Hi everyone. I have a orgo question that has stumped me and a couple of my classmates for a while now. Basically, we've been asked to create a procedure for obtaining pure Methyl salicylate from a sweet birch tree without using any kind of man-made materials (for example, no glassware, no pure chemicals, no thermometers... only things that could be found in nature).
What we have so far is this: we can create a fire and use it to heat water. We can then place crushed up pieces of birch bark into the water for a few hours and let them create wintergreen oil. We can then filter out the pieces of bark (perhaps using a scrap of clothing) and boil off the water. This will give us a compound that is 98% Methyl salicylate.
What we've been struggling with is how to get rid of that extra 2%. We can't use steam distillation, we think, because that involves a ton of relatively complex glassware. The wording of the question suggests that we need to add something (an acid or base of some kind) to the compound and do a liquid-liquid separation-type-thing, but we can't think of a way to get an acid/base that is strong enough to do this. Plus, although we think that Methyl salicylate is acidic, we don't know that the other components of wintergreen oil are basic or neutral.
Are we thinking along the right lines? Are we missing some angle entirely? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
- Evan G.