Erlenmeyer flask, and Erlenmeyer the man

If you ever picture the glassware equipment of a chemist, one of the most distinctive pieces aside from the beaker is the Erlenmeyer flask. Actually, Americans tend to call this an Erlenmeyer flask, but Brits often refer to it as a conical flask. In any case, it is cone-shaped with a flat bottom and a cylindrical neck.

The edge of the opening on the neck might have a lip like the 2 pictures on the left, or it might be a straight lip like the one second from the right. In some cases, the neck might have a ground glass (frosted) texture to match a glass plug with a frosted side to it for a strong seal. Without that type of surface, the bare glass neck opening has to be plugged with a rubber cork or a bundle of cotton wool.

The shape of the flask makes it superior to a beaker, which has a large opening, if the scientist swirls a liquid in it and does not want it to spill easily. Swirling the flask by hand is one way to mix the contents; a Teflon-coated magnet placed in the flask can spin to mix it, too, when the flask is placed on top of a platform that contains a magnet which rotates at a controlled speed.

The magnet plate may or may not have a heater built in. A constant mixing is needed to prevent a solution from heating unevenly, which might cause violent bubbling. Mixing is also needed when certain chemicals are slowly added to the flask, so the chemical reaction can take place more smoothly. Erlenmeyer flasks are used extensively by chemists, but they are also very common in biology labs. They are used to prepare growth solutions (media) for bacteria, for example. If cells are grown inside the flask, a magnet inside it can sometimes damage the cells as they hit or with too violent a vortexing action (like a tornado in the liquid). So, in the cases where a gentle mixing is needed, the flasks are put into a special device called a shaker platform, which holds them down with handles or springs and which has a floor that rotates at a desired speed to swirl the liquid mechanically in a hands-free fashion.

Look up more details of how Erlenmeyer flasks are used here.

Richard August Carl Emil Erlenmeyer (1825–1909) designed this type of lab container in the late 1850s. He was born on 28 June 1825 in the German village of Wehen.  He attended the University of Giessen for one year as a medical student, but when he listened to lectures of famed organic chemist Justus Liebig, he switched to chemistry. Then he transferred to the University of Heidelberg for a year. He studied botany, mineralogy, and physics then returned to Giessen for more chemical studies. Erlenmeyer was a lab assistant to the noted analytical chemist Carl Fresenius, who himself had studied under Liebig! Erlenmeyer's father convinced him to get a pharmaceutical license, but he was unhappy with that business after one year. Then he returned to Giessen to get his PhD in chemistry.

He taught chemistry and physics at a trade school and traveled with a friend until 1855. Pharmacy work was boring, so he sold his shop and entered Heidelberg U hoping to become a professor. Liebig had since retired to Munich, but Robert Bunsen (yes, that Bunsen, as in the burner named after him!) had just opened a new lab there to work on analyzing fertilizers, but he thought instructors like Erlenmeyer should earn their own keep and pay for their own research all on student fees. So Erlenmeyer and a brilliant younger chemist August Kekule opened a tiny lab and lecture room together.

They and other chemists of a similar age rebelled against older chemists' ideas as Erlenmeyer consulted with industry, taught, and did his own chemistry research on agricultural products. He began to publish research papers, too. In 1857, he exhibited his new flask (Erlenmeyerkolben) at a conference, then published about it in 1860. That same year, he published about another invention, a new type of test tube rack (Reagenzgläsergestell), which Bunsen was happy to be using.

His doctoral dissertation was on extracting phosphate from animal bones, and soon hit on the idea that German farmers could save money by mixing his "superphosphate" with imported manure instead of using only manure as fertilizer. He spent a few years doing research on how to make or analyze chemicals for the agriculture industry.

He then took over as editor from Kekule's new scientific journal which was created to put out chemistry book reviews only and added original research articles because of the boom in chemistry research going on. At Heidelberg, his work shifted from practical applications to theoretical chemistry when he filled an opening in the faculty. 

Back then, people knew how much of each element was in chemicals. Water was H2O, two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of water, for example. But just how strongly these atoms held on to each other was unknown, and you couldn't show that with just a chemical formula. His colleague Kekule published a groundbreaking paper that explained how organic compounds (chemicals with carbon as the main element), could form structures, and that opened Erlenmeyer's eyes beyond the simple letters and numbers in chemical formulas. 

He eventually refined Kekule's point and used structural symbols that another chemist Alexander Crum Brown had devised to show organic compounds as pictures. As a result, Erlenmeyer is credited with inventing the term "structural chemistry". This work helped revolutionize theoretical chemistry.

In 1868 he accepted a position as full professor of general chemistry at the newly established Polytechnic School in Munich. For health reasons, he resigned from his posts in 1883 and continued to work as a private citizen. He died on 22 January 1909 at age 83.