Ebullioscope
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An ebullioscope is an instrument for measuring the boiling point of a liquid. This can be used for determining the alcoholic strength of a mixture, or for determining the molecular weight of a non-volatile solute based on the boiling-point elevation.
The first ebullioscope was invented in 1838 by Brossard-Vidal, and was used for measuring alcoholic content. The advantage of this method was that the boiling point is relatively insensitive to other components such as sugars. Older alcoholimeters were based on measuring the density, which is more sensitive to the presence of other solutes.[1][2]
A later version was built by the French chemist François-Marie Raoult,[citation needed] but the difficulty to determine the exact temperature was overcome by the invention of the Beckmann thermometer by Ernst Otto Beckmann in 1887. This improvement made the ebullioscope a standard apparatus to determine the molecular weight of substances by its characteristic boiling-point elevation.
[edit] References
- ^ P. Doré. Leçons de chimie élémentaire appliquées aux arts industriels, 1857, 323-325.
- ^ William Crookes, The Chemical News and Journal of Physical Science, 1874, 30.
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