 Today we're going to make acetosalicylic acid. That's the scientific name for aspirin. And you make aspirin by combining salicylic acid and acetic anhydride. We want to weigh out 2 grams. Actually we have 2.027 grams. So record that number. Now we want to add between 4 and 5 milliliters of the liquid acetic anhydride. As you can see, there's a little of our salicylic acid in our wayboat. So in order to make sure we get it all in there, I'm going to pour the acetic anhydride here, swirl it around a bit, and then get all of it in my Erlenmeyer. Then I want to mix. Next we add 5 drops of concentrated sulfuric acid. This is making us an acid environment and it will also cause a reaction to go a little faster. We want to heat this in a boiling hot water bath for about 10 minutes. After 10 minutes you can see that the color has a sort of a yellowish brown tint to it. Now we're going to add 10 milliliters of cold water. Now we're going to put this in a cold water bath and allow the aspirin crystals to form. So you can see we have lots of aspirin crystallized in our Erlenmeyer. Now what we need to do is to filter our aspirin from the solution. And to do that we're going to use a sidearm flask and a suction filter and this aspirator. The aspirator creates a low pressure inside our container here and that will help gravity pull that water out and leave our aspirin inside the funnel. We need to put a piece of filter paper inside our funnel and when we turn the water on you see water is running down. That running water creates this low pressure here. We use just a little bit of water to make a nice tight seal and then we'll pour our aspirin solution into the funnel. We're going to rinse the sides down and we want to make sure we get all of the aspirin into our funnel. You can see here we have lots of aspirin and since we want to make sure we get it all we're going to lift the filter paper into our beaker and then we're going to rinse this with alcohol. This is ethanol and we will rinse the crystals off of the paper with our alcohol. Now we want to dissolve our aspirin in the alcohol so that we can re-crystallize. Re-crystallizing will allow us to get larger crystals of the acetyl salicylic acid. Now we're going to add 60 milliliters of warm water. You see it gets cloudy, there's actually a little bit of crystallization that's occurring. You want to stir that and now we get to wait again. We need to give this time for the crystals to form so we're going to put it back in our ice water mix. We're going to weigh a filter paper. The filter paper weighs 0.354 grams so make sure you record that number. I'll place my weighed filter paper in the funnel and set up my filtering apparatus again. Now we can turn on our aspirator and filter. Next we want to take out our filter paper with the aspirin on it and set it on a watch glass. Now we have to set it aside and let it air dry. Now we want to weigh our dried filter paper and aspirin sample. This is what one of the crystals up close looks like.