[Histonet] acid-cleaned slides --a walk down memory lane.

[Monfils, Paul]

2x2 mounts for slide conferences?  You bet!  I actually made a few for
someone a couple of years ago!  And I still have a case of 2x2 glass in my
lab.  Those were the days when a new shipment of embedding paraffin went
first into a big filter-lined funnel on a big flask in the oven, to melt it
and filter all the dirt and crud out of the wax before we used it. But first
the 2-pound blocks of solid paraffin had to be broken up with a hammer in
order to fit in the funnel. After filtering, the clean wax was transferred
into the metal pitchers we used to pour it into the embedding molds. Those
were kept in the oven too. You used one pitcher of wax until it started to
get too cool, then returned it to the oven and took another pitcher.  Then
on friday afternoon we would all sit on chairs in a circle, fold little
paper squares over wooden blocks to make little paper boxes, and toss them
into a carton on the floor in the middle of the circle (our embedding molds
for the following week).  What fun!

Paul M.