PDF copy of "Golden book of Chemistry Experiments"

Very similar to the one I had as a kid. That included expts on how to distill HNO3 from H2SO4 and KNO3, plus that old favourite of using H2SO4 on old teeth (from the dentist) to make HF and use it to etch glass.

--
Dirk

http://www.onetribe.me.uk/wordpress - The UK\'s only occult talk show
Presented by Dirk Bruere and Marc Power on ResonanceFM

billb! i used to read your websites religiously when i was in high school. Thanks for the fun times.

snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com wrote:

Oh, my. I remember this book. Cripes, I might still have the darned thing in some box. It got me buying glassware, finding chemical sources, and so on, too. Made my own test tube rack from out of it (modified per my skills.)

One thing this brings back is that I used to order my chemicals from Boulevard Labs in Chicago. I could get everything from picric acid to RFNA and WFNA. And I was just 15+!! They only required the use of trains for shipping certain things, like the picric acid.

By the way, there is another excellent book that has been completely and totally "sanitized" (as in, you can't get anything like it, today) is Capt. Bertrand R. Brinley's "Rocket Manual for Amateurs" with a forward by Willy Ley. I did that stuff, too, back then. Steel rocket cylinders, making rocket nozzles with a small metal lathe, a variety of interesting fuels (including potassium nitrate+sugar, which one must be VERY careful melting and using properly -- I used a double-boiler with pure H2SO4 as my bath since its boiling point was below the flash point of the mixture), and so on. I did the whole sand bag route.

There's a few other books I got access to, with good experiments to try out. One I did used iodine crystals and produced huge volumes of smoke from a thimble. I wonder where I put that book -- they took it off the library shelves while I was still going to school there and I remember having to look hard for another copy. (I think it had a magician on the cover, but I could be confusing it with another one.)

Another book which I was exposed to around that time and had things I wasn't prepared for, despite being deep into chemistry-for-action, was something I remember being called "Thermodynamics and Homemade Bombs." I had ordered it out of the state library, when young, thinking I could make firecrackers and the like from what it said. But it actually was a guerilla warefare thing and I had no interest in building anything in there (emptying rifle cartridges into a light bulb that was drilled at the base to "let the air in" and then screwed back into the light shade, for example.) No fun, just nasty evil stuff. So it got read once through and sent back without any interest in securing a copy of my own.

Thanks for this!

Jon

All is not lost. Most kids have the recipe for cooking meth or making ecstasy handy.

--
Paul Hovnanian     mailto:Paul@Hovnanian.com
------------------------------------------------------------------
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature
replaces it with.       -- Tennessee Williams

Side question: Yours is an unusual surname, and no aspersions are meant to be cast on you...but are you any relation to that sleazebag real estate developer K. Hovnanian?

Eric Lucas

You may be able to buy these on magician's supply sites - Chemical Magic.

And various type of bombs!

Cool! Bart Simpson would love it!!

He's here in AZ, in the "boonies" communities, very low prices. What's your beef?

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

I've seen his practices in both NJ and OH, and they're the same both places. He build crap houses, sells them for ridiculous prices, and builds very poorly planned developments. Given his proclivity for buying up dirt-cheap land in rural areas (as you describe it, "in the boonies"), this understandably overtaxes almost non-existent local infrastructure (roads, traffic control, schools, etc.) Then when a community that is stretched to the limits of its ability to cope because of suddenly having thousands of new residents thrust upon it dares to ask that he put a tiny fraction of his profits back into the local infrastructure, he refuses. He's sort of the Walmart of land developers.

Eric Lucas

In my early teens, we couldn't easily get H2SO4.

My "Review text in Chemistry" told me

2NaNO3 + H2SO4 -> Na2SO4 + 2HNO2

So I did the math on HCl (easier to obtain) and decided HCl + KNO3 -> HNO3 + KCl

Bad idea. After we ran from the garage we found out my friend's mother was ironing in the adjoining basement (she was not happy.) I looked back to the earlier chapter on halogens and discovered that Cl is easily released from HCl by heating with an oxidant.

I still remember watching that yellow-ish gas coming through the tube into the condenser and then not condensing. Killed the heater, but the reaction took a while to stop.

Here, in AZ, he's located in development hot spots... he's not by himself. I don't know about NJ or OH (except my sister lives in Cincinnati), but AZ REQUIRES land dedication for parks AND schools AND roads.

Of course NJ and OH are Blue States, so all the money goes for corruption, rather than infrastructure ;-)

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Oh, I have it around somewhere. It was mid-to-late 1960's book, as I recall.

Jon

Lisa, maybe, but not Bart unless you bought all the chemicals and set up the lab for him. Then he'd be interested only in making H2S.

-- Joe Legris

Or C2H6S and C4H10S.

Jon

You didn't have car batteries?

How does that equation balance?

That, and the fact that HCl (bp -85 C) is much more volatile than HNO3 (bp

83 C)--you drive both reactions by distilling out the most volatile acid. Otherwise, you just have a solution of H+, K+, NO3- and Cl-, not HNO3. HCl is the thing that you're going to distill out of that mixture, and you aren't going to be able to condense it, even with dry ice. With H2SO4, the only thing that is volatile is HNO3 and water (pure HNO3 if you use conc H2SO4, and ca. 65/35 HNO3/H2O azeotrope if you have any water present).

Immersion in an ice bath would have helped.

Eric Lucas

The book was copyright in 1960. It is almost certainly still in copyright. I don't want to be a wet blanket, but you may be hear from Random House, who now own the golden Books.

So those of you who treasure this book, download the PDF PDQ.

"Uncle Tungsten" by Oliver Sachs (the neurologist) is great fun. How he never killed himself and others remains a mystery.