Although much of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s chemistry building remains mostly undisturbed over the summer, the same cannot be said of the glass shop hidden deep within its basement. One afternoon, a graduate student drops off a cardboard box of seemingly infinite broken glassware: round-bottomed flasks and Schlenk flasks, condensers and chromatography columns. A crack here, a missing component there — occasionally two pieces that were accidentally glued together via the intense heat used in a chemical reaction.
As each passes under his eye on its way to the workbench, Neal Korfhage, the university’s lone scientific glassblower, nods and remarks, “I can do that.”
