As a child, my main recurring Christmas gift was a chemistry set. That was back when chemistry sets were "dangerous", with real chemicals that you could actually get to. I preferred the "experiments" that changed colors and exploded.
I once made a batch of gunpowder. My father was skeptical as to whether it would actually burn or not so he placed a little pile on the wooden floor in our walled-in back porch and lit it.
It burned.
In school, I was fond of labs. Show-and-tell was often a chemistry experiment. It often resulted in an evacuation.
In elementary school, I set up a demonstration of how crude oil was cracked to make different compounds. The science teacher did the actual demonstration. There was fire involved so they didn't let a little kid perform it. That would be dangerous.
I told him the tube was getting blocked. He didn't listen.
When it blew, the cork in the test tube hit a girl in the front row and knocked her out of her chair.
Oh, I continued my mayhem into college. I once spilled some concentrated hydrochloric acid on the floor of a class laboratory. The correct response is to neutralize the acid with a base and then wash the spot. My choice of base? Concentrated ammonia solution.
Unfortunately, the gases given off by ammonia solution and hydrochloric acid, ammonia and hydrogen chloride, will combine in air to form a white, solid, particulate substance, ammonium chloride.
Soon, I couldn't see a foot in front of my face. Another evacuation.
My first ten years at Auburn University was a five year curriculum in Pharmacy. I wanted it for the physiological background that I could take into a double major with psychology. I was interested in neurophysiology before neurophysiology was cool. But there was also a lot of chemistry to keep me happy.
For the first ten years at Auburn (I spent twenty years there alternately studying and working my way through a double major and graduate school.) I variously commuted from home in Valley, Alabama and lived in a dormitory. I didn't drive, though. For awhile, I tagged along with a chemistry professor who lived in Valley. I paid for the lift working as his lab assistant. He collected amino acids, synthesizing one after another and determining their properties. There wasn't much color or explosions. There could have been explosions but I would have lost my ride.
But I did get to watch him run his tests and I washed a lot of glassware.
Occasionally, there was a class (for credit) that was basically students helping a professor with their project. I jumped on those.
It's been awhile since I've played around with chemicals. Chemicals for home exploration became scarce about the time I graduated from college. Blowing up buildings full of people became a thing and the only way you could order a laboratory grade chemical was if you had proof that you had some professional or occupational reason to have it. Chemistry sets became safe (lame). You couldn't actually get at the chemicals; you could only transfer them from one closed container to another. And even if you could get at them, they were all very dilute solutions and there was only enough to perform the "experiments" in the manual.
Things have loosened up now and you can buy reasonable chemistry sets and individual chemicals online (for instance, from Home Science Tools) and, in larger cities, from local dealers who cater to hobbyists.
I'm not sure how I want to approach chemistry next year. I don't want to rely too much on laboratory grade chemicals so as to keep close to the portable and inexpensive philosophy of the blog, but we can't really avoid some chemical purchases. It would also be hard to avoid some level of chemistry hardware - glassware, heating equipment, supports, those sorts of things, but all that tends to be pretty inexpensive.
Two resources I keep close are:
and
They have a lot of the basic material at prices that adventurers can afford.
The blog is basically for introducing adventurers (including myself) to different fields. For more in-depth study, I am writing the LabBooks, and I do want to start one on Chemistry. Like the astronomy and physics LabBooks, they will be a long term project and I'll be working on very basic topics for a good while. But they'll be available at the Timeline as they progress.
In the meantime, have a fun and satisfying New Years Eve and New Years Day, and may all your future years be better than any that has gone before.
