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).
http://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=2_4
Dam! They’ve sold out of Uranium Ore!
I remember a fellow student trying to make NI3 in his lab cupboard at University. The Lecturer was walking around trying to work out where the explosion and smell of Iodine came from, as the petri dish finally dried out and auto-detonated!
We knew, we didn’t say a word!
I remember learning the lesson of how to safely insert glass tubing into a rubber stopper. It involved an ER visit and having to paint the walls of my bedroom. That scar is a constant reminder to me now about the cost of cutting corners.
Used to, you could buy saltpeter and sulfur at the drug store. There were lots of places to get your charcoal. Now, I’m not sure if just putting the above two sentences together on here will get me in trouble, or not.
DocMartyn,
we used about four teaspoons of cornflour in a small dish with enough water to form a stiff but flowable paste that has given hours of fascination (even for the adults!). Just found some videos here that show the properties: http://quequero.org/Non_Newtonian_Fluids (you can probably paste into Google Translate if you need a better understanding of the text). Lots of other stuff on YouTube too.
The original idea was to replicate this ‘walking on water’ test:
This scale is probably more appropriate for home and scouts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxDOn4x0X50&NR=1
I think I’m incorrect in labelling cornstarch mix as thixotropic – but it certainly is a non-Newtonian fluid.
Next experiment is to make ‘crazy putty’ with PVA glue and borax:
I can recommend the Flavia de Luce detective novels by Alan Bradley. Flavia is an absolutely charming 11 year old amateur detective and chemist.
Somebody mentioned an “Air Band”.
I was flicking through a GCSE Music revision guide that was lying around the other day and came across the last page which detailed a “elective” subject section called “Air Guitar”. I kid you not. It had help on how far apart your feet must be and the proper distance your fret board hand must be from your body.
I added this post to my list of “WUWT classics” at Ric Werme’s Guide to WUWT:
mike g says:
May 1, 2011 at 8:45 am
Actually, you still can! I did some colonial reenactment stuff and to make the “slow match” for the linstocks that are used to set off cannons, you soak some cotton clothesline in a solution of KNO3 to get something that smolders reliably. Source for the saltpeter? Walmart’s pharmacy section. Cotton clothesline? Lotsa luck. Black powder? Expensive, especially if it’s shipped due to the haz-mat fees and paperwork.
BTW, colonial and civil war reenactors take safety issues seriously. There’s a field safety officer who oversees everything. Cast iron cannons must have a stainless steel insert to absorb some of the shock of the exploding black powder. Instead of wrapping cannon charges in linen, aluminum foil is used. “Pricking” the charge is still done with a long pin, Instead of priming the charge with block powder, people grind up black powder, get all they can to stick to some Scotch tape, then roll it lengthwise and stick it in a straw, leaving a cm or two for the contact area with the linstock.
Works great – I’ve never seen a misfire. Well, maybe one, early on in my activity.
It’s really amazing what you can do to black powder without it going off. People put some muscle into ramming the charges into the cannon, both for a faster burn and to get charge firmly in place by the touch hole. Grinding it for making primers is generally done in a ceramic mortar and pestle, and it takes some muscle there too!
A spark from the campfire? That’ll do it. Aluminum foil wrapping helps dissipate the heat from any ignition sources that would only be a problem if there were multiple safety lapses.
When I was a kid I always wanted a chemistry set! I asked for one each Christmas, but instead got a biology one! (I hate biology and in fact have never taken a class in it).
Then I grew up and computers became PCs! Then I wanted a compiler! I got one of those (my first was an ancient basic compiler for MS DOS). Any wonder I am a network engineer?
Steve C says:
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.
I have long argued that so-called “civilization” is DEvoluntionary.
Ric Werme says:
Buy this. Chemical Magic
Here’s another one – “The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments”. Almost impossible to find on Amazon, and quite expensive when it’s available: http://www.amazon.com/Golden-Book-Chemistry-Experiments/dp/B002PQGX8U/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1304351662&sr=8-1
BUT it can be found in PDF format:
http://chemistry.about.com/b/2008/08/05/banned-book-the-golden-book-of-chemistry-experiments.htm
I also liked the book ‘Caveman Chemistry.” It’s a text, but if you skip some of the philosophy bits, the book does a lovely job of each experiment builds on the others up to the point where you are making gun cotton. That’s the “final exam” as it were.
Never had a chemistry set, but I managed to get into trouble just the same. And to blow a small dent in the physics teacher’s work table in the set-up space in High School. I sanded the char out during my study hour and we agreed that it had never happened.
I received a C-minus from a disgruntled geology prof. who assigned a “lab” in which the students were to grow crystals. I made rock candy, had an excellent euhedral sucrose crystal. He did not appreciate it though and gave me the “C”, when I went ahead and ate it after he chewed me out for taking things more seriously, he tacked on the “-“. Oh well.
Chuckles says:
May 1, 2011 at 6:40 am
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….
Kind of fun to paint on the feet of toilet seats too. Takes a while to dry usually, but sooner or later…
My most memorable experiment with my Chemcraft set was heating sulfur with candle wax according to instructions in my basement “lavatory” during one of my parent’s parties upstairs . Proved H2S isn’t all that deadly , but will empty even a large house .
Nobody has mentioned Lott’ s Chemistry Sets, which were dominant in Britain. Oddly, Lott’s also made building bricks, a sort of simple precursor of Lego. By the time I got mine (in about 1956) there was a note in the instruction book that the instructions for making gunpowder were no longer printed there because it was illegal. The favourite experiment was definitely making hydrogen sulphide. Also, making up novel explosive mixtures which would blow the cork off a test tube when heated on the spirit burner. (Of course they always did, because even heating air or water would do this ! We never had a test tube break).
Protecting kids from the consequences of their actions, only creates dumb kids (and adults) who do not think before they act.
When I was in grade school we had some simple electric lab setups in about 3rd or 4th grade. It included some of the large cylindrical dry cell batteries and light bulbs and various other things like electro magnets. I happened to notice one day that if you shorted a paper clip across the terminals of said dry cells the paper clip got very warm.
Being a typical kid, I thought about this wonderful discovery for the rest of the day. When I got home I decided I should run the experiment with more advanced equipment.
The only source of electricity I had at hand was a wall socket, the most available metal object was one of my Mom’s hair pins. Having had other “adventures” with experiments, I realized that the wall socket had more power than the dry cell so I figured out that I needed a safe way to hold the hair pin. I cut a pink school eraser in two pieces and gingerly held the hair pin between the two little rubber blocks and carefully inserted it into the wall socket.
I learned several lessons with this experiment.
1. Wall sockets have WAY more power than a dry cell.
2. A vaporized hair pin creates a significant jet of hot plasma and molten metal that is rapidly ejected from the wall socket.
3. The a fore mentioned hot plasma arc is very bright, resulting in a purple spot in my field of vision for several minutes.
4. Hot plasma and molten metal burns your fingers very quickly, but 1/4 inch thick rubber blocks are adequate insulation to avoid both direct contact burns and electrical shock.
5. The red hot remains of the hair pin leave an interesting little curly burn mark in the hardwood floor when they are dropped while you suck you burned fingers.
6. The act of shorting out a wall socket makes a loud “POCK” sound followed immediately by all the lights in the room going out.
I was terrified that my Mom heard this sound and would ask me all sorts of interesting questions if she found me sucking my burned fingers in a room with no lights.
Pondering the situation I realized that I must have popped the circuit breaker with the short and recalled watching my Dad reset a popped breaker.
The breaker panel was at the top of the basement stairs right off the kitchen, where my Mother was working. I nonchalantly walked down the hall, and as I walked through the kitchen could see one circuit breaker that was obviously popped, I reached up and reset it as I walked past and went down in the basement, then after a few minutes I came back up stairs and was relieved to find that the lights in my room now worked again.
Mom never knew I almost electrocuted myself and or set the bedroom on fire with spraying droplets of molten metal.
I learned several things additional things like it takes several days for your fingers to quit hurting if you burn them badly.
Years later I had similar learning experiences after placing M-80 fire crackers under a large tin can and seeing it blown high in the air and wrapped around a tree branch.
The sum total of dozens of such experiments were an appreciation of the consequences of actions and a tendency to pause a moment before doing something and considering “and what could go wrong here?”
I learned about gravity by falling out of jungle gyms and out of trees. These lessons also included important information about how the human respiration system responds to strong physical blows and how to get my breath back, not to mention learning how to land on hard things from high places without breaking major bones.
I discovered chemical mixtures that if placed in a plastic bag with even the slightest trace of moisture would quickly self heat and ignite in a small fire ball. This also taught me about the basics of room ventilation to clear the smoke from the kitchen before Mom came home from work.
My brother lit a fire cracker in the house than thought better of it and decided to toss the lit firecracker in drawer of a night stand and slam the drawer shut. Lesson learned, even a small fire cracker will blow the bottom out of a closed drawer – this was useful information for a 10 year old.
We also discovered that if you cut the stick off a pop bottle rocket and put it in a large jar, it will zip around inside the jar in a most satisfying manner, filling the jar with a pungent sulfurous smoke.
Let the kids be kids and learn these bad things happen if you don’t consider consequences when the results are more than likely minor, and sane adults are around to help you out if you do hurt yourself. Instead we shield them with rubber play grounds and boring toys that don’t do anything interesting.
Have you ever thrown a super ball inside a room? It teaches you all sorts of interesting lessons about highly elastic collisions, conservation of energy, trajectory analysis and reflex honing efforts to avoid the multiple rebounds.
On second thought you probably cannot buy a super ball any more because it might be dangerous.
Larry
Does anyone have a spare copy of the “Greeat Scientific American Paper Aeroplane Book”? I gave my copy from Oak Ridge Library 1978 to a son who promptly lost it. Not explosive chemistry, but elegant physics.
Another memory of my younger days was keeping a cube of Plutonium 244 (or one of the other long-lived Pu isotopes, I forget now) on my desk as a small encapsulated paperweight. I used to toss it to greenies to catch as it was quite dense. Then I would tell them what it was, to see if they were.
Then the Health Authorities heard about it and took away my toy.
hotrod (Larry L) says:
Protecting kids from the consequences of their actions, only creates dumb kids (and adults) who do not think before they act.
Part the desired outcome, IMO – the other part being a substitution of the thinking of “authorities” for your own. I know a frightening number of people who are utterly incapable of holding any opinion without first consulting with an “authority”.
By third grade, I had found that a 10 gallon milk can with a small hole in the lid would blow the lid higher than the power lines if you added a bit of carbide and water, lit the gas coming out of the hole and waited for the flame to back down through the hole.
In the fifth grade, I learned that you should use insulated wire when attempting to make an electromagnet which you are going to plug into a wall outlet.
In the tenth grade I discovered that using a two foot square piece of glass to support a tesla coil on a bed does not prevent a spark from the bottom of the tesla coil from setting the mattress on fire. The glass remained intact, so I also learned about capacitive coupling.
The major revelation, however, came the summer after my junior year in high school. I had a summer job at a medical research foundation. I was working in a small room with no other people in the room. I had several bunsen burners lit when I noticed a new smell. Looking down, the entire floor was wet. To the best of my knowledge, I had not spilled anything. I touched the wet floor and smelled my fingers. It was ethyl ether. After I had shut off the burners, left the room, and had time to see that the hall floor was not wet with anything, I went into a much larger room adjacent to where I had been. Several people with many paper towels were at a counter at the adjoining wall. After asking what was going on, they informed me that they had broken a five gallon carboy of ethyl ether. I will never forget the changes of expression when I asked them if they had considered going next door to ask me to extinguish the bunsen burners. The lesson learned was that I am quite happy to take my chances with my actions – I somehow manage to survive them – but I must take extreme precautions to protect myself from the actions of other people.
A grandfather must be responsible.
This is killing me…
Sheesh! So many things I’d like to show the g-kids how-to-do. Maybe I can do a work-around and begin showing them THINGS THEY MUST NOT DO?
Thank you all for a wonderful thread down memory lane; and much to ponder.