From sci.chem Mon Dec  2 12:43:59 1996
From: kp9151r@acad.drake.edu


I can confirm a previously mentioned statement that bunsen burners can
make lovely fountains when hooked up to high pressure water spouts...our
labs have certain benches with horizontal nozzles, presumably for no
real purpose than to spray all persons to your immediate left or to be
mistaken as gas outlets by careless students.  


Speaking of carelessness...my own dumb lab mistake (rather tame):  As a
senior undergrad doing research I oftentimes had LONG hours in the
lab... ofentimes doing column chromatography that took hours...sometimes
overnight.  Usually nighttime research for undergrads is a no-no, but
I'd taught in the dept and had special permission.  I was also involved
in the dept's goal of finding useful and interesting demo's, so I broke
out the demo book one night.

Now the Nitrogen Triiodide demo is a fairly well-known demo...and I knew
enough to understand this wasn't something to tinker too much with
...certainly enough to know not to scale it up...but I'd seen it done
and was curious.

I followed the procedure carefully, and even scaled down a little...and
spread the material out to dry.  The procedure I had said to "allow the
solid to dry undisturbed for at least 30 minutes"...

I kept myself busy pushing the legitimate frontiers o' scientific
inquiry whilst the stuff sat for about 60 minutes.  Then I came back
into the room, where the material was spread out on filter paper,
sitting on an old lab stool in the center of a main walkway.   It looked
dry, so I took my trusty yardstick (we US folk still ain't metric 
y'know) and tapped it w/ a very outstretched arm.

A shotgun *BANG* and purple smoke rose into the air!!  It was much
louder than I'd remembered.  I was quite pleased!!  =)

I went about some other business and later returned to the area of
detonation to find my mistake.  While the outside of the solid was
dry...the inside was STILL wet upon detonation...meaning that with one
loud bang I managed to fling WET nitrogen triiodide all over the floor,
the counter, the sides of the benches and drawers.  Over time, of 
course, it too became dry and ready for detonation!

I spent the next two hours cursing myself, as I shuffled BACK and FORTH
down that aisle, EVERY SINGLE STEP sounding like a mix between bubble
wrap being popped or amplified rice crispies.  In the dead quiet of the
early morning, just a few hours before your research advisor comes in,
that's an AWFUL sound to hear!! It's amazing how that stuff can get
between EVERY little crack in the floor...and it seemed like it took
much longer to detonate all of the splattered triiodide than it ever did
to do one of those blessed columns!


NOT that it is anything to laugh about, but everyone hear about the wing
of a texas research lab that burned down after a post doc put
incompletely decomposed sodium down the sink?  ouch.

Kel