In chemistry, a condenser is laboratory apparatus used to condense vapors – that is, turn them into liquids – by cooling them down.
A distillation setup using a Liebig-type condenser (the tilted double-walled tube at the center). A liquid (not visible) in the flask at left is heated by the blue mantle to the boiling point. The vapor is then cooled as it goes through the inner tube of the condenser. There it becomes liquid again, and drips into the smaller collecting flask at right, immersed in a cooling bath. The two hoses connected to the condenser circulate water through the space between the inner and outer walls.
A glass still head, upside down. The rounded part was meant to be fitted on the top of the boiling flask. Black-and-white photo of object at the Wellcome Trust museum.
Distillation, also classical distillation, is the process of separating the component substances of a liquid mixture of two or more chemically discrete substances; the separation process is realized by way of the selective boiling of the mixture and the condensation of the vapors in a still.
Distillation equipment used by the 3rd century alchemist Zosimos of Panopolis, from the Byzantine Greek manuscript Parisinus graces.
Hieronymus Brunschwig's Liber de arte Distillandi de Compositis (Strassburg, 1512) Science History Institute
A retort
Old Ukrainian vodka still
