From sci.chem Tue Nov 19 12:41:29 1996
From: rwpick01@ldd.net (Randal W. Pick)
Newsgroups: sci.chem
Subject: Re: Lab Accidents.......
Date: 13 Nov 1996 00:44:07 GMT
Organization: Midwest Internet

Here's another of mine.

Since I was an ace chemistry student, naturally the most chemically 
challenged person in the high school chemistry class, whom I'll call 
John (as in Buhner), glommed onto me as a lab partner.

I have a lot of stories from that period, but I want to keep this short,
so I'll cut to the chase.

For my high school chemistry term paper I chose explosives, of course.
For the term paper I manufactured some nitrogen triiodide (*watch out!*)
and what was called "torpedo compound" from one of the ancient "Chemical
Formulary" volumes the instructor had lying about. 

Back in the good old days they had fireworks called torpedoes which 
exploded when you threw them on the ground. They looked like cherry 
bombs without a fuse. Railroads used them for signaling by
laying them on the tracks in morse code-like patterns.

Torpedo compound is a friction sensitive explosive made from red 
phosphorus, potassium chlorate, and some chalk.
Since the recipe in "Chemical Formulary" was for about 1/4 lb that's
what I made (didn't occur to me to scale it down). The ingredients
must be mixed wet - or else.

So I made up about 100 grams of this stuff, used about 2 grams of it 
to stuff into 4 or 5 "torpedoes" made up of folded notebook paper and
set it out to dry overnight like the recipe said.

Next day was term paper time. It was delicious! I spent 20 or 30 
minutes lecturing on the thermodynamics and kinetics of 
chain reactions, almost putting *myself* to sleep until I ended
the lecture with "....resulting in a tremendous explosion!" at which
point my intructor, lab partner, and I threw the torpedoes we had
been holding to the floor. The resulting detonation was loud enough
to cause more than one bystander in the hall outside to stick their
head in to see if everything was OK. One girl fell off her lab stool.

The NI3 was pretty neat, too. I was moving one of those long Dairy
Queen plastic spoons across the benchtop to use up the remaining 
explosive (snap, crackle, pop!) when I hit a big piece which went
POW! shattering the spoon to pieces. For the next several hours 
every time I combed my hair it snapped, crackled, and popped.

But that's not the best part. When the lecture was over I was 
going to dispose of the remaining torpedo compound properly by 
rinsing it down the sink. My lab partner begged and pleaded the 
intructor to let him take it home, which he did, over my objections.

On the way to school next morning I heard a loud BOOM! I thought 
for a second then shook my head, "Surely not!". Later that morning 
I learned that the chem instructor had been called on the carpet
and thoroughly chewed out by both the principal and my lab partner's
(very stuffy and British, not to mention irate) mother.

What had happened was this: John took home my jar of slurried torpedo
compund, spread half of it on a sheet of notebook paper, and left it
on the front porch to dry overnight. When he got up the next morning he
went out and picked it up. He told me later he remembered seeing sparks 
when a few loose particles rolled across the paper. Then, FLOOOOSH!

Burned off his eyebrows and eyelashes. The doctor spent most of the 
morning scraping chalk from under his eyelids. No permanent injury 
(God watches over drunks and fools).

His dad took the jar of remaining explosive, started a fire in the 
burn barrel, threw the jar in and put two more bags of trash on top 
of that. That was what I heard on the way to school that morning. 
I walked by his house on the way home. The only thing left of the burn 
barrel was the bottom hoop and there was trash scattered over every 
adjacent yard. 

Well that's one way to dispose of it.

PS - guess what my first job out of school was? Plant Chemist at a 
Trojan Div. of IMC dynamite plant. It was uneventful.