The preacher-alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel made an oil by the destructive distillation of bones about 1700. He proclaimed it to be a universal remedy. Much later Ferdinand Runge detected the presence of pyrrole, but not in bone oil. He observed the red color of the pine splint wet with hydrochloric acid in the vapor of coal tar distillate, and called the responsible substance pyrrole. He suggested that it might also occur in bone oil. In the mid-1880's, Thomas Anderson finally isolated pyrrole by repeated distillation of about 250 gallons of ivory oil. About the middle of this century Du Pont began to make it synthetically.
Our Secondary School editors work hard to distill all the JCE materials to produce a fraction of particular interest to high school teachers. We call it CLIC.
In recent years we have worked hard to better match our advertisers with our readers. When shopping for chemistry education materials, visit our advertisers' WWW sites first.
Take JCE along on your outreach missions. Copies of the Journal, guest access to JCE Online, our publications catalog, and more are available for your participants.