chemical sewage plant. My desk has got stains on that I doubt even a blowtorch could remove (provided you ignore the fact that this course of action would probably destroy the labs). There are some things that even the chemical wonder which is acetone has no effect on!

Actually a really good way to get the black crud off is as follows...

Rinse the flask with ethanol (yes the lab variety not the drinking variety) and pour about 25 ml of conc. nitric acid into the flask - beware the nitric acid needs to be slightly yellow in colour. Place the flask under a fume hood and close the door. The ethanol on the walls of the vessel will be oxidised by the NO2 in the vapour above the nitric acid and this reaction is a radical chain reaction. So the flask appears to do nothing for anything up to about a minute (the yellower the acid the quicker it goes) - then suddenly the flask fills with NO2 - at which point you can rinse the flask out with regular tap water and the black crud is much easier to shift.