Unusual Piece of the Week

When we picked this up at an estate sale in Connecticut, we thought it was a bell jar. It wasn’t until we got it home that we realized it was a piece of laboratory equipment. But what the heck was it?

We started bringing it to the Elephant’s Trunk at the beginning of summer. After a couple of trips, a retired pharmacist identified it, although he said he hadn’t seen one in years, going back to his days as a student studying for his degree in pharmacology. It’s a reservoir for liquids used in compounding cough syrups, elixirs, and liquid medicines.

Before everything came from a drug manufacturer pre-made and ready to dispense to the general public, pharmacists had to mix up their own. They had recipes for the drugs they dispensed, and mixed them up as needed. This reservoir would be on a stand, with a petcock inserted into the neck to control the flow into a bottle to be mixed. You rarely see them outside of laboratories these days, and certainly not as elegantly engraved as this one.

We hope the new owner likes it as much as we do.