I learned how to make and use gunpowder in the fifth grade thanks to my home chemistry set. KNO3 + S + C = boom!
I happily and safely (I have all my digits) made my own fireworks for the 4th. Today, I’d probably get arrested.
Get a load of this chemistry set.
JAYFK writes:
No, your eyes do not deceive you. Yes, it is a chemistry kit with no chemicals. Let’s dig deeper by looking at the kit’s description.
- Crystals… of what?!?! There are NO chemicals in the kit! Is the 10 & up set supposed to create matter from nothing?
- I have a PhD in analytical chemistry and I’m at a loss as to how to do chromatography with NO chemicals. At. A. Loss.
- Growing plants. Surely, that is chemical-free? No, actually, it’s not. Soil alone is teeming with chemicals and critters. The chemical water will be required. In fact, there is a lot of biochemistry in growing stuff and all of that biochemistry takes chemicals.
- It is a mystery how you can have slime and gook without chemicals. Boston’s Museum of Science show’s just how easy it is to explore slime chemistry, but it takes chemicals like glue, water and borax.
- Bubbles? The kit contains soapy water? FALSE ADVERTISING! That’s water (a chemical), likely a surfactant (another chemical) and probably other stuff (also chemicals).
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I had a chemistry set circa 1960, moderately interesting until I found my father’s college chemistry book with formulas for everything explosive. Other than a bit of tinnitis (sp?) all worked out well. Before those fools blew up the math building at U. Mich., one could mail off for casings up to 6″ and 1.5″ in diameter, underwater fuse, and two bags of powder when mixed was the same stuff in M80s and cherry bombs. I suppose one best not mention what the actual ingredients are these days to avoid culpability. These large firecrackers would clear a six-foot diameter of grass from a lawn, or a small pond of fish. At twelve, upon seeing molitov cocktails used in a war movie, a 2 am escapade involved a beer bottle filled with gas and a rag, tossed under a highway overpass after lighting. The resulting explosion, yes, explosion, resulted in flames 50-60 feet high, daylight illumination for a quarter mile around, and eight young male legs pumping like hell to escape the light. A scar remained on the asphalt for at least thirty years I knew of.
Those spring-loaded clothes pins could be retooled to ignite and shoot the wooden self-striking matches. Enough of the crushed ends of those matches in a 30-06 casing would launch said casing. Reading the above comments brings back many fond memories. Thanks folks.
I went to a tech school and we used the lathes to manufacture rocket nozzles and nose cones. These were fitted to our 6FT rockets , filled with Potassium Nitrate and sugar these tended to go out of sight. Launched from the school ground and angled to land in a local army area. Apparently we never killed anyone or we would of heard.
I am sure I made something like potasium tri iodate crystals which are heat sensitive. The dried crystals would be put on door knobs and explode from heat of the hand when someone turned the knob. I tried to speed the drying process by putting the material on top of a heater and it exploded shaking the house.
> Potassium Nitrate and sugar
Oh good, someone finally mentioned that. Good smoke. A spark from burning some landed in my jar that I had stupidly left too close. Great smoke!
I wrote an essay once, titled “No More Edisons.” It got printed in our local Mensa newsletter, but was wasn’t happy enough with it to make it into a web page. Worth including here, though. Lessee, ah, here it is.
No More Edisons?
-by Ric Werme
One of my childhood heroes was Thomas Edison. No, I’m not old enough to know him – but his eldest daughter gave me my first book about him. “Aunt Marion” lived next door to my grandparents was one of my grandmother’s closest friends. That book was a biography written for children and gave an appreciation of his entire remarkable life. That was some fifty years ago, and even then it would have been nigh on impossible for another child to replicate Edison’s childhood. Today, aspects would be considered child neglect or result in other adults facing criminal charges.
In 1859, when Edison was 12, he convinced his mother to let him sell newspapers on a train that ran between Port Huron and Detroit, 60 miles away. The time in Detroit was frequently spent reading at the library or buying items for his chemistry hobby. Apparently there were no restrictions on what he could buy – just consequences when a stick of phosphorous set fire to the baggage car when its bottle was jarred loose by bad tracks.
Edison never became an engineer or scientist, he remained an experimenter and inventor and several of today’s products are still closely related to his original designs.
Suppose someone with Edison’s promise were born in 1997, 150 years after the original. How might he turn out? Today’s United States is so vastly different it’s hard to tell. Edison was a “late talking child,” not talking until age four. Today, that is a red flag for autism, though I’m certain Edison’s mother would have found Thomas Sowell’s book on the subject and realize that description is a better fit.
The new Tom would never become a newsboy on the Port Huron train, in part because it and most other passenger trains no longer run, in part because neither parent nor train operator would allow it. Nor would he have learned Morse code or the telegraph business. Instead, I think he would carve an interesting niche out of the World Wide Web. I’ve heard stories of motivated teens setting up commercial web sites, and have no doubt a new Tom would readily get the little permission and parental support needed to get a business running. What to sell? Probably not chemicals! Today’s EPA, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Homeland Security, and several other federal, state, and local agencies and other distractions have virtually destroyed the home chemistry hobby. They’ve even created huge obstacles to legitimate R&D. Perhaps in Russia or India a new Edison could grow up with chemistry.
New Tom would embrace electronics and could well build his web business around clever gadgets, peripherals, etc. and reach far more customers than he ever could on a train. Edison was a master at finding new products that would create new markets, even if he had to create the infrastructure to support it. The incandescent light and electricity production is his the best example. The phonograph and the recording industry has parallels with today’s iPods and music downloading.
As new Tom’s business grows, it would give him the capital to look for new product niches and set about filling them. Genetic engineering or nanotechnology could be the stage big enough to address the myriad ideas, and is fresh enough so that empirical design and experimentation that Edison relied upon might apply to new Tom’s work. Science is the process of understanding how the universe works and developing tools to interact with it. Engineering takes those tools and creates new systems not previously possible. Invention envisions new systems not previously known. What might the new Tom create? I don’t know, that’s his job. What markets might exist to absorb new products? That’s a much easier question! Medical monitoring for the aging baby boomers is one obvious choice. Clean energy production or post production cleanup like carbon sequestration is another. Novel ways of extracting material from depleted ores or waste couples into that.
Some of the best inventions are things that are fairly simple but no one ever considered them before. That’s one reason why most predictions about the future fail. When predictions center on improvements to existing technology, the failure can be quite spectacular when new technology comes along that makes existing products obsolete.
Can there be another Edison? Perhaps, but he’ll have a different background. Few people are as widely read, as experienced, and as insightful as Thomas Edison was. I’ve met people who have some of those characteristics and can infuse employees with the intense allegiance needed to join in the 99% perspiration work. However, they have never achieved more than a small bit of Edison’s fame and impact. The biggest obstacle may not be personal, but environmental. Until a new “disruptive technology” like nanotechnology opens up thousands of avenues for invention, there may not be room enough for a new Thomas Edison.
Like several of the others commenting here, I have very happy memories of growing up learning about science by making bangs, flashes and stinks myself, with real ingredients, and share in the generally nonplussed feeling when looking at rubbish like this. It was not only in the labs at school that my experiments were carried out, not by a long way! It does not take too many scary experiences and healthy electric shocks to teach you where the limits of safety are, but we seem now to be sleepwalking into a world where nobody is ever going to be allowed to learn what is actually safe, where those limits are.
The onward march of Elf and Safety seems to be attempting to make every square inch of the world wholly free of any risk, most particularly for those who really ought to be allowed to Darwin themselves out of the gene pool. Actually knowing what you are doing is no defence: a few years ago I watched helplessly as these cretins required the school whose labs I kept running to make several of the lab features “safe” by their warped standards, despite the fact that their tampering both considerably reduced the usefulness of the lab and made it no safer in use. We actually had to drop several experiments and demonstrations after their meddling, simply because the lab had been made a less safe environment for experimentation. So that’s a few things less for future pupils to learn about, eh? The “dumbing down” continues.
Better yet, I heard last year that the UK’s Open University – where students study at home and have, in previous years, attended summer schools at conventional universities to catch up on larger scale experiments – is considering dropping summer schools for the science subjects, “for cost reasons”. No doubt orders from Elf and Safety are a major part of that decision too … but, anyone fancy employing a “science graduate” who has never been in a lab?
I worked my way through 2 or 3 Gilbert chemistry sets as a kid in the 1960’s. While the changing-colors experiments were fun, I also became quite adept at getting excessively high temperatures out of the alcohol burner for bending/melting glass tubing, etc. The odd experiment where a pile of powder goes poof somehow wasn’t quite good enough, so one day in my parent’s basement I managed to adjust the mix just enough for a larger POOF that for some reason started a small fire. Now of course this was the time before smoke/CO/fun alarms, so it was up to me to extinguish the flames before my parents discovered what I had done. (Repercussions would be worse than any fire.) Using my chemical knowledge, I dashed upstairs for a box of baking soda, and used it to put out the small blaze. I had to answer questions under the parent’s glare, and I had to clean up the mess, but I survived! 🙂
My guess is we are hearing from all the survivors, especially those without serious maiming scars! Chem sets (sic) aside, what do you provide for your children and/or grandchildren today for their edification and imaginations?
My older brother was a science-nut, and my early boyhood was filled with wonderful examples of his high-risk curiosity.
He would snitch chemicals from the school lab. Eventually he got in trouble because he was a sort of absent-minded-professor, even at age ten, and he forgot he had some potassium (?) in his school locker, which did not ignite because it was in a flask filled with alcohol (?). There was no cover on the flask, and the alcohol slowly evaporated. The janitor came slouching down the hall and was confronted by a locker belching smoke. Our front doorbell rang, and my mother was confronted by the police chief. My brother came ambling downstairs to see who was at the door, a dreamy and innocent look on his face. He was accused of trying to burn down the school, which was ridiculous, because if he had wanted to he would have succeeded.
One time I went into the back yard and saw him crouched behind a boulder, manipulating flasks which were tied to the ends of very long sticks. Usually he was very mild mannered, but he snapped at me, telling me to go get lost in no uncertain terms. (So I watched from a safe distance.) He was making nitroglycerine. It was of a poor quality, but worked if you gave it a solid whack.
In those days it was difficult to get my Dad’s attention, especially when he was working on one of his own projects. He tended to answer all questions and comments with a sort of, “Hmm,” without really listening to you. He was working away on an anvil in the cellar when my brother told him he had made some nitroglycerine. He said “Hmm,” turning away to get his hammer. While he was looking away my brother put some of the nitroglycerine on the anvil. Dad turned back, brought his hammer down, looked up at the hammer imbedded in the plaster of the ceiling, turned to my brother, and inquired, “What did you just say?”
Meanwhile, in the school science class, they were learning that a candle will go out in a closed jar. My brother was bored to tears. He was reading a book on molecular bonding by Linus Pauling.
In geology class the students had a project which involved making volcanoes. Most of the volcanoes spewed out red food coloring and wet flour, with the propellant a mix of vinegar and baking soda. My brother’s volcano set off the sprinkler system.
My brother was always on the verge of being kept back, and almost didn’t graduate. There was some technicality involving credits. I think he hadn’t passed in his French homework because he was too busy studying German. However he was granted some waiver or something, and went on to Harvard.
That was back in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and since then I think public schools have gone downhill, when it comes to encouraging inquisitive minds. The dumbing-down process seems to be based around “protecting” youth, but is actually repressive, even Puritanical. It is also downright cowardly, quailing from a fear of bullying lawyers.
My wife and I run a daycare on our farm. Kids are always scraping knees, running into thorns, being chased by enraged roosters, and basically behaving normally. The way we avoid lawsuits is to remain too poor to be worth suing. The only other way to avoid lawsuits would be to wrap all children in eighteen inches of bubble-wrap.
1950’s chem sets, and cutting up dead animals just to see what’s inside. I loved the 50’s. Far more interesting than “virtual” science. 🙂
Darn,
You folks had all the fun…all I was ever able to do was produce bad smells my mom hated…I did love that REAL chemistry set though – came in a wood box with square bottles of a bunch of stuff…ah, the golden years!
Oh, The most questions at our local planetarium are on the signs of the zodiac and the end of the world in 2012…and these are from the adults – some of the kids are more level headed.
Mike
Valentine McKee: What the hell’s in those things, Burt?
Burt Gummer: A few household chemicals in the proper proportions.
I have offered to allow my grandchildren to come to my house during the summer. In the process of doing “safety training” we will discover why it is bad to have fine particulates near an ignition source, and what happens when you combine potassium nitrate (fertilizer), sulfur (from the fumaroles a few miles away), and charcoal (dehydrated heated wood). All in a completely safe manner, of course. My daughter-in-law has refused to allow my grandchildren to visit unless she comes along, for some odd reason.
Oh, and setting fire to iron filings, making mustard gas, throwing knives, building catapults . . .
You can still yourself get into trouble:
click1
click2
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Here’s a recent chemistry book by Robert Bruce Thompson who is doing his best to allow kids to learn real chemistry (with chemicals), despite the “safety über alles” mindset. He is currently working on (or perhaps has finished) chemistry sets to accompany the book.
All I can say is –
“Uncle Tungsten”
by Oliver Sachs !
http://www.amazon.com/Uncle-Tungsten-Memories-Chemical-Boyhood/dp/0375404481
They are obviously using Green Chemicals made from antimatter.
Not that it really matters.
The chemicals turn Green when the dough is exchanged.
Buy this.
Chemical Magic
There was also a first edition, I have both. I haven’t compared the two closely, but the 2nd edition was edited by his son-in-law, or someone like that, to remove some of the most dangerous experiments/demonstrations. I’m actually okay with that – there were several that I wouldn’t do or wouldn’t even want to be nearby. The second edition still garnered reasonable reviews like “Not really for the general public.”
The oldest, only 2 star review:
Boy, I’m glad she wasn’t my chemistry teacher, however, the book is definitely for people with more than the current level of common sense.
Amazon doesn’t have any sources for the first edition.
Oops, blew the link. I meant to say Chemical Magic though simply http://www.amazon.com/Chemical-Magic-Leonard-Ford/dp/0486676285/ (without Amazon tracking notes) might work.
My first chemistry set (early 1950’s) had radium included so one could study this mysterious substance!! I’m still here, for now.
In our first chem lab in undergrad school (mid 1960’s) we precipitated fulminate of mercury as a lab experiment. I’m still, still here, but the waste basket into which we threw the test tube is not.
Perfect, chemical free chemistry to compliment fact free science
Cementafriend says:
April 30, 2011 at 5:57 am
Probably Nitrogen triiodide (or is it Ammonium triiodide – actually a bit harder of a question to answer than it should be).
My father told me about it, and I made a little with tincture of iodine and household ammonia. It’s an extremely sensitive contact explosive – your explosion was probably due to the mechanical stress of drying.
The typical demonstration is to touch a very small amount with a feather.
In college, a friend and I use the Chemical Magic book’s directions. It said to combine lab-grade ammonia, iodine, and potassium iodide. It turns out iodine is far more soluable in a KI solution. That created semi-dangerous quantities, but we never used it for anything interesting like stuffing key holes. I kept it wet with ammonia in a small capped container in a glass of water.
Eventually we just smeared it on an IBM card one weekend and left it in a corner of a stairwell to let it dry. We set it off early when we saw the head of the computer center wandering around.
This reminds me of poor “Mr. Turpentine” from Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Probably wouldn’t get past the EPA censors nowadays.
See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ2T2_v8j3w from 5:20-6:35
The thing with ALL science – is that it WAS fun – and I am 51 now!
the danger, the stupidity, was least of the concerns 40 years ago – it was part of the learning. Accidents will happen – and lack of supervision and adequate teaching would no doubt have contributed – but no amount of education will prevent a schoolboy doing something stupid given half the chance (you know what I mean!)
You could say, if you were politically incorrect – that learning in the old days of danger and no health and safety was actually SAFER in the long run – because you were taught/knew the danger in a hands on way and had no choice but to hold YOURSELF responsible. These days, they never get to even SEE or get close the danger!
It might be politically incorrect, but the old addage still stands, – you cannot learn to ride a bike, without falling off occasionally!
For myself – I demonstrate the dangers to my kids as often as possible – real life experience beats dictatorial instruction hands down perhaps one day Mrs Nanny state will recognise this?
I get the feeling no chemicals are included in the chemistry set so they can’t be sued for any consequences of using them. If you have to scrounge them for yourself, then you are the responsible party. Go sue yourself.
As many have stated, my Gilbert set was the basis for gunpowder experiments. But I also cleared everyone out of the house one day when I heated some parafin and sulfur in a test tube with that alcohol burner, Hydrogen sulfide, here we come!
Mind you, I had my early childhood in the late 70s and 80s into the 90s. But we could still get chem sets with actual burners! And my parents allowed me to have fuel for those burners! OMG!!!
I was never really big into the whole chemistry thing. The thing I was more interested was fire and blowing up stuff. I was totally in awe when some of the older kids could get so called “Schweizer Kracher” (lit “swiss crackers”, also known as “pirate crackers”) and use them, while we had to deal with the so called “Stripsy” (essentially very small crackers usually sold in strings that would go off in a row.)
I ended up pondering “What if I would take several of them?”
There used to be an ice cream in my country that was sold in little plastic barrels (which actually looked like real barrels.) They were pretty awesome, stable little containers. I used them to store many of my plastic soldiers in them. So yeah, I got one of those, filled it up with blackpowder from the Schweizer (that took A LOT of those), made a hole into the top and used the standard ignition from a Schweizer.
I knew it would be a big boom, so me and my friends figured we’d test it in the local playground.
Now that local playground was split in two parts. One was pretty standard with all the standard stuff. The other part was called “Indianerdorf” (lit “Indian Village”), and had several Old West style wooden buildings (one was themed like a real salloon, with that typical door everybody knows from any random western movie, OMG). The town government, which was maintaining it, had also added two ovens, both very solid, about a meter or a bit more high, made of bricks.
Well. Afterwards there was only one left.
We made a fire in one of them, as it was common. Then we came to the big moment. That was when one had the idea “Hey, let’s use some spray cans as well.” Fire material was plenty, back then our garbage containers were still accessible (today they’re locked away) and we burned A LOT of paper from the recycling containers (on some fire days we’d empty at least half of those really large containers and burn it all.) And the guy had found some used spray cans.
Remember, that was in the late 80s, before “OMG! OZONE LAYER!” became the hype.
So we dumped them in and finally the mini bomb, then we hauled ass.
It wasn’t strong enough to shatter windows, and we were really glad about that, but that oven? The top was gone after it and we just ran like hell.
We also burned batteries. Basically, we burned everything we could get our hands on. I once almost accidentally burned my Scoutrooper action figure! And Princess Leia had her foot melted. Whoops.
We also jumped from those buildings after stacking up freshly mowed grass. Cracked my right ankle that way. There were also apple trees growing which produced very small, very hard apples (some were edible). That always led to “apple battles” and lots of bruises. Every autumn we’d pelt each other with those apples. It was a bloody war zone.
Today the entire “Indian Village” is gone. The apple trees have been cut down. There’s only grass left. The playground is still there, but it’s now all protected and safe. State of the art.
In the house where I lived there was also a plumber who had his store in the ground floor. In the backyard, accessible to everyone, he’d store stuff that was removed from construction sites until the large truck would come to haul it all off. There were hot water tanks, old, rugged, and used. Damaged partly. Lots of sharp metal edges!!!!!!! OH THE HORROR! And those tanks back then had mercury in their thermometers…
We played with mercury. It was amazing to watch how you could push it around on the naked earth of our fragile planet, poke it with sticks, etc.
Oh dear, we were so bad.
Today the only thing I can do is squeeze a couple of rounds down my local firing range. The reason I stayed in our “national guard” was because I could fire a 120mm cannon and get away with it!
This safety craziness is a global thing. I see it in Japan every time I’m there as well. So now I’ve taken it upon my self to teach my niece (who’s now 11) a few things about wildlife and stuff like tracking, etc. We usually get out of Tokyo for a couple of days and I try to teach her stuff (not always easy, because the fauna there is a bit different than here.) But it’s enough to turn her into somewhat of a nerd. She’s already planning on becoming a ranger up in Hokkaido (can’t say her grandma is very pleased with that idea and it’s the foreigner’s fault!) Go me.
Luckily firecrackers aren’t as badly controlled there as they are here. Well, their production is very strictly controlled, simply because Japan has some bad experiences with fires coming from incidents. But you can get smaller ones without problems and even some bigger buggers are easy to get if you know where to look (and if you make sure you’re not setting them off in the middle of Shibuya.) My 11 year old niece now knows more about black- and gunpowder than all the Safety Nazis together and I plan on doing this with my three god-daughters as well.
Caleb, I think we were separated at birth.