 Here the crucial breakthrough was achieved by Mayo, Pike and Butcher and by Williamson who demonstrated that inexperienced students were able to carry out organic syntheses on a few tens of milligrams, a skill previously thought to require years of training and experience.These approaches were accompanied by the introduction of some specialised equipment, which was subsequently simplified by Breuer without great loss of versatility.There is a great deal of published material available to help in the introduction of such a scheme, providing advice on choice of equipment, techniques and preparative experiments and the flow of such material is continuing through a column in the "Journal of Chemical Education" called 'The Microscale Laboratory' that has been running for many years.