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.

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.

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

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 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.

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).

rookie mistake i would have simply let the acid and copper continue reacting

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.

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:

1. I’m a muppet.
2. I’m a bloody muppet.
3. 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!)
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Glass containers are fragile from the inside.

Anyway, that’s my “nitric acid acts upon trousers” moment.

I once decided to see what would happen if I connected the terminals of a 6v lantern battery with an unbent paperclip. Turns out it glows red hot and hurts like a motherfucker when you grab it in a panic to disconnect it.

Sulphuric Acid acts on trousers and carpets. Wooden desks seem remarkably immune.

Found out after getting an actual chemical and chemistry set from a deceased relative. Parents didn’t check what was in it, just “chemistry is educational, good he’s learning”.

I was either dropping magnesium or potassium into a beaker of sulphuric acid as both of them were in the set too. And I was either a butterfingered lummox, or the act of dropping the metal into unbalanced the beaker knocked it over and the sulphuric acid cascaded onto my jeans eating through them and making my leg itchy, and bubbling the carpet into a stinky white then grey foam. I can still picture-ish that sight; and I’m normally not very visually minded, a testament to the deep impression the experience left on me.

Was much more sensible after that: just burning magnesium and chucking potassium into tub of water in the garden like you do in Chemistry class from time to time.

4 different valuable observations, science gained a lot that day.

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

Did you know that acetone and/or other common reagents from a college chemistry course can remove your fingerprints?

Fume hood? ❌

Safety glasses? ❌

Gloves? ❌

Lab coat? ❌

Oh yeah. It’s chemistry time. 😎