One of my favourites lines from “Ignition” by John Clark.
It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively.
Looks like when, as a child, I read on a bottle of bleach to avoid mixing it with acid. The first thing my dumb ass did was to look for a bottle of vinegar…
So how’d it go?
I remember one time when I was a kid and had read something mentioning spark gap transmitters. I of course found a bit of wire (tie wire because that’s what came to hand, not anything insulated) and a radio and was playing around with a 9v battery making little sparks by shorting it with the wire and hearing the radio crackle in response. What I then thought was that if the little battery was making a noticeable effect then a bigger battery would obviously be better.
I got one of the drill batteries and shorted that out with my bit of wire to make a better spark and proceeded to discover that resistive heating is a thing and thin tie wire connected even briefly to a high discharge battery will get very hot very quickly. I ended up with a nice blister line across my fingers and a scar for a few years showing the position I’d been holding the wire…
I feel boring - only thing I ever had to realize that if you work with solvents with a boiling point close to body temperature and have them in a flask with a glass cork, you shouldn’t hold the flask in your warm hands while waiting - because after a few minutes the glass cork flies off and you have to pay for it 😕
Girl in my chemistry class painted her face with silver nitrate (IIRC the chemical correctly; something used in photo development turns dark brown/black when exposed to sunlight) because she did not believe it would do anything once she went out into the sun.
She got sent home for being in black flace next period.
Early in my career I did tensile testing on adhesive coupons. I was running an experiment to simulate heating and cooling cycles on a bond. I had a nice big thermal chamber from the 1960’s, lined with heating elements (and undoubtedly asbestos), a big old dewar of liquid nitrogen, some thermocouples, and a PID controller the size of a German Shepherd.
Problem is, cold air sinks. My samples are sitting on the bottom of this huge chamber and their temperature is fluctuating wildly every time a bit of LN2 is added. The ancient PID controller cannot cope with my shitty test setup, it’s trying to turn on the damned heaters to control the temperature when I’m trying to go cold and this is a multi-hour test and I just want to go home.
But… I have a cardboard box. Nice, insulative cardboard, just the right height to get my samples off the floor of the chamber and into a zone where the temperature is more stable. I am brilliant! Cardboard box deployed, I can finally begin my thermal cycling.
I learned a few things that day:
- thermal cycles include both hot and cold phases
- the floor of the thermal chamber has much less temperature stability while cooling AND while heating
- specifically the floor contains a heating element and gets ridiculously hot
- cardboard combusts at a temperature much lower than you might expect
- opening the door of a smoking thermal chamber to investigate allows in a rush of oxygen
- rapid introduction of oxygen to a smoldering cardboard box leads to very large exciting pretty flames
- fire extinguishers leave a fine dust of particles all over everything that you will be cleaning up for MONTHS
Brilliant writing, funny story told well, 10/10, would set my experiment on fire for.
Water makes explosions worse.
I had put a bunch of dry ice into a Falcon tube (50 mL screw top plastic centrifuge tube) and suddenly realised that I wasn’t actually in the mood for a loud bang, so I chucked it into a perspex water bath. The bang was muted but the water spout hit the ceiling and the water bath failed, drenching my supervisor’s notes.
Test failed successfully.
What i tell you now must never be repeated to my parents. I will deny every word, except for the latter part that resulted in me burning a hole in the driveway since they already know about that.
When I was a teen, I spilled some gas on the concrete floor of the garage while filling up the lawn mower. I thought to myself, “What’s the fastest way to clean this up?” Clearly the fastest option was to burn it. This did in fact work and produced a controllable flame, but I had neglected to move the closed plastic gas can away from the puddle of gasoline. As it turns out, plastic is made of flammable petrochemicals. The outside of it immediately caught on fire.
I realized that if the gas can lost structural integrity, gas would flood the garage floor, likely setting the whole structure ablaze. So, I picked up the flaming jug of death and ran out of the garage, setting it in the middle of the asphalt driveway downwind of any important structures. I now had the task of putting out a gasoline fire. How could I do this? Obviously, the best way to put out a fire is to spray it with a hose. So I grabbed the garden hose and aimed the nozzle at the melting jug of death.
This did not work. As it turns out, gasoline floats on water, and as such spraying water on a gasoline fire simply increases its surface area. It roared like a bonfire and the plastic can rapidly collapsed. Additionally, it turns out that asphalt is mainly composed of tar, which is a flammable petrochemical.
At some point I realized I had no idea what I was doing and called the fire department. By the time a fireman arrived, all that remained of the blaze was a smoking hole in the driveway the size of a small child, which was extinguished with a handheld chemical extinguisher.
My dad, at the time, was in charge of the safety training at the local chemical plant. My attempt to extinguish the flaming jug of death made an appearance in one of his PowerPoint slides as an example of what not to do with an oil fire.
Well, that’s one way to explain the small-child sized scorch mark.
Epstein victims hate this one simple trick!
…too dark? Probably too dark.
It’s medium rare at most… still pink in the middle, just how Epstein liked them.
Honestly I bet the drum of acid was darker anyways.
My dad used to be a police officer in South Africa. He had several interesting artifacts from his time there.
One such artifact was an unmarked black cylinder with a spray nozzle. One day after school, I had managed to get locked out of one section of the house and could only get into the kitchen and my dad’s office. (Houses in SA often have security gates inside locking off sections of the house.)
It was sitting in this office, waiting for someone else to get home and let me in that I absent mindedly started playing with this cylinder. I sprayed a small bit out. It made made a really cool heat haze effect in the air. Awesome, but what the fuck was this stuff? Well I’d just had a highschool science lesson on how to test an unknown gas… you waft it towards yourself, you do not sniff it directly. So I sprayed out a bit more and wafted it carefully towards my face…
Instant regret. My nose felt like I’d just done a netti pot of hot sauce. Eyes streaming, snot dripping.
Lesson 1 learned. Don’t play with random cylinders of mysterious chemicals.
I found out later that it was tear gas.
Hey pop quiz: What’s the worst thing you can do if you get tear gassed?
That’s correct! My dumb ass ran straight for the kitchen tap. Lesson 2. DO NOT USE WATER to clean off tear gas. I will say that I knew IMMEDIATELY that I had fucked up a second time. Felt like my entire face was on fire. Baaaad times!
I am no expert but this feels like a fun and useful bookmark:
Something I learned / remembered from reading that:
Though tear gas was classified as a chemical weapon in 1993 and banned from use in international warfare, law enforcement officers are still allowed to use it on civilians in the United States.That’s fun.
Rinse your body as soon as you get to a location with a shower.
Lesson 2. DO NOT USE WATER to clean off tear gas.
So, how to clean it off?
It’s not a war crime if you’re not at war!
Taps-head.jpg
Mmmm not the same , but similar.
My single mother was changing a headlight in our garage. Like any poor person worth her salt, my mother was using a butter knife because we didn’t have proper tools. I wanted to see what would happen if i crossed the cars battery terminals with the butter knife. I decided to make it look like an accident. I “bumped” the butter knife and it locked into place across the terminals. Sparks shot from both ends when it made contact. From the center out the butter knife started glowing red from the heat. It all happened so fast, i smacked the butter knife free with my right hand. 30 years later I still have the physical scar across my middle finger, and the emotional scars of what she called me (admittedly deserved).
My mate had a similar thing happen in his old car.
The original classic Mini
Had the battery in the boot, not in the engine bay. I was supposed to be covered over, but my mate had taken it out to charge the battery and never replaced it.He also had a can of de-icing spray in the boot. Can you see where this is going?
One feisty bit of cornering later and all of a sudden there was a hiss and a weird chemical smell. SHIT!
After a very quick emergency stop we were -fortunately- stupid enough to investigate the boot and then wildly kick at it with our young flailing gangly legs.
The battery cover was put over the battery from then onwards.
Mine is from when I was 14:
I mixed calcium carbide with water inside a glass bottle. Then I closed its lid. Then I waited until I got really concentrated acetylene. What I got was a scar on my right arm, a smaller one just above my upper lip (nowadays hidden by the beard), and a big scratch on my prescription glasses — without them I’d be probably blind from my left eye.
From that I’ve learned some valuable things:
- I’m a muppet.
- I’m a bloody muppet.
- My mum was also a muppet, for letting me fuck with calcium carbide, sodium nitrate, concentrated sulphuric acid, sodium hydroxide, concentrated ammonia, gunpowder etc., since my teen years. (Guess where I got the calcium carbide from? Her brother’s garage!)
- My dog (rest in peace, Lana; you were the greatest girl) was probably traumatised with loud noises because of me. Now thinking, Lana was also with me the time I melted lead and poured sulphur on it, and instead of getting galena I got a whiff of Hell on my face.
- You can tell people a different story every time they ask you about the scar, and they’ll buy it. The one I just told was the true one, though.
- Glass containers are fragile from the inside.
Anyway, that’s my “nitric acid acts upon trousers” moment.
I melted lead and poured sulphur on it, and instead of getting galena I got a whiff of Hell on my face.
Was it supposed to form Galena and you messed up the process, or did you think it should but were wrong from the outset?
At least in theory it could work, given it’s similar to how people make niello since the antiquity, but I forgot to take into account oxygen — the sulphur caught fire.
TIL. Thanks for the explanation (and your stories)!
(Also, thanks for using the em-dash — I feel like too few people use it these days and hate that it has come to be considered an AI indicator.)
The one I just told was the true one, though.
Suuure it is 😉
I told you, she’s totally yandere! She tied me and carved her initial on my arm with a knife!
No, wait, I did it to myself, as a proof of love. No, wait, I did it for the sake of the secret organisation I used to belong to, as an identification mark. Sorry, actually I got it in an accident, as I was covering a puppy with my arm. No, wait, it was chemicals, but I was developing a cure for cancer, not dumb stuff like mixing calcium carbide with water! 😜
Mine, nitrated organic compounds will act on fingers that are too close…
It all started, as a teenager, with my mates and I making black powder pipe bombs to let off on the back of a farm. With time these increased in size, and then the chemistry also stepped - to the point that we unplanted a sizable pine tree. This resulted in the local constabulary paying us a visit (for the first time). Thankfully it was a quite visit, no lights, no parents involved, just a stern watch out you could really heart yourselves. As we move on in our endeavors escalated we learnt a few things.
Timing is everything, get the timing wrong and you may need stitches at best. I think one of my mates was very lucky that day and only split the skin of a finger, it could have gone much worse.
Of cause that didn’t stop us - and that lead to the cops and AOS being called on another occasion - when the AOS is involved it tends to make the local papers, and parents somehow become involved as well.
All good life lessons.
AOS?
When I was a kid I discovered that cyanoacrylate acts upon human skin. It also acts upon all the change in my parents’ giant change jar.
Cyanoacrylate was formulated specifically to bond well with human skin. Liquid stitches.
Well, kind of. The original stuff was just a castable plastic that turned out to be a really nice glue. There are formulations that were specifically for skin bonding, however.
What you can generally purchase as “superglue” (usually 100% ethyl or a blend of ethyl/methyl cyanoacrylate) is not the same thing as liquid stitches (Butyl or Octal cyanoacrylate), and only barely bonds to human skin (you can peel your fingers apart if you superglue them together, for example). The real medical-grade stuff is intense and fairly dangerous, as it can’t be peeled off like people are used to and trying to remove it usually results in ripping patches off the skin.
You can sometimes get the real stuff (Dermabond is the most commonly available brand name) but it’s so incredibly frequently counterfeited that buying from a reputable reseller is pretty critical if you don’t want to put dirty unsanitized ethyl cyanoacrylate directly into an open wound. I’ve never found the real stuff on, for example, amazon.
It’s a remarkable material. one of my favorites. Gonna go watch videos about it on youtube right now, now that I think of it. it’s been a while, there might be some new ones.
I feel like it would make a good 3d printer material for certain applications, and there are formulations that are highly recyclable. I would love to be able to print prototypes without wasting tons of plastic. But I need to learn a lot more about materials science and a little more about robotics before I can really reason about how a working cyanoacrylate printer would behave. It would be a fun project to try if I had tons of money.
I was a student in a lab, so I was tasked with making the 10% HCL bath to clean the glassware. I learned that day why you should always add acid to water, and not add water to acid. The building was evacuated.
I’m sad that I didn’t have access to random chemicals growing up. All these fun stories makes me feel like I missed out!
