The story of Quickfit, part one: Friedrich's joints

There aren’t many films based on chemistry. My favourite is the Ealing comedy ‘The Man in the White Suit’, a dystopian story of an obsessive chemist who invents an indestructible fibre. Written before microplastics and industrial off-shoring, it eerily documents a bygone age. The stark black and white photography captures misty urban-industrial landscapes, deep chiaroscuro shows factory interiors, and detailed closeups capture polymer processing and weaving.

In a key moment that chemists should watch in slow motion, a clutch of managers enters the technical laboratory of the factory. A slow panning shot reveals a world of volumetric glassware, and a chemist pipetting by mouth while others tinker with flasks and clipboards. A brooding apparatus featuring a glass spiral, glass tubes and flasks sits in a corner, accompanied by a peculiar bubbling musical leitmotif, at once mocking and sinister, and the obligatory dry ice ‘smoke’.

Yet chemists will note that despite the familiarity of the glassware, something is slightly off. Even in the 1950s there is no sign of the standard ground glass joints – known in the UK as Quickfit – that are ubiquitous in our labs. Today we take these joints completely for granted, but their arrival took decades.