another good book

Another disaster caused by a transport ship looking to expedite unloading. They heated the molasses to make it flow faster into the tank.

Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer by Nevil Shute

John, as an engineering entrepreneur yourself, this should be a good read for you.

OK, I'll get it.

I read really fast so burn up books. Then I have to get rid of most of them.

We have Little Libraries around here, tiny boxes for book exchange. I drop books into them as I walk to work.

I'm reading

Plutonium: A History of the World's Most Dangerous Element Paperback – May 15, 2009 by Jeremy Bernstein (Author)

pretty cool.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I have here a few print editions of "Addicts, Idiots, and Losers".

"I quickly picked up my things and got out of there."

Sort of reminds one of "Red Meat",

This Rafiquzzaman's "Fundamentals of Digital Logic and Microprocessor Design, Third Edition" is pretty good.

The "Solid State Physics" or Kittel has a lot going on.

My city has a public library that rarely doesn't have a book I want. If they don't have it, they usually can request it for me from a local university.

I'll put this on my reading list too.

Well, in the grand scheme of things, the most dangerous element is Oxygen. But that was a very long time ago.

"They" didn't heat the molasses. It was unseasonably hot which caused the molasses to expand. There were other causes:

The wiki article, with references, says they heated the molasses. How you can make a statement with such certitude about something that happened 107 years ago and about which you know so little, is beyond rational explanation.

Correction: it was the Scientific American article linked in the Wiki article. And unseasonable warm typically refers to a brief daytime high of a few hours. The gazillion gallons in the tank represents the state corresponding to the long term average, which was probably very cold. Molasses has a specific gravity of about 1.5 ( I think), meaning it's going to take a while to thaw out.

The tank was built cheap and fast and never reviewed for design. And located in a very bad place.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

That's not how I read it. I read: "... and the previous day, a ship had delivered a fresh load of molasses, which had been warmed to decrease its viscosity for transfer".

Could I trouble to provide the location of where the Wikipedia article said that they had "heated the molasses"?

This one, I presume:

Again, I don't see anything that resembles "they heated the molasses". A quote from the article would be helpful.

There's quite a bit of speculation in the above paragraph.

It's not a gazillion. It was a total of 2.3 million U.S. gallons (8,700 cubic meters).

Change in viscosity with temperature. I have no clue which type of molasses was involved:

I read a little more and concluded that the tank was badly designed, badly built, badly maintained, and in poor condition. In my never humble opinion, adding a load of warm molasses to the tank was probably fly that broke the camel's back. The rood cause was the tank was rusted and was probably falling apart. The tank and molasses temperatures were probably incidental.

It includes an image of a contemporary newspaper, the Boston Post 16 January

"Internal Cause was Explosion, Says State Chemist

It became known last night that W. L. Wedger, State police chemist in charge of explosives, had reached the positive conclusions that the disaster instead of being due to a collapse of the great tank was caused by an internal explosion. Mr. Wedger in his investigation is understood to have found that the tank was fitted with heating apparatus that connected with a boiler. This heating apparatus consisted of pipes inside the tank and its purpose was to make the molasses run freely into the tank carts that trucked it to the Cambridge distillery of the company.

Mr. Wedger after a careful study of the matter is reported to have reached the conclusion that in a great tank of molasses so heated there could be generated a mixture of air and gas that would be as explosive as the same amount of air and gasolene. That horses were blown about like chips, houses torn asunder, and the heavy section of the Elevated railroad structure smashed like an eggsheel are other considerations linked with the conclusions of Mr. Wedger. That windows in the neighborhood remained intact is explained by the fact that the explosive waves in such a blowup would be decidedly different in their effect on surroundings than would be the case if dynamite exploded.

Thus it is understood that Mr. Wedger's formal report will be that the disaster was due to an internal explosion."

But that it was capable of being heated is not evidence of it having been heated at the time. I can't seem to find a copy of Wedger's report online, and Wedger seems not to feature in later reports. A conclusion reached on the day of the incident may not hold when more evidence becomes known.

Theo

Right. The tank had chronic leaks at the seams, so any overpessure, beyond the liquid head, is unlikely. Kids with buckets would collect the molasses that leaked from the poorly rivited seems. Two of those kids died in the flood.

No engineer or city inspector ever reviewed the design or construction. The steel didn't meet specs.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I'm suspicious. Someone knowledgeable in explosives would know that the incident was a deflagration and not an explosion:

In my never humble opinion, that various descriptions of the damage appears to have been caused by the weight of 2.3 million gallons of molasses and not from an air pressure differential (explosion).

Also, there was little mention of noise from an explosion beyond: "At about 1 p.m., they heard a low rumble. At first, many assumed it was a Boston Elevated train approaching." Explosions don't "rumble".

Also, 35mph is not faster than sound: "The wave of molasses rushed through the North End at about 35 miles per hour."

I'll dig deeper when I have time.

Hmm, do you think there is essential difference between "had been warmed" (present in the text you cite) and "heated"?

According to various online dictionaries, "warmed" and "heated" the same:

More of the same:

I use "warmed" to mean anything between ambient temperature and where the object becomes too hot to handle. The term "heated" can be any temperature above ambient temperature. (Anything below ambient would be "cooled").

ChatBPT "temperature molasses pours easily"

Looks like about 100F (37.8C) is a tolerable estimate. You can probably survive putting your fingers in 100F molasses. Therefore, the Boston molasses had probably been "warmed" and not "heated".

Back to rebuilding my 1960's Delta kitchen faucet. The brass is in good condition, but the rubber parts are all crumbling and everything is encrusted with lime deposits (hard water). Two trips to the hardware store today. Probably one more tomorrow. I hate plumbing.

All of the waterfront of the North End, Charleston/Everett, and East Cambridge were heavily industrialized in the early 1900s. Raw goods (and molassess apparently) in the NE, petroleum products in Charleston/Everett, and coal gasification in East Cambridge were major industries.

Nowadays the historically Italian North End is mostly high-end residential/tourist trap area, with a shrinking number of Italian restaurants that tend to serve rather average Italian food, compared to my childhood recollections.

Only main legacy of the industrial history is the large LNG tanker terminal in Everett, longest-operating liquefied natural gas import facility in the U.S. Remarkably there is only one industry still served by freight rail inside the Boston city limits, an ABEX logistics warehouse.

There are some good books about rum, like

Try a tablespoon of good rum on a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream. Or Bananas Foster.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics