- Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen, I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW-Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight it's my pleasure to introduce to you both Catherine Jackson and Tracy Drier. Tracy is a glassblower with the Chemistry Glass Lab here on campus. He was born in Port Huron, Michigan, and went to school, high school, at Holland, Michigan. He got his undergraduate in pulp and paper engineering at Western Michigan University, and then he went to Salem Community College in New Jersey to go through their glassblowing program. And he came here to UW-Madison in the year 2000, which is where he is now as the master glassblower for the chemistry department. Catherine Jackson was born in Liverpool, which means I get to say the word Liverpudlian. She went to the equivalent of high school at Liverpool and then did her undergraduate work at Cambridge University, got her PhD at Cambridge University in organic chemistry, and then, after several years, went to the University of London to get a PhD in the history of science. And then she came to UW-Madison in 2015, where she's an assistant professor in the Department of History. Tonight they get to talk with us about how glass-blown apparatus accelerated chemistry. Please join me in welcoming both Tracy Drier and Catherine Jackson to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. [applause] - I should be good to go. Thanks so much, Tom, and thanks to all of you for coming out this evening. I know there is a massive amount going on, on campus right now, so it's really great to see so many of you here. In the next 50 minutes or so, Tracy and I are going to show you why glass is the medium of modern chemistry. It's a story that begins in the early 19th century when chemists turned to glassblowing to bend nature to their will, to build the science of chemistry, and to produce the view of molecules we now believe. Glass and glassblowing are fundamental to everything chemists do and, until the mid-20th century, all that they knew. That's a pretty radical claim, especially from the present where we all sit. Chemists today see molecules in three dimensions through the agency of machines. Here's an NMR spectrometer, a powerful tool  of modern structure determination. And here's the structure of the sugar glucose. Atoms of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen bonded together in chains and rings. That's how modern chemists know nature, through a black box process that produces three-dimensional molecules from complex machinery. Here's the modern chemist at work. The board is covered with formula, reaction mechanisms, spectra, equations. This man's wearing a lab coat but it's virgin white, and what's in his hand isn't apparatus, it's a plastic rendition of atoms and electrons. On this showing, the chemist can make and manipulate molecules as easily as he can take apart and rebuild that model. This view from now is a big problem in the history of chemistry. It's as hard for historians as it may be for some of us to see beyond the idea that atoms and structure have always been what makes chemistry work. The foundation of or perhaps the hidden hand guiding chemists' ability to interpret and shape the natural world. I want to tell you differently. I'll use just one example. Does anyone here know, and not you, [inaudible], does anyone here know when chemists first learned glucose was a three-dimensional molecule? That its structure was what I showed on the previous slide? Ten years ago? Twenty? Fifty? A hundred? Well, the answer is about 125 years ago, around 1890, well before any of those machines I've talked about were built. In fact, glucose was the very first organic substance to have a three-dimensional molecular structure. And before I go on, just to say by organic chemistry I mean the chemis