Marsh’s wires and the birth of the toaster

I want to report a theft. I’m not talking about the notorious ‘high vapour pressure’ of useful widgets in shared labs. This is much more serious. A beautiful tube furnace – lovingly built by our head of technical staff Dave Knapp, and that I used for years to purify things by sublimation – has vanished! Consisting of a pair of clear coaxial Pyrex tubes, its interior was meticulously wound with a spiral ribbon of one of the most useful alloys ever invented: nichrome, a wonder material that changed the world.