Working at NASA back in the day we destroyed a $10k gold plated mirror trying to drill a hole in it for a Herriot cell.
— Josh McBee (@JkMcBee) March 6, 2024
You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, and it also appears that you can't have a career in chemistry without an embarrassing experience of breaking some expensive laboratory glass. Keith Hornberger is the chemistry director at a biotech firm, and he knows the feeling. His son felt bad about breaking a beaker in his high school chemistry class, so Hornberger wanted to make him feel better about it by showing him that it happens to everyone. More than a hundred stories rolled in of expensive lab whoopsies.
Yikes!
— Miss Cellania (@misscellania) March 17, 2024
It's not just beakers, either. Respondents have dropped and broken Geiger counters, microscopes, and thermometers. Or an entire rack of expensive glassware they just cleaned. Plus even the cheapest dropped beaker could be holding something very expensive that spilled, or something dangerous that caused a lot of damage. You can read the entire thread at Twitter, or X, or just the best of them at Chemistry World. -via Real Clear Science