Basic Chemistry Lab Equipment

well hi welcome to the lab I thought we'd take a little bit of time today to take a look at some of the lab equipment that we use some glassware and some instruments so that when you take your first lab you'll be able to understand what the equipment is called and so I'm going to show you a few of these things and tell you how they're used so that you become familiar with them I will tell you some of the glassware is a little confusing at first until you're used to the terminology so hopefully we'll get you used to the terminology pretty quick we're going to start with some basic glassware now there are three general types of glassware that you're going to be coming in contact with beakers flasks and cylinders it's pretty simple actually the way you tell the difference between them will also help you understand how they're used so we'll start with beakers a beaker is anything with straight parallel sides it looks kind of like a drinking couple though you never want to drink anything out of here but in a straight parallel sight sometimes a beaker has numbers on the side of it but we don't really use this scale we don't use these numbers to do really anything important it's just to give you an idea of about how much is in here they're not very accurate you don't really measure with beakers beakers aren't used to make measurements beakers are used just to hold stuff so you might put a liquid in here if you wanted to boil some water for example quite a bit of water you would put it in here beakers come in various sizes this is probably one of the most common sizes this is a 250 milliliter beaker and again you'll see it's got numbers on the side but we don't use those numbers for anything and then they go very large and they even get down to very very small this is a tiny little 10 milliliter beaker and it isn't it cute it's cute so a beaker has straight parallel sides it may or may not have numbering on it it's just used to hold stuff a flask on the other hand the sides are not parallel this side almost looks like a cone and as a matter of fact one of the names of it is a conical flask but it's more common name is named after the scientists that created it it's called an Erlenmeyer flask an Erlenmeyer flask has sides that are not parallel they sloped in another way in other words the mouth of the flask is much narrower than the base of the flask in the case of a beaker the mouth and base are essentially the same diameter more or less but flask is much an hour at the top and this prevents splashing so we often do chemical reactions in flasks because if there's any kind of splashing it'll usually be contained by the sides this is probably the most common size this is a 250 milliliter Erlenmeyer flask you'll be using these every now and then and again may get very large or they get very small this is a 25 milliliter or allymeier flask but you see it's the same shape same general side some of these may have numbers on them but we don't we don't really measure anything other than approximate amounts in our own Meyer flask if you want to measure volume you need to use something called a graduated cylinder many of you have seen a graduated cylinder before it's called a graduated cylinder because it has not only numbers but many numbers and lines if you can see those right along there numbers and lines on the side this is what we use to measure volume volume of liquids specifically it's fairly accurate in other words we can get a pretty good idea of how much volume we have in here if we read it correctly there are different sizes this is a 50 milliliter graduated cylinder we have 25 milliliters so a little bit smaller and we have 10 milliliters they're very skinny they don't hold quite as much and the lines are a lot smaller on a 10 milliliter flask you can see how small those lines are on a 10 milliliter graduated cylinder they're very small and that means that we're actually able to get a very accurate volume small volume but very accurate with something like this so we have beakers flasks and graduated soldiers graduated cylinders are really the only ones that we're going to use to measure volume beakers and flasks hold stuff but don't generally we don't generally measure with them even if they have lines on some other glassware that you're going to become familiar with you've probably seen something like this in most movies about labs or you may have actually used these before this or of course the ubiquitous test tube and the rack the test tube rack that we keep them in we need to keep them interact because if you look very carefully their bottoms are rounded which means they won't stand up if I put it down on the bench it'll fall right over so we often don't want them to fall over because whatever's in might spill so we put them in a rack to keep them upright the test tubes are where we do small reactions we do chemical reactions and test tubes all the time tests test is just another word for reaction often in chemistry and if we want to hold a test tube we're going to use a very specific piece of equipment called test tube holder this is a test tube holder you squeeze it together like this the jaws open you can put your test tube inside like that and now we can hold the test tube securely but without having to actually touch the glass in case there's something very hot in here or if we want to put it into a flame and heat it test tube holder test tube holder test tube rack test tube something that people get confused with the test tube holder and the test tube rack these things these are called crucible tongs and they have a very unusual end to them see they're kind of bent like that and they have this weird sort of bent piece in the middle crucible tongs are not going to be used to pick up test tubes they are used to pick up things that are very hot you can hold something directly in a Bunsen burner flame with tests with a crucible tongs or you can use it to pick up something a hot piece of glassware for example if this beaker were a little too hot to touch its small enough I can grip it by the sides but it Crucible tong was originally invented to hold well its namesake a crucible and a crucible is a small porcelain cup a little hat and inside this cup we can do some heating we can heat things very strongly because porcelain conducts heat pretty well and originally this little weird bent piece in the middle of the of the crucible tongues was designed to allow the crucible to sit right in there unfortunately if you don't have a steady grip or you relax your hand just a little bit it'll slip right through and you'll break your crucible so when we use crucibles we don't carry the hat around with it the lid we just grip it by the sides and that thing's not going anywhere it's very very secure that way so we can carry it around the lab put it up we don't want to be touching with our hands because it's usually going to be very hot so we can carry it around with the crucible tongs pretty easy so these simple tongs these with the rubber tips are called beaker tongs and these are used to pick up hot beakers usually that's a lot easier than this especially if a beaker is a little bit larger and full of boiling water it's going to be very heavy and it's going to be hard to lift with crucible tongs so we use the beaker tongs they're padded they've got a little nonstick or non-slip rubber sleeve on each of the the arms and we can carry around our beaker like that so we can heat liquids in beakers we can heat solids and crucibles we can do chemical reactions in test tubes or in Erlenmeyer flasks what if we want to heat something we keep talking about heating things how do we heat things well we're going to use something called a Bunsen burner here's a Bunsen burner a very famous structure here in in chemistry we use these Bunsen burners to heat things all the time in a later video I'll show you how to light it properly there's a right way to light this thing in a way that's not quite as efficient and more difficult so I'll show you the easy and correct way of lighting Bunsen burner later on but we heat things the Bunsen burner this end of the hose gets hooked up to the gas and we light the tip right here we turn on the gas and light it and we get a nice flame that can get fairly hot 700 degrees or so well we can hold something directly over the flame using one of our tongues but sometimes we just want to let it sit especially if we're going to do a wet water boil and so if we want to do that we're going to set up a little structure called a ring stand with a ring and some other items we might put on so here is a ring stand and it has this little platform base we can often put our Bunsen burner directly on there and then we can set something clamp something to the stand itself in this case I have an iron ring it clamps right on here I can put the Bunsen burner right underneath it and then if I want a platform or something I can use for example this this is called a wire gauze it's made out of wire it has this ass bestest circle in the center that allows us to heat evenly and I can put the wire gauze on top of the iron ring and I get a very nice little cooktop and then I can put my beaker on top of that and I can heat it nicely so that's one way that I can heat things if I want to hit it Crucible up on my little oven top I can do this but there's probably a little bit easier way and better way to heat a crucible we can use something called a clay triangle this is a clay triangle and that actually holds the crucible rather nicely right in place if we wanted to heat the crucible when it's time to light the Bunsen burner I use a sparker this is a sparker it creates a little spark and I can light the Bunsen burner again you'll see this later on when we go ahead and show you how to light the Bunsen burner just a couple more to do a couple of other pieces of equipment that you're going to be using that you want to become familiar with this anytime you need to take some powders or crystals out of a beaker for example or out of a bottle you're going to use this thing this is called a scoop EULA it's like half scoop half spatula and so you can reach in and you can grab some and it sort of sits right in there lights like a little spoon it sits in there and you can transfer it from one place to another so the scoop EULA is used to get solid powders or crystals of bottles or beakers and put them someplace where you want to use them this looks like a giant contact lens it is in fact called a watch glass and we can use this we can put something on there to observe it we don't ever heat a watch glass be very careful sometimes you might want to heat this don't heat this this Pyrex that it's made out of is pretty fragile and it'll crack if you try to heat it if you do want to heat something in an open container that's not like a crucible you can use the crucibles bigbrother this is an evaporating dish and you can put something in here and you can heat it very strongly it's also made out of very strong porcelain it will heat very well you can put it in here and it will well it will evaporate whatever liquid might be in there so evaporating dishes are better to evaporate liquids over heat most of you probably know what this is this is called a filter funnel this is used when we need to filter a solid out of a liquid we put a piece of filter paper in here we pour our mixture through the solid gets stuck in the filter paper and the liquid goes right on through same general idea as a basic coffeemaker that's kind of how coffee makers work a coffee filter is the filter paper the structure that you put that filter in is like the funnel and the mixture is the coffee grounds and the water going through it and what comes through is what is dissolved what's mostly liquid so we use of coffee filter a filter funnel just a couple more this is a glass stirring rod it is used you guessed it to stir it's glass it's Pyrex actually so it doesn't react you generally don't want to stir with metal especially if you have acids or things that react with metal use Pyrex because it's not going to react this looks like an eyedropper it is actually called a pipette and a pipette is used well that's what an eyedropper is it's a pipette so if you want to suck up a little liquid on one place and put it someplace else you use a pipette these things are disposable we throw them out all the time if you use them generally they get a little dirty you can't clean them real well because the opening of the tip there is very very small so we just throw them out and finally a thermometer you're going to need to take some temperatures occasionally this is a thermometer now this one is a mercury thermometer we probably will not be using mercury thermometers even though it is coated with something so that it won't break we generally don't like to use mercury so the ones that you use will probably be alcohol means they'll have a blue or red liquid in they're still used to take temperature so that's a lot of equipment if you've just watched this video through without pausing you're going to miss a lot you should probably go back and use the handout that has all the pictures and write in their names and write down maybe their structures or their functions so that you know what they do you're going to start to need to know what these things are because when we do labs in the lab description it'll say take a 50 milliliter graduated cylinder well you need to know what to look for if you're doing a 50 milliliter graduated cylinder so learn your lab equipment learn their names when their basic functions and don't forget to do the whisk at the end of the video and we'll see you later

Channel: Eric Pantano

Views: 978,975

Keywords: chemistry, science, lab, lab equipment, glassware

Id: _A3JxpMU63s

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 15 2014