This catalog is by Corning. Randomly, they have an absolutely incredible museum called The Corning Museum of Glass https://home.cmog.org/ located about 5 hours drive from New York City.
My roommate in college worked at GE's Global Research lab in Schenectady. As a bit of a relic from the heyday of US corporate research they still had an in-house glassblowing department for producing all the necessary glassware for all the labs and chemical/material research!
As a consumer, it is important to note that `pyrex` and `PYREX` are not the same thing [0]:
"Corning used borosilicate to produce all Pyrex products. However, the company that purchased the cookware products switched to soda-lime glass, adopting the name pyrex (spelled with all lowercase letters).
Corning continued to make its lab tools with borosilicate, dubbing these products to be PYREX (spelled with all uppercase letters)."
All of the glass examples in TFA are borosilicate all-caps PYREX, while most of what you can buy today in the store is lowercase pyrex (Europe is an exception where the all-caps variety can be found).
I believe it's interesting that these kinds of intricate, hand made objects float to the front page of the HN while at the same time many people glorify how AI can handle these jobs and can do an "arguably better job" in less time.
It's evident that these hand-drawn diagrams or any artifact with high levels of human effort (for lack of a better term) contains something we lost in today's world.
Nice, page 13 has the 'standard' chemical labels which happened to also be the contents of a 'standard' chemistry set (minus a couple for me, like no concentrated sulphuric acid and only dilute nitric acid.)
One of the things that has always impressed me was mid 20th century laboratory equipment, lots of clever ways to achieve the required accuracy.
This reminds me of the American Science & Surplus catalogs we used to get in the mail. Hand-drawn pictures of each product along with cheeky copy for almost all the little motors and breakers and push buttons and on and on. Sad that they stopped their mail order business.
My new theory, developing for a while, is that as technology makes things easier, the perceived average quality goes down over time. I've yet to fully understand the factors that drive this trend, but feel certain AI will put it in overdrive! I'm not a luddite or hater actually - but this trend is pretty apparent...
This is random, but if you're ever in the Corning area, do check out the Corning Museum of Glass. They did a really great job of blending an experience of history, art, creation, and science in there. The history of glass areas in particular made me really emotional seeing art expressed in this way. The fact that something so old was made it this far through time.
After college I got a Pyrex 5L erlenmeyer flask as a wine decanter and it's served me well two and a half decades later. Always a fun topic when people see it for the first time.
I've always wondered: is there a term for the process that brought those hand drawings into a printable form like that which then enabled it to be mass produced? I understand how it can be done with computers and scanners, but I've struggled finding what tech/process was used back in the day.
Pyrex catalog from from 1938 with hand-drawn lab glassware [pdf]
(exhibitdb.cmog.org)358 points by speckx 27 October 2025 | 72 comments
Comments
Does anyone know which fonts (or, probably more importantly, which modern-day equivalents) are used to get this feeling?
https://archive.org/details/stanley-catalogue-34-1929/page/6...
"Corning used borosilicate to produce all Pyrex products. However, the company that purchased the cookware products switched to soda-lime glass, adopting the name pyrex (spelled with all lowercase letters).
Corning continued to make its lab tools with borosilicate, dubbing these products to be PYREX (spelled with all uppercase letters)."
All of the glass examples in TFA are borosilicate all-caps PYREX, while most of what you can buy today in the store is lowercase pyrex (Europe is an exception where the all-caps variety can be found).
0: https://www.corning.com/worldwide/en/products/life-sciences/...
I believe it's interesting that these kinds of intricate, hand made objects float to the front page of the HN while at the same time many people glorify how AI can handle these jobs and can do an "arguably better job" in less time.
It's evident that these hand-drawn diagrams or any artifact with high levels of human effort (for lack of a better term) contains something we lost in today's world.
Maybe we should reflect upon that, a bit.
One of the things that has always impressed me was mid 20th century laboratory equipment, lots of clever ways to achieve the required accuracy.
You don’t know what you have untill you lose it.
Today these are like $300 at least, and I'm guessing they cannot be made in the USA. (I would be glad to be wrong)
edit: ok with inflation from 1938 it's not so incomparable. But still.