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).
Health & Safety in the UK was intended to protect people in dangerous working environments, which was a good thing eg putting guards on rapidly moving machine tools, providing eye protection for welding etc. It was NOT intended to be implemented the way that it has been ie to remove all risk from day to day activities. The reason that it has is because of litigation so warnings or preventative measures have to be given/taken to cater for the most stupid people in case they hurt themselves.
In UK we have such gems as a bag of peanuts bearing legend “Warning, this product contains nuts”. A microwave oven cautions the user against putting in live animals and that “Products cooked in it may be hot”. A chemistry set with no chemicals is just a logical progression of this.
What really hacks me off is the fact that there are literally an infinite number of ways to hurt, maim, kill yourself and others and that H&S cannot deal with all of these factors. What can deal with all these factors is the human brain with it’s inherent instinct for self preservation. Why do we need use by dates on food? I frequently eat food past it’s use by date I use my eyes and nose to make sure I am not going to get food poisoning. My 15 year old son though throws away perfectly good food because it is a few hours out of date. That is the way that the young have been conditioned, to accept that nanny state has removed
all risk.
What we need is some common sense and the lawyers need to realise that if someone slips on something and hurts themselves it is sometimes their own fault for not looking where they were going.
P.G. Sharrow, can’t agree you more.
In the end we have forfeited both our kids knowledge and our freedom.
Yeah, sure, tell me we are safer.
I mean where the heck is the Phenolphthalein ?? I bet mom doesn’t have that in the kitchen cabinet.
That was one of my favorites. What a guy to do if he needs to pass secret messages in fourth hour? What are kids going to do if they don’t know what phenolphthalein smells like? Sigh.
Ah, yes! We remember it well!
Maurice Chevalier from”Gigi”
I’ve been so enjoying your stories. Mine more on the accident side. Alone in the house for a while around age 7/8 and playing with the thermometer I wondered how hot the two bar electric fire was. The exploding thermometer blew back into the bars, wrecked the fire and I played with the mercury scattered around the floor. Nothing was ever said. When I took my 5 years elder brother’s pride and joy racing bike with everything for a spin, and getting to 23 miles an hour, could go faster down steeper hills, changed my mind about direction and decided to go home, taking the turning too late crashed into the low pub wall resulting in great shock, what? I wasn’t going fast enough to make it?, bruised and bloodied me and very mangled bike, which was repaired without a word of reproach.
@ur momisugly AK says:
April 30, 2011 at 11:40 am
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
Well in some parts of the country, you can still blow stuff up 🙂
How to split a log with blackpowder:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SUuUzAieig
One of the “read to pieces” treasures of my book collection is “Rocket Manual For Amateurs” by Capt. Bertrand R. Brinley (Project Officer, U. S. Army Amateur Rocket Program) from 1960. (the golden age of so many things is twelve ;;;)
With about a dozen of my friends (only one other girl though), I did about everything in it, especially the parts labeled “This should only be done by professionals with proper equipment.” We took our creations out to James Rock and shot them over the bay till the Coast Guard got mad at us. After that we moved out to the rez. Donnie was a Quinault so he could take the rest of us up there. We eventually made stuff that would go up a few thousand feet and make a nice boom when it got there. The state had some regs about that, but they didn’t apply on the rez…
I have since become a sane and sober citizen. Well, except for the continuing go ’round the OM and I have with the building dept over some of our ham antennas and a few other things like that. Our grandson knows the code but doesn’t read well enough to take the test yet. He’d probably pass if we were allowed to read the questions to him …. ..
wayne Job says: (April 30, 2011 at 5:39 am)
“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.”
Some pals and I did exactly that, although we never made a 6 footer. One of our rockets went high and straight up, then came straight down. No matter where we ran, the thing looked like it was going to spear right through our heads.
I won’t say how we fabricated the fuel. It worked well but by rights the process should have sent us to meet Robert Goddard in Valhalla. God looks after his fools.
pyromancer76 says:
April 30, 2011 at 7:12 am
“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?”
I once sat in on a “Science Camp” that I was thinking about enrolling my daughter in. The camp councilor was demonstrating a soil testing kit to four-year-olds. I realized that instead of getting my young daughter interested in science at a young age, this boring camp would turn her off to science for good.
I was mad as heck, so I wrote up a proposal for a science camp that included things like taking apart old small appliances and building batteries from pennies and aluminum foil. I sent it around to places that might be interested. I ended up working for a children’s museum and doing daring things like lighting a candle and putting a glass over it, then watching the candle use up the invisible air. I burned steel wool with a small battery to show how the filament in a light bulb would burn if it was exposed to air. We mixed baking soda and vinegar in a bottle with a balloon on top and then played with the funny heavy balloon. These are not dangerous but they are interesting.
With my own kids, we did hydrolysis, and then exploded the tiny bit of hydrogen and burnt the oxygen. We sprouted beans… in a spinning centrifuge… to see if increased gravity would make the beans grow slower than a control. We tried to mix peroxide with anything that we could find to see if it would fizz. I even bought a Geiger counter from Russia and we tested everything in the house. The only thing that we found to be radioactive was an old radium watch dial.
Most science kits are worse than useless, they are boring, and especially kits made for girls. I think the worst one is the soap making kit. Do they give you oil and a base and you actually make soap? No they give you bars of ready made soap that you melt and pour into a mold. The kit might coast 20 dollars. Ivory soap can be purchased for a few cents. It should be called a soap molding rip-off kit. (…yes… we made soap out of wood ashes!)
I blame the emergence of Climate-Change-Science on boring science kits.
Made in China. They kept the chemicals for industry — something we are having less and less of because of chemophobes
Why do I feel like I’m reading a post from the Free Range Kids blog? (http://freerangekids.wordpress.com)
A majority of Lenore Skenazy’s blog posts over there have something to do the irrational fear of random kidnappings; which are less likely to occur than deaths due to kitchen activities, much less likely than kidnappings by a family member (which result in the child’s return within a few hours except in very rare instances), and FAR less likely than deaths in car accidents. Almost all of the rest have to do with how the (somewhat rational) fear of lawsuits is hurting America’s children. When discussing these fears, such quotes as “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” (Franklin D. Roosevelt) and “He who would give up liberty for security deserves neither” (Benjamin Franklin) come to mind. Though Lenore has never mentioned global warming (she is a liberal, though a reader of her blog would likely pin her as a conservative due to her stance for tort reform and against the sensationalist media), it can be said that the principle applies there as well… do not give up trillions of dollars for a plan that even the AGW advocates admit will have very little impact on global temperature.
Anyway, yes, the fear of lawsuits is the reason for the set not including any chemicals. It is also the reason for the conversion of many older American (and UK and Australian, and to a lesser extent Canadian) playgrounds, even larger ones, into “safe” structures that are no more than 6-8 feet high at any “reachable” point (not to say that the kid won’t find a way of reaching the unreachable points.. ha :P) and have little or no parts that move while the kid is on them (such as swings; seesaws; merry-go-rounds; and other such equipment, which cannot be easily found today outside of foreign nations). Poor education, childhood obesity, increased teenage crime — all of these are easily attributable to the dumbing down of kids’ culture due to fear. Countries such as South Korea, Japan, Germany, and Finland have great educations as measured by internationally standardized test scores; the USA is lacking to say the least. Going to these countries (which I have not… yet) one can see that children are more autonomous than in the United States. In fact, it becomes apparent that the idea of child overprotection is unique to English-speaking nations (with the USA being the worst offender… case in point, they are alone with Somalia in not ratifying the UN’s Conventions on the Rights of the Child, one of the few liberal-touted protocols that I agree with. If I were the Senate, I would ratify with a reservation that additional spending [such as Article 26’s “social insurance”] would not be required; however I would NOT add reservations to Articles 12-16, as they are the parts the USA needs work in). Of what I’m going to say about Germany, the vast majority applies to educational leader Finland as well; but I’m more familiar with German education, as it is more often studied and discussed. In Germany, for instance, it is very uncommon to see any child above second grade NOT walk, ride a bike, or take public transportation to school. It is often said that “[in Germany] the journey to school takes 5 minutes, but the journey back takes 5 hours” (the first figure is more likely around 20 minutes). Those who scratch their heads at this statement should recall their own childhoods or ask an older relative about theirs. If you think that this freedom is due to the lack of major urban areas, then keep in mind that things are much the same way in urbanized Japan, except the journey back takes just 2 hours due to the longer school day. German school is basically a half-day education (8:00 to 12:30), with some academically-minded high school (grades 10-13) students taking a class or two in the afternoon or evening 2-3 days a week. It is extremely common for German children as young as 5 (though more common at 8) to go to a nearby (within a few kilometers/miles) swimming pool or ski resort (depending on the season) by themselves. German playgrounds, even newer ones, are similar to American playgrounds from before 1984, and this is not a bad thing. Today such unique structures would be sued out of existence in America, or at least not built due to the fear of a lawsuit and/or the inevitably high cost of insurance. With all of the overprotection in America, kids with naturally stronger personalities tend to go overboard commit crimes when they are (often abruptly) first given the privileges they should have had many years before. The increase in depression in America can also be blamed on overprotective parenting, which can in turn be blamed on fear. To recap, children in America are being denied the basic freedoms that children in non-English-speaking countries take for granted and that even American kids had just 30 years ago. Much of this is due to irrational fear of risks which are far less likely than those that parents don’t think twice (or even once) about. In addition, lawsuits and the fear thereof are driving many fun activities out of the country (not just with the dumbing down of playgrounds, but also with the abolition of outdoor recess activities in many American school systems). Of all I’ve read on the Free-Range Kids blog, this long comment by KyohakuKeisanki has got to take the cake:
http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/2011/04/28/when-risk-visits-the-playground/#comment-63333
Sorry if you think I sounded anti-American, but even the best of anything (whether it be video games, sports, or nations) has its faults; and it would be stupid to turn a blind eye to these faults simply because of the good things…. instead those in control (the voters in this case) should correct the faults and make things better for everyone — even those who are being restricted by government (whether it be family “government” [which most of it is], local government, state government, or federal government) more than in any other time in American history.
For the pyro-technically inclined, these days the internet has many assorted “recipes” available. YMMV. One thing often Googled for is The Anarchist Cookbook (Wikipedia entry). Written by the author to protest US involvement in the Vietnam War, resembling reading material for an urban guerrilla revolutionary, the author has since renounced his earlier views and basically wants the book to disappear. Which may be for the best, it is getting dated, and the pyrotechnical recipes are regarded as… unreliable, also dangerous… possibly because those attempting them didn’t have the technical ability and know-how to use them. The following thread from a site named after the tome has a download link (download tested, worked):
http://www.anarchistcookbook.com/showthread.php/6466-ORIGINAL-Anarchist-Cookbook-in-PDF
Interestingly there’s a similarly named book, Recipes for Disaster: An Anarchist Cookbook (Wikipedia entry). It’s put out by a “real” anarchist group, who complain that the other book wasn’t written by a real anarchist, and essentially isn’t “anarchist” enough.
Searching for the title dredges up many things going by that or a similar name that aren’t the real one. Which may be a good thing. Googling for “anarchist cookbook pdf” found “The Anarchist’s Cookbook” as the first result (download tested, worked):
http://bumsrush.multiservers.com/files/CookBook.pdf
This appears to be an excerpt of a larger book, limited to the exciting recipes. It is replete with assorted disclaimers and warnings in the general format “if some complete moron were to make this he could use this method.” The layout is good, and going by what I recall from chemistry classes long ago, the recipes look like they could work, with sufficient technical detail. Of course you’d have to be stupid to try them.
😉
Sad.
For my son’s science class ‘volcano’ project this year we used potassium nitrate and sugar in an inverted plastic cup lit by a remotely triggered Estes model rocket engine embedded within a clay volcano submerged in water to simulate the Ring of Fire.
The science teacher saved the video to his personal drive.
No child growing up on the above chemistry kit will ever have their project saved to the teacher’s personal drive.
Andrew30 — thanks, I haven’t thought of JetX engines for over 40 years….brought back great memories of terrorizing our quite suburban neighborhood with my genius (but looney) older brother.
Some really great comments about how children need to learn and grow and do so by making mistakes. The idea that all children are to be placed in a hermetically sealed clean room with padded walls or must be strapped up in child seats really makes you wonder how we ever will produce people with backbones or any kind of leadership qualities in our society?
A country full of homogenized little purple Barney characters is the last thing we need in this very complex world in which were are in fact desperate for people with great leadership qualities to get great things done. It was inspiring to hear so many great stories about childhood chemistry sets and the contrast of how such a ridiculous chemistry set shown really nails everything that’s so wrong in our society today.
One of the MOST important aspects of the AGW movement is how we finally realized the connection between the socialist movement and the green movement. When the wall came down in Europe, all of the socialist people did not pack their bags and disappear, but simply morphed into the global warming movement. It is the same anti-west and anti-business garbage that they been preaching all along but with a different name. Socialism had became a dirty word, but green had not.
I should note that now we’ve pretty much destroyed and showed up the gig of the green movement being a bunch of leftists and socialist people pushing their agenda in message of more government control over everybody, they are now jumping ship and landing in what we call the safety movement.
Just like the socialist movement or the green movement, the whole safety movement is exactly the same thing all over again!
We can’t use nuclear reactors due to safety! We cannot drill for offshore oil due to safety! We cannot burn coal due to the un safe health effects! We can’t let people drive their own cars, and they must use certified public officials and must use public transit due to safety. And to ride a bicycle, you better get the bicycle licensed with lots of red tape from more government officials so you do not hurt yourself, and of course you also have to wear that helmut in the name of safety.
So was with heartfelt warming that is post about the chemistry set was posted here, and now that we made the connection between the green movement and socialism, we forcing them to jump ship into the safety movement. Once again it is high time we also call these new safety Nazis what they are: Good old fashioned busy body leftist socialists.
Super Turtle
Gilbert Stork was jilted on the Nobel Prize. Everybody expected him to win it in combination with E. J. Corey. Stork was a better chemist but Corey published more, by far. And one day they threw away Stork’s chemistry set too.
It was called the ‘Stork Morgue’ at Columbia University. It was in the basement with no lock on it. A room with THOUSANDS of little and not so little bottles of organic and organometallic chemicals.
My Lord in God’s Great Heaven WHAT A PLAYGROUND IT WAS!!!
Aldrich chemical was across the river in Jersey so if ordered by 5PM I’d get anything I wanted by 4-5PM by UPS the next day. But that left the god damned weekends.
Enter the Stork Morgue. A simple clipboard was used to check items out like library books. You could go grab stuff and leave a note with the current owner that you took it and would bring it back on Monday. Most people were there though, even at midnight on a Saturday. Most organic chemists I mean. Not the computer jockeys.
In the late 90s they killed it. The safety people. They started testing our water drain lines for acetone, even. We couldn’t even wash glassware any more in the sink.
They THREW IT ALL AWAY. For me it was like the burning of the Library of Alexandria.
My last year there prior to three at Harvard with George Whitesides was without a library of chemicals that went back to the 1930s.
Not only are chemistry sets neutered, so are science classes. In my son’s general science class his sophomore year in high school, only the teacher was allowed to do the experiments, he wouldn’t let the kids touch the stuff, they could only watch and take notes.
reminds me of that old Star Trek episode where Capt. Kirk fights “The Gorn”…..Kirk finds a pile of sulphur or phosphorus on the surface of the planet and makes some kind of gunpowder or black powder out of it…as a 7 or 8 year old kid, i thought “The Gorn” was the coolest thing i’d ever seen…
Recently on our domestic news was a story of a badly stung amateur beekeeper who had fallen when carrying a beehive up a ladder, the ladder sunk on one side and he and the bees crashed.
The punchline came when he was described as a “Health and Safety Officer” 😉
Thank you to all readers who left memories of their childhood excesses. I laughed a lot at some of these experiences, a reminder of how dull over anxious parents have made modern childhood. It is rather sad.
“Myrrh says:
April 30, 2011 at 12:24 pm
I’ve been so enjoying your stories. Mine more on the accident side. Alone in the house for a while around age 7/8…….”
Ok – I think could be time for a visit by social services and police……
Your parents need jail time, quite clearly.
This entire thread has been brilliantly entertaining, and it is almost certainly the case that most/all of the posts have been by people over the age of about 40. I dont know when exactly our society got so totally risk averse, but we do seem to have a generation for whom any notion of risk/uncertainty is just too much for their over-protected brains to comprehend.
The generations who have been through school in the last 30 years seem to have a need for absolute certainty in everything, and they cannot work things out for themselves. Hence the slavish adherence to the AGW message. Don’t question it, you might have to think. Don’t do anything which isn’t completely “safe” according to the mantra, something might happen to the planet and we will all die….
This chemistry set is a perfect example
Some say that poilio was a disease of affluence, because children were sanitised so they did not form antibodies when they were needed.
So it is with the stories above. The stories do not tell us, but I’d bet that many of the experimental explosive bloggers later became successful chemists. An early curiousity seems to be an indicator of good chemists. (I suspect this is not a general occupational principle, but that it is occupation-specific – consider morticians, then hookers).
We used to have many pounds of mercury. It was a fascinating material and we’d be up to our wrists in it some weeks. It was quietly teaching us about some properties of materials that would stand us in good stead later. At the other end of the density scale we made hydrogen and exploded it. Boundaries of properties were learned. Then I was a chemist in a plant making urea, while the one over the river made ammonium nitrate. We advertised how dangerous it was – one truck engine was found 400 yards from the explosion of its 4 tonne load – so they invented a coating to slow propagation of the shock wave. I got the job of working out what it was and how it worked. And how to reactivate it, which we won’t discuss.
I’m making the point that the inhibition of childhood experiments cramps the mind and fails to educate in breadth for later professional use. The chemistry set with no chemicals does not teach one much about a vacuum, which mercury metal can make fairly well.
The dominant mesage for me is that we are breeding killjoy goodie goodie two shoes types who worm an occasional way into a decision making position. Heaven help us. That’s what Mullahs say they are for.
Lack of chemicals (even not really knowing what they are) will not deter the budding scientist. This was an ‘experiment’ from last year (daughter then aged 7) – density: what sinks in water? (treacle – until it starts to dissolve, ???); what floats? (oil – two different kinds, cloves, peppercorns, ???)
We’ve graduated to exploring thixotropy this morning (cornstarch in water, with obligatory pink food colour).
At least here on the Internet, we can still have a bit of fun with chemistry:
http://www.periodicvideos.com/
I recommend starting with Potassium. 🙂
It occurs to me that one or more of my chemistry sets wasn’t a classic Gilbert model. The plastic bottles containing the magic chemicals were blue with a white cap. Sound familiar to anyone?
Verity Jones, could you give me the details of your thixotropy experiments?
I help out at the scouts, one of the things I have been asked to do is to come up with a safe, cheap, scientific experiment that takes about an hour for ages 11-16.
I never thought about chemo-physical properties and thixotropy looks very visual.
A friend of mine suggested using a standard sized coffee tine, with two of the plastic lids on each end. Place different types of powder inside, with different grain sizes but the same mass, and then tilt gradually. The tins are only able to move down the slope when they overcome the internal friction of the material they contain.
Works apparently, but data interpretation is phenomenological.
Cementafriend @ur momisugly April 30, 2011 at 5:57 am
‘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. ‘
Ammonium iodide perhaps? Very easy to make and fairly well behaved if still wet. Once it’s dry, it explodes if you give it a dirty look. We made it at every opportunity at school, – Blackboard erasers and chalk leaping a foot into the air when touched and the like.
About 20 years ago my son had an excellent science teacher at school, and he told said teacher about this marvellous substance dad had described. Teacher was very disbelieving, but cheerfully agreed to make some during a lab. Unfortunately, there was a lunchbreak in the middle, and they returned to an absolutely dry ammonium iodide covered filter paper standing in a beaker on an open window ledge.
They decided it would be a good idea to use a couple of stirrers to gently lift the paper and flick it out of the window. The resulting bang as soon as they touched the paper attracted the attention of half the school, and blew the beaker to pieces as well as 2 panes of the window.