History and What It Became

The receiver has been part of the distillation apparatus for as long as the alembic and retort themselves, since no still can function without somewhere for its output to go, and period illustrations of alchemical and early chemical laboratories consistently show a receiver waiting beneath a still's spout or a worm's outlet. Its passive role meant it changed less over the centuries than almost any other vessel in this category: a receiver from a medieval alchemical workshop and a receiving flask on a nineteenth-century chemistry bench serve the identical function, catching and holding what the rest of the apparatus produces.

Because it held finished product rather than material still being worked, the receiver was sometimes given more attention as an object than its purely functional role required, occasionally graduated with volume markings or made from finer glass than the rougher vessels doing the actual heating and distilling. The term crossed into modern chemistry essentially unchanged: a "receiving flask" in a present-day distillation setup is the direct linguistic and functional descendant of the alchemist's receiver, still doing precisely the same job at the far end of precisely the same kind of apparatus.