RossCampbell: I heard that joke while a student at Caltech back in the '50s. It seems a certain chemist had found condoms just the thing for capping a test tube & leaving room for evolved gas. He bought them by the gross, because in his experiments he used racks of 12x12 test tubes. One Sunday he found that the box contained only 143. The following day he went to the drugstore & mentioned the matter. The young man at the counter rose to the occasion by saying "Gee, mister, I hope it didn't spoil your weekend."

*

The following story is said to be based on fact. I heard it, already much embellished, at Harvard in 1959. For a long time I thought it was the stuff of balladry, and eventually I got around to it. It is, of course, TTTO that other great ballad of concatenated disasters, "The Sick Note":

Destroyer Benson

If you will please to take your seats and turn attentive ears,
A Harvard tale I'll tell to you, from Pusey's golden years.
There was a wise professor then, a chemist known to fame --
Played golf with Eisenhower. Kistiakowsky was his name.

He had a brilliant student, name of Benson, and 'twas said
If you asked him for an orbital, he'd do it in his head,
But if he touched a test tube, it invariably broke,
And when he flipped the switch, the centrifuge went up in smoke.

It happened that the Boston Globe reported in those days
The Navy Yard had sent a warship sliding down the ways.
'Twas called Destroyer Benson, 'twas the pride of our Navee.
"Aha!" Destroyer Benson said, "That's just the name for me".

One night Destroyer Benson labored in the lab alone.
The very plumbing in the sinks could scarce suppress a groan.
He had a flask of mercury and wished to know its mass;
He put it on the balance in its little house of glass.

He loaded up the other pan with every weight in sight.
The balance never budged; the tongue hung stiffly to the right.
With sudden inspiration, to the cabinet he strode
Where he had heard that Kistiakowsky's own gold weights were stowed.

He piled them on the right-hand pan; the beam swung round at last,
And then it broke and dropped the flask, which came down hard and fast.
It shattered, and the mercury poured out and swirled around;
The steel weights floated in it, but the gold ones stood their ground.

Now if you are a chemist or a dentist, you've been told
That mercury on contact will amalgamate with gold:
The atoms walk their way into the crystal grains, and then
There isn't any easy way to get them out again.

It soon occurred to Benson the professor might be sore
To find his own precision weights now weighed a little more.
"I'll try some heat", he thought, and he assembled for the task
A clamp, a Bunsen burner, and an Erlenmeyer flask.

Alas, the weights within the flask stayed silvered as before,
Though Benson turned the flame up to a gratifying roar.
"I'll pump it out", he theorized, and so he went and stole
A pump, a vacuum hose, a tube, a stopper with a hole.

He went to throw the balance out, he heard a sucking sound,
Turned anxiously towards the bench, and this is what he found:
The flask had softened and was now completing its collapse;
The stopper melted on the weights and trickled through the gaps.

Now just imagine, if you will, that coruscating mass
Of precious weights, now shrink-wrapped under curves of gleaming glass,
Old gold and new quicksilver all entwined with threads of black:
Well, that's the way Professor Kistiakowsky got them back.

Said he, "A synthesis like this can scarcely be believed.
I hope that you took careful notes on how it was achieved.
In Arts as well as Sciences 'twill get you a degree,
And tourists in the Fogg will see your shining Ph.D.

We'll write it up this afternoon -- there is no other way.
I can't afford to have you here at Harvard one more day.
And soon in Cambridge there'll be no-one left to tell the tale:
I'll catch a plane to Washington, and you can go to Yale."

-- Joe Fineman (1998)