Labor Union

. See Trade Union

Laboratory, a room or workshop fitted up with apparatus suitable for conducting scientific investigation. Although the term is suggestive of school and college, it is applied quite as properly to the department of investigation and testing maintained in all considerable manufacturing plants. Cotton mills have laboratories in which material is examined carefully, and in which dyes are mixed and tested. The manufacturing chemist has all materials tested for strength and purity in the laboratory. A private room in which experiments are made is a part of every well established gas plant, powder mill, spice factory, flouring mill, etc.

The chemical laboratory of the school and college is derived from the workshop of the druggist, the study of the physician, and the secret room of the alchemist and the astrologer of the Middle Ages. The latter was a private room in which the search for the philosopher's stone was carried on, and in which potions and charms were concocted. The first known laboratory in connection with an institution of learning was opened at the University of Altdorf, Switzerland, in 1683; but laboratories were not considered a necessary part of a university outfit until the middle of the nineteenth century. Count Rumford set up a laboratory in the Royal Institution of London in 1800; a physiological laboratory was established at Breslau in 1825; Baron von Liebig, the great meat extract man, set up a chemical laboratory in the University of Giessen in 1826. Those of the Universities of Heidelberg and Glasgow were established in 1846. The first educational laboratory in the United States is said to have been established by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the United States 1825. the first zoological laboratory in the United States was perhaps that established by Alexander Agassiz at Harvard.

Laboratories for the study of chemistry, physics, and biology are now so generally recognized as a necessary part of educational equipment that the laboratory of a progressive village high school surpasses that of the average college fifty years ago.

See Glass; Alchemy; Chemistry; Bunsen