Glycin... fresh glycin... what developers to make with it?

[DREW WILEY]

Yes, I mistook glycine for guanine. Sorry if I was multitasking at the moment, waiting for my color dev to reach temp equilibrium, among other things. But I use glycin very often in the darkroom, and certainly know what it is, and what it isn't. I buy mine from Photographers Formulary. Our local source dried up when his younger assistants were each offered $200,000 incomes from the tech companies and could not longer resist the pay upgrade. They had each done their phD thesis on the properties of another "G", gallium, which was a very hot topic in electronics R&D at that time.

 

[Martin Rickards]

If HEAP sulphate were available ...

 

[GLS]

They had each done their phD thesis on the properties of another "G", which was a very hot topic in electronics R&D at that time.

Germanium?

 

[DREW WILEY]

I went back and inserted it, Gallium, after double-checking the spelling. I'm a bit distracted again, testing my RA4 chem and hoping it's still usable. It was intended for last year, but then the pandemic came, and I didn't want any respiratory irritation at all. I'm somewhat allergic to RA4 and process the prints in drums outdoors. Now I'm fully vaccinated.

 

[GLS]

Ah yes, that would have been my other guess. Various gallium arsenides are quite widely used in semiconductors now, I believe.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Precisely. That was maybe 20 yrs ago when the specific field was still relatively new. The husband and wife who owned the chem supply house were well past retirement age, but were grooming their son to take over the business, who also had a phD and already worked there. Then he suddenly died. The two other main assistants offered to buy the company and we're certainly qualified to run it, but then got offered big bucks in Silicon Valley on the other side of the Bay. The original owners were simply too grieved to train yet another generation. They were wonderful people with a remarkable inventory serving not only pharmaceutical manufacturers and darkroom workers, but metalworking artisans, and so forth. At the time, I was in charge of another kind of huge inventory down the street, a massive selection of high end designer hardware, where careful matching of custom finishes on very expensive door and plumbing items was important, so I got involved in metal treatment advice too, and it was especially nice to have both custom plating services and a specialty chem supplier in the same neighborhood. Sometimes I'd get lucky and make a personal print sale to the same clients, or get hired by the architect to shoot the finished job. I wore a lot of inter-related hats back then.