This kit dates to 1847, and it's less a toy than a kit for serious students and amateurs. Its creator, John Joseph Griffin, wrote a 556-page manual to go with it.

Griffin's book, Chemical Recreations, extolled chemistry as "an everlasting source of occupation and amusement."

The cover of this Chemcraft kit from 1917 may have inspired would-be chemists with its images of science and industry.

The Chemcraft kit included an impressive selection of chemicals and equipment.

The boy and the chemist he would become were a common trope on 20th century chemistry sets, like this one from around 1952.

Like many sets, this one from the 1950s highlights topics that were hot at the time, including plastics, atomic energy, and outer space.

The atomic energy experiments included looking at a piece of paper coated with radium dust with a spinthariscope, a device used to visualize radioactive emissions. Outer space experiments included adding sodium carbonate and sodium bisulfate to water to power a soda bottle "rocket."

Girls can't be scientists, but they can still be technicians--that's the unenlightened message implied by this kit from the late 1950s.

By the early 1970s, when this kit came out, people were becoming more attuned to the negative environmental impacts of chemicals. In one experiment depicted on the back cover, a boy uses the kit to measure emissions from a nearby factory--a notable contrast to the more positive depiction of a factory on the 1917 Chemcraft kit.

This 1996 Smithsonian kit includes tiny vials of chemicals with labels taken up mostly by warnings (see next slide).

A handful of lemons might have more citric acid than that tiny vial on the right. Come to think of it, why don't lemons come with warning labels?