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.
I promise I never had a little brother.
Fun side hypothesis proven by this experiment: Everything is made of fossil fuels (especially if this took place in America).
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
Cleaning up for months
Sounds like my first internship. Huge, multi-million dollar test loop for compressor validation. Shortly after I left one day a 1/4 inch tube fitting on top of the compressor, part of the oil system, sheared off during a test. While I dont remember the oil pressure I do remember the video a coworker took of the incident.
Oil geysering all the way to the 40ft high ceiling. For 45 minutes.
I get back the next day and the whole test loop is covered in oil. Footprint-wise think two semi trailers next to each other. Oil on the floor, oil in the (water only) trench drains which they had dammed quickly, oil on thousands of feet of piping.
Let me reiterate; I was the intern. Aka, my job description now included “waste oil remediation.” It took a week-ish for your boots to stop sticking as you walked and far longer than that to clean the piping.
To top things off this happened in winter and the oil viscosity reflected the cold conditions. Thus as spring and summer rolled in and the temperature increased the pipes started…dripping. Honestly this was years ago and I suspect they’re still wiping oil up here and there.
Brutal, oil spills are the worst, even in really small volumes. That stuff will crawl straight up a wall.
Brilliant writing, funny story told well, 10/10, would set my experiment on fire for.
Could you have extinguished the fire with the LN2? Not that I would have reacted any better in the moment.
Maybe… it was a big enough fire that I was worried about triggering the sprinklers / fire alarm so I wasn’t in any mood to experiment further.
I was seven.
My dad didn’t give me a paintbrush so I made one by taping a chunk of styrofoam to a stick so I could paint my wooden airplane. It was oil based paint.
When my war vet father saw the styrofoam dissolving, he grabbed the can away from me, remembered the cigarette in his mouth, then shoved it back and made me put the lid on first.
And that was when I learned how to make
nitro glycerine*napalm.You didn’t make nitroglycerin. Maybe you could classify it it as a form of napalm though
NAPALM that was it, my mistake. I’ll edit my post.
NAPALM DEATH
Holy shit, all it takes to make napalm is a cigarette and some oil paint ??! brb
Don’t forget the styrofoam!
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…
4 different valuable observations, science gained a lot that day.
Science gained a scientist that day
Almost lost them too.
There are old chemists and there are bold chemists, but there aren’t many old bold chemists.
That “almost” is where the most interesting science happens.
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.
That book is a great read in general
It is. Unless you’re from a strictly solid rocket fuel family, then you probably won’t like it.
Chlorine trifluoride? The best part of that quote is the end imo. It’s an amazing oxidizer but it’s also hugely impractical to store or work with.
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! 😜
I have a small concrete patio inside my house that is open so it’s perfect for the pets (2 cats and 2 dogs) do poop and pee. I went traveling for 2 days and left the pets home and when I came back there was a lot of pee. I was out of cleaner and, since I’m a genius, I used BLEACH to clean the pet piss. Well, we had to evacuate because I just created a chemical weapon inside my house. Almost fainted.
Yeah… bleach and ammonia are a very bad combo.
Considering how many times as a kid I mixed any household chemicals I could find in empty pill bottles, I’m really surprised I never killed myself.
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.
My first thought was, why didn’t she just paint a finger? Something small in case she was wrong. But then I remembered how I was in pretty much every lab at that age.
Yes, silver nitrate. Also, she would have had that lesson painted on her face for at least a week.
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.
Friend thought water on a grease fire was only bad because some flaming grease would get washed away, so threw a bucket of water at a grease fire from a fish fry over a big concrete patio. He thought it may spread, but that it would be something he could then stamp out pretty easily.
And that’s how he learned the ignition point of oil is way higher than the boiling point of water and that steam explosions are exciting.
Fortunately, he mostly missed with the water, so singed eyebrows (and probably stained pants), were all the damage.
Test failed successfully.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-dioxygen-difluoride
There are a bunch of these if you search the tagline
I was not prepared for
spoiler
FOOF
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 😕
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.
About ten years ago I had to change an AM radio stations back up generator battery. It was like 3 car batteries fused into one big heavy mother fucker.
The large wrench I was using slipped out of my bad and skipped across the terminals. For some reason unknown to me I pulled my hands back as soon as it slipped. So I was okay but that was a HUGE spark and the terminal that hit the middle of the wrench carved out a huge hunk of the wrench like it was warm butter.
Electricity will fucking kill you
Warning: FAFO is not a good way to learn about hydrofluoric acid.
HF is a weak acid but extremely complex binding. If you spill it on skin, it will react with any Ca in your body and FUCK.YOU.UP! Always have plenty of water with Ca to rinse with and Ca containing “lotion” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrofluoric_acid_burn?wprov=sfla1
It is also fun as you can get really interesting results. I wanted to make a coffee cup with no bottom and put some in a cup and placed the cup in Ca-water. What happened was it removed the glazing and made a cup with slight leak as liquid permiates the clay.
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.
It’s not a war crime if you’re not at war!
Taps-head.jpg
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?
Probably use dawn soup first, then wash with very cold water to prevent your pores from opening further?
