The Cooling Pipe

A furnace sends its vapour up a pipe that runs back and forth through a box before dripping into a flask.

Work: Ymage de Vie, traictant des secrez des philosophes sur la fleur d'alkemie (Wellcome MS 446)
Artist / creator: Unknown French scribes; text attributed to Raymond Lull
Origin & date: France, 15th century; French and Latin
Held by: Wellcome Collection, London (MS 446)

Format

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$24.00

The story

A small furnace burns on the left, a yellow cone on top. From it a pipe climbs, turns, and runs back and forth through a long box several times before coming down into a flask on its own stand. Below, a second apparatus sits on a yellow table, a box with a peaked lid and a pipe running out of each side. The leaf is numbered 3. This is one of the full-page drawings in the Wellcome's fifteenth-century Ymage de Vie, a manuscript of alchemical processes in French and Latin. The folded pipe is the cooling path: every turn gave the vapour more time to give up its heat and come back as liquid.

About this reproduction

Faithful reproduction of a public-domain work, sourced from Wellcome Collection, London (MS 446)’s open-access release.
Printed to order on archival cotton-rag stock, pigment inks rated 100+ years.
Color-managed to the source scan.
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Image courtesy of the Wellcome Collection, London, licensed CC BY 4.0.

In situ