Between the Lines, Beyond the Bench

Student laboratory and course notebooks are records of scientific instruction. They are repositories for lecture notes, diagrams of apparatus, and experimental results. But they can also capture the individuality of the student and offer a window into their world—both inside and outside the lab and classroom.

I recently curated Between the Lines, Beyond the Bench as part of the Science History Institute’s A Closer Read exhibition series. The notebooks in this exhibit, kept by students of chemistry in the 1800s and 1900s, are full of surprises. Some document unique ways of organizing or remembering material. Others reveal evidence of laboratory mishaps, professional relationships, and academic performance. All are filled with words, some include illustrations, and a few hold physical objects. They also contain history, art, and even romance.

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The illustration in this notebook kept by chemistry student Louis Payard at the École Benoit in southern France demonstrates how acid turned a blue litmus tincture red, shown in the glass on the far left. The remaining four glasses show the solution reversing to blue as different bases—limewater, soda, potash, and ammonia—were added to each.

Payard’s use of color to denote the change from acid to base is informative in this context, but is also likely a form of artistic embellishment. Elsewhere in the notebook, he used colored pencil to signify the presence of liquids, gases, flames, and sparks in other experiments and demonstrations, although these effects were likely less vibrant in the lab. The instructor’s grade (“72”) is also visible in the top left-hand corner.

A carefully illustrated diagram graces the opening page of this notebook kept by an anonymous student taking a French chemistry and physics course in the early 1800s. The chemical instrument—drawn so neatly it almost appears printed—is a gas blowpipe designed in 1816 by John Frederick Newman (1783–1860), an instrument maker for the British Royal Society. Gas blowpipes were used to chemically analyze minerals by subjecting them to high temperatures. A legend identifies the blowpipe’s various parts: a bladder to hold oxygen and hydrogen gas (E), a piston to compress the gas (B), a reservoir for the condensed gas (A), and an iron capillary tube (C, D), where the gas exits and can be lit with a flame.

In the accompanying notes, the student explained the history of the invention, how to operate it, and its experimental effects. As they write, the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe was invented in 1801 by Philadelphia chemist Robert Hare, who famously used its steady and intense heat to melt platinum—a metal previously thought to be “infusible.” Newman’s updated version was more portable and less likely to explode. The inclusion of this history in a scientific notebook suggests that the student was expected to understand not just how the instrument worked, but where it came from as well.

The industrial chemistry notebook of Swiss student Achille Alioth contains many illustrations, but none as large or detailed as this one. His sketch depicts the extraction of boric acid from geothermal lagoons in Tuscany to produce borax. This process involved constructing masonry basins around active steam vents and channeling the water to concentrate the acid (top of illustration). The acid was further concentrated through evaporation and boiling (bottom of illustration) until crystallization occurred.

Alioth’s drawing is part of a larger section in his notebook on boric acid and borax. This undoubtedly reflects the interests of the course’s professor, Anselme Payen (1795–1871), who played an important role in the creation of the industry in the early 1800s. In 1815, Payen took charge of his father’s borax refining factory and devised a way to synthesize borax from boric acid, undercutting a Dutch monopoly on imported crude borax from Asia. At the time, the principal source of boric acid in Europe was the Tuscan lagoons, which, after Payen’s discovery, were exploited on an industrial scale.

Alioth’s sketches closely resemble the illustrations Payen featured in his 1841 article on boric acid extraction in Tuscany published in the French journal Annales de chimie et de physique.

“Besides the fact of its being so untidy you can get no credit whatever for this diagram since it is not drawn to actual size.”

This comment, written in red ink by the instructor of a high school chemistry course, may sound harsh to us today. But the interaction is a reminder that students’ laboratory notebooks were—and often still are—evaluated by their teachers and professors.

The drawing on the left page, illustrated by student Kathleen Hickey, depicts a U-shaped tube filled with separated brine and oil. The addition of the denser oil to one arm of the tube causes the brine to rise higher in the opposite arm. The diagram’s incorrect size, smudged ink lines, and hastily written labels all contributed to the instructor’s critical feedback.

The opposite page contains Hickey’s written description of the ratio that will balance the liquids in the tube. Here, the instructor is just as unsparing: “You lose marks for diagram and also for explanation omitted.” A later entry on the preparation of hydrochloric acid contains an even sharper and more personal observation of Hickey’s academic performance: “You have gone back in your work—begin again to write well and neatly.”

The school Hickey attended is not known. The blank notebook itself was printed by Relfe Brothers, a London bookseller and school stationer.

This bound, handwritten diplomarbeit (“diploma thesis”) by Moses Stielmann, a chemistry student at Polytechnikums zu Riga [Riga Technical University] in the Russian Empire (now Latvia), is not a notebook, but it represents the culmination of a graduate-level laboratory research project. After describing his experiments on the effects of ethyl a-bromoisobutyrate on hydroquinone, Stielmann ends with a note to his advisors Carl Adam Bischoff (1855–1908) and Paul Walden (1863–1957), thanking them for their support and advice. The gesture, written in Stielmann’s graceful German cursive, provides a glimpse into the personal relationships that shaped his scientific career. Stielmann graduated with a doctorate in chemistry in 1896.

Bischoff and Walden were themselves distinguished collaborators. Together they wrote Handbuch der Stereochemie [Handbook of Stereochemistry], a guide for organic chemists, published in 1894. Two years later, Walden famously discovered a phenomenon that would become known as the Walden inversion, in which the spatial arrangement of a molecule reverses during a chemical reaction.

The content of E. W. Safford’s course notebook covers fairly standard academic ground: lectures on electricity, magnetism, and basic chemistry. But the final pages reveal the author’s poetic side. The last includes a handwritten excerpt from the “The Creation of the World,” the opening passage of the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses. And tucked in at the end of the notebook is a song of Safford’s own composition, “I Love My Love,” along with a photograph of an unidentified man and woman. The second verse of the love song reads:

How these materials ended up together is unknown, and the dates on the documents only deepen the mystery. Safford’s notebook dates from 1865 to 1866, but his love song was written in 1875. And the photograph, which features a handwritten Christmas greeting on the back, is dated 1920. Why did Safford hold on to this notebook over the years? Were the love song and photograph added later by someone else? Are they somehow connected?

The notebooks in this exhibition challenge our idea of what a student notebook can be—not just an account of what was taught, but a trace of who was doing the learning. To read between the lines is to glimpse the student beyond the laboratory bench. To see these notebooks and more from the Science History Institute’s collections, visit our museum. Between the Lines, Beyond the Bench is on display through February 2027.

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Featured image: Cover of Kathleen Hickey’s high school chemistry notebook, 1912.