When I was ten, a relative gave me a Gilbert chemistry set that he
had found at a local garage sale. I do not know when this
particular set was manufactured. Based on the construction of the
metal case and the fact that the set contained no plastic whatsoever,
my guess is the late 1950’s or early 1960’s. I loved that chemistry
set. It contained about a dozen test tubes, a 50 ml beaker, a 50 ml
Erlenmeyer flask, litmus paper, several glass tubes, an assortment
of corks, rubber tubing, an alcohol burner, test tube tongs, copper
and zinc plates, and various assorted chemicals in glass bottles
with steel screw-on tops. This was my introduction to Chemistry.

My favorite item was the booklet of perhaps 250 experiments. I
could not perform many of them, because the required chemicals were
no longer present, but I spent weeks reading that booklet over and
over. Its theory section and experiments explained many things of
practical value. They taught how to heat the glass tubes with the
alcohol burner and bend them into needed shapes for various
experiments. They explained basic safety precautions. They
summarized how to use litmus paper and how to perform titrations.
They revealed underlying principles of acids, bases, and buffers.
They taught about oxidation and reduction and exothermic and
endothermic reactions. This is where I first learned about atomic
valences, the theory that explains, for example, the existence of
the two oxidation states of iron as ferric oxide and ferrou