Laboratory Synthesis of Aspirin 

I made Asprin in my Organic Chemistry Class in Uni. I snorted the "white powder" as a joke I was then told to leave the lab by the lab tech/TA. A week later I was removed from the class and I had to take it the next semester.

Neo (waking up from a training program): "Whoa, I can synthesize Aspirin!" Morpheus: "Show me. I've been a tad headachy today."

I can still remember a reaction I performed in organic chemistry that kept me up into the late hours of the night. I had done the reaction perfectly and all my numbers and reactions appeared to be perfect. The damn thing would not come out of solution. So I’m looking at a pure clear liquid that was holding within, my product. Tired and impatient I dumped the ethanol fluid into a test tube and stuck it into the freezer. Nothing. I then remembered how super concentrated fluids need a seed to begin crystallization and the same is even true of snowflakes. With a spoon I made tiny scratches on the bottom of the tube. Not only did my product come out of solution, it came out as perfect little rectangular prism crystals, no more than five. I could only use a melt test, but it came out at a very pure temp with well over a 95 percent yield by weight. Everyone else had only managed to produce a powder with much lower purity and yield, I never spent longer on an organic chemistry reaction than that experiment and I never got better results. I was Jessie Pinkman years before breaking bad.

I'm on Aspirin for my heart. This is fascinating too me, thanks Dave!

one of the first lab experiments I recall doing when I took ochem as an undergrad. And pretty much the only one I recall going smoothly :P

I remember this from a 1st year organic chemistry practical 25 years ago..... But it was really fun.

I did this last year. Extremely helpful video

Excellent video, it really teaches lab techniques. Most chemistry videos are just for entertainment. Well done!

Yo we cookin?

we legit have to do this next monday in preparation for this semester's ochem lab lmao this is so surreal

After watching Nigel's series about this, it's nice to see how it goes.

Very interesting, now I am going to look up and see if I can find how aspirin on an industrial scale.

Classic experiment! 🤟🏻

Why Ethyl Acetate is mentioned as a reagent in your video, but doesn't seem to be used in the actual procedure?

Hey Professor Dave, Rusty cage made a video recently, crafting a...relatively eccentric lemonade stand, and he started talking about the fluride in the water in the middle of it. The thing is I know that some of what he said you addressed but he also mentioned other things like PFA's which I know contain fluorine and are also detected in rain water (idk about taps though). There seemed to be a bit of a conflation there but me not being a chemist I wanted to know if you had a take on it.

How do you get the salicylic acid in powder form? It found in nature via certain plants and barks but how would you extract it or create it out of nothing??

Looks like he's really an.. *aspirin*g researcher

the thermo sponsorship yes!!!!!

if there are impurities are the *re*-crystalisation, what would it most likely be?

Danke!

The lab video reminds me of another question I've never had answered yet: Sometimes, graduated cylinders come with a plastic hexagon that fits around it and is free to slide up and down. What is that for?

Professor Dave has really been hitting the tanning bed.

why do we rinse with ethanol? Why not just distilled water?

I have a question - I notice on the salicylic acid molecule there are 2 OH groups - what prevents the acetic anhydride from acetylating the non-phenol OH group on the upper part of the molecule? I dunno if maybe this is a dumb question I should be able to figure out, but if anyone could enlighten me, I'd greatly appreciate it! Thanks!

Dave I love your videos. I have a question though. I like using old acetic anhydride to make nice smelling things In order to dispose of it. I recently made some more benzyl acetate from benzyl alcohol and acetic anhydride and added h2so4. I started heating per usual and after about 20 minutes the color changed which made me think tar was produced and to some extent it was. I ended up with a big glob of some kind of polymer looking stuff. It was extremely difficult to remove and ended up using high heat to melt it slightly and pour it out. I was able to clean the stuck tar off the glass with piranha solution. Anyways my question is what might the polymer looking stuff be? Also I performed the gabriel synthesis which I found through you and my product will be donated to another channel for use in synthesis. You cover alot of very cool reactions which absolutely fascinate me so keep doing what you do Dave!

Unfortunately, I think a video on how to synthesize mifepristone is in order.

Sick! I got to synthesise aspirin for a final project, unfortunately it was only about 70% accurate or something

Yo, when's the merch drop? I wanna flex a Professor Dave T-shirt

Q/ 1g of Aspirin is soluble In 300 ml of water 3 mg/mL (20 °c) Why?

Thank you!

Where can a person obtain chemicals to refine gold? I used to be able to buy them from a lab, but they went out of business.

hey hey . love all your content pls never stop ♥

Please be precise, what's "concentrated H2SO4" ? This does not mean anything for reproducability in a lab. It's like saying "concentrated HNO3", what are you talking about ? The regular 68% lab HNO3 ? Or maybe WFNA ? Or perhaps RFNA ? Chemistry is all about precision, theory and experiments, if the theory isn't precise, let alone the experiment.

Remember that it is not good idea to use the product of the experiment

👏👍

David, please make a video on Biomolecules

thanks im gonna overthrow big pharma with this

ptsd from biochem labs

une masterclass

Synthesize the blue stuff next ;-)

Second

First, make salicylic acid, acetic anhydride, and sulfuric acid. Then watch this video.

So easy you can do it on the edge of a field in a war-torn country as bombs fall around you. Yeah, I'm alluding to that reaction.

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FIrst

that's cool and all but Aspirin should be avoided in this day and age, with so many better options available.

I would love to try this synthesis but the site I usually buy chemicals from will not sell acetic anhydride to an individual...I did some google searches to find out why companies are so sketched out about selling it, and it's because it's used to synthesize heroin from morphine...I hate stuff like that, I think when people want to learn and practice chemistry at home that's a great thing and by restricting that because a chemical can be misused kills good old fashioned learning and innovation. Like seriously, you'd have to have morphine in the first place to do that, so if someone can get morphine i'm sure they can find whatever chemicals they need if their intention is to turn it into heroin. I seriously doubt many people inside the USA are turning morphine into heroin, and those that are probably have no trouble getting their acetic anhydride - in fact, clandestine drug labs tend to import banned chemicals from other countries like Mexico and China, and these days most of them have abandoned heroin in favor of fentanyl because it's cheaper to make, does not require growing poppies then extracting morphine, therefore it does not depend on growing something all season to have one yearly harvest and can be done any time of the year, and to supply a given number of people and make a given amount of money the product will take up far less space, and the profits are far higher with the lowered overhead. So because of some remote possibility of it being misused, they make it nearly impossible for individuals to buy it. I haven't gone to every different chemical supplier I could find, but the two most common ones I've bought things from before have big disclaimers on their acetic anhydride page saying they will only ship it to companies and it will be deleted from orders by individuals, and basically telling you to not even attempt buying it. I'm willing to bet 99.999% of the people who would order it inside the USA just want to practice basic chemistry and would never make heroin, and even if they would, they probably have no access to morphine to do so. If someone was dead set on it and grew their own poppies, your average person could maybe grow enough poppies every year to make a couple grams of the final product at most, and it would likely be far more time consuming and costly than simply going out and buying it somewhere. All these restrictions on people who want to practice chemistry, yet drugs are for sale all over in this country, so really all this does is inhibit people from doing chemistry on their own. We should be encouraging people experimenting, learning, and trying new things on their own - great things come from experimentation.

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