wet chemistry
Picture an old laboratory: beakers, burettes, color changes, weighing a dried precipitate on a balance — chemistry done with flasks and reagents rather than blinking instruments. That hands-on, solution-based way of working is wet chemistry. It is analysis carried out mainly through chemical reactions in liquids, using glassware and simple measurements of mass and volume.
Wet chemistry, also called classical analysis, covers the techniques that predate modern instruments: titrations (measuring volumes of reacting solutions) and gravimetric analysis (measuring the mass of a product). The 'wet' refers to working with samples dissolved in solution, and the answers come from amounts of substance reacting, not from an electronic readout.
It matters because these classical methods are often remarkably accurate, cheap, and transparent — you can see and understand exactly what is happening — and they are still used to certify standards that instruments are then calibrated against. The caveat is that they tend to be slower, more labor-intensive, and far less sensitive at trace levels than modern instrumental analysis, which is why the two approaches complement rather than replace each other.
Determining the chloride in a brine by titrating it with silver nitrate until the color shifts, then reading the volume used, is classic wet chemistry — no electronic detector required.
Wet chemistry gets answers from reactions in solution, not from instruments.
Wet chemistry is not 'outdated' chemistry. Because titrations and gravimetry can be extremely accurate, they remain a backbone for certifying reference materials and standards used to keep instruments honest.