Black’s balance

As the pandemic swept away my department’s plans, we pondered how to deliver practicals without labs, and decided to issue our students with a chemistry set. Rather than sending them chemicals, we sent them a box filled with small instruments. We took inspiration from one of the first chemists to make detailed and systematic measurements in the lab, Joseph Black.

Born in Bordeaux, France, the son of a wine merchant, Black was sent to boarding school in Belfast, Ireland at age 12. He then studied in Glasgow, Scotland. By his final year he had become the firm favourite of the Robert Dick Snr., then professor of natural philosophy (i.e. physics). William Cullen, a distinguished medic, took him under his wing. An enthusiastic lecturer, Cullen is sometimes remembered for freezing water by evaporating ether using a vacuum pump. Black became his assistant, doing experiments but also supporting lecture demonstrations that were part of Cullen’s schtick. Relations with his mentor became so close that Black would later write that Cullen ‘treated him with the same confidence and friendship … as if I had been one of his children’.