Strange and familiar smells

Just seeing the word ‘litmus’ takes me right back to my earliest memories. An odd thing you might think, except my dad was a scientist and I’d visit him in his lab at the Low Temperature Research Station in Cambridge, from being a very small child. This was a long time after the ‘Low Temp’ had been established:

By 1922…  the Low Temperature Research Station (LTRS) opened with William Hardy (Director of Food Investigation at the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research) as its Superintendent. This came about because of a recommendation by the Food Investigation Board to set up a ‘cold storage laboratory’ and, given a research environment that owed much to Hopkins, Cambridge was the obvious place for it.
https://www.bioc.cam.ac.uk/about-us/history/establishing-the-department/low-temperature-research-station

Who was ‘Hopkins’ to whom much was owed?

Frederick Gowland Hopkins was born on the 20th June 1861 in Eastbourne. His father died when he was very young, and in 1871 he moved with his mother to Enfield and attended the City of London School. Having published his first paper at the age of seventeen, Hopkins studied chemistry at the Royal School of Mines and at University College, London. After his B.Sc. he read medicine at Guy’s Hospital, graduating in 1894. Hopkins worked for a period as a Home Office analyst and taught physiology and toxicology at Guy’s for four years. It was at a Physiological Society meeting that Foster suggested Hopkins came to Cambridge.
https://www.bioc.cam.ac.uk/about-us/history/establishing-the-department/the-coming-of-hopkins

I can’t tell you what the smell in Dad’s lab was, the various chemicals he used I guess, but I was fascinated by the glass equipment, custom-made for his experiments (some made by him) and he would give me a little book of litmus strips which I could dip in various liquids at home to test for acidity. However interested I was, and however desperate to follow in dad’s footsteps, and those of his brother Sid (Professor Sidney Reuben Elsden – you can google him to find out more!) I was not mathematically or scientifically inclined, and after doing an arts degree, and working briefly in the Civil Service, a pickle onion factory, and Manchester Airport, I became a teacher.

As a teacher in secondary schools, every time I had to venture to the science department, I was taken right back. The wooden benches, the Bunsen burners, the racks of test-tubes, the strange and familiar smells, and the little books of litmus paper. I am now fascinated to discover that litmus is derived from lichens, and the word comes from the Old Norse for ‘moss used for dying‘. My dad always thought we had Norse ancestry – he would have been delighted at the connection!