But what if a chemist needs to boil some chemical brew? Enter Pyrex, a borosilicate glass that can be taken from hot to cold extremes without breaking.
And what about the researcher who needs hundreds of small vials, and doesn't want to spend the time or money to wash them between uses? Enter plastic--a material both cheap and disposable.
And then there's the scientist who needs a beaker made of something as inert as possible. Behold Teflon, a polymer that reacts with very few substances.
These are just a few of the rapidly expanding choices available in glassware and plasticware for scientific labs. Glass is a few millennia older than plastic, but both materials have distinct advantages. And as advances in glass and plastic technology continue, neither material seems in danger of becoming obsolete in the near future.
The oldest known glass objects are beads from Egypt that were made ...
