Growing up I read every monthly edition Scientific American’s The Amateur Scientist column by C. L. Strong. In the May 1964 column there was a great “getting st

Growing up I read every monthly edition Scientific American’s The Amateur Scientist column by C. L. Strong. In the May 1964 column there was a great “getting started” introduction to laboratory glassblowing for the complete amateur. I was only 12 years old, but it got me so interested that I tried it myself. You can see that it’s not too hard to make very simple glass accessories. Realistically, real laboratories require much more complex glassware. It doesn’t take too much equipment to get started. Sadly, the old Amateur Scientist columns are hard to come by unless you have access to a library with Sci American going back to 1952. (The old Mathematical Games columns by the late Martin Gardner are great too. I first read about public key encryption just a few months after Rivest, Shamir and Adleman wrote the MIT memo on it because it appeared in the August 1977 column by Gardner.)