Linnemann’s baskets and distillation in the early days of understanding equilibrium

Much of chemistry is taught in metaphors: electron clouds, energy flows, close-packed spheres, reaction landscapes and flipping magnets. These pictures, while embedded into a deeper theoretical structure, provide mental shortcuts that help make predictions, formulate experiments and cement understanding. And yet, danger lurks in such ideas; they can also prevent us from seeing things that might otherwise be obvious. As the biologist and cybernetics guru Norbert Weiner wrote so pithily, ‘The price of metaphor is eternal vigilance’.

This phrase came to my mind when I was trying to make sense of the strange lineage of apparatus that I first saw in the stores of the Science Museum in London.