The bangs and smells department

It is sincerely hoped that the eyes of anyone as young and irresponsible as we were does not discover this account. Certainly, anyone, whatever their age, would be ill-advised to attempt to emulate our experiments. It is unlikely, however that sources of the substances I mention are readily accessible today and it was only by the greatest of good fortune that we survived. We were able in those days to obtain virtually anything we needed in the way of chemicals. The supplier of the chemical substances wrote everything down as Copper Sulphate: he was in later years the subject of an exposure on the front page of a rather scurrilous Sunday newspaper and was closed down, much to our disappointment. Some people have no sense of fun or adventure! In these days of terrorism I imagine we would all have been imprisoned for our activities.   
In my wayward youth I was an avid reader and at some point I came across a well-illustrated text-book titled Inorganic Chemistry, by a certain Mr Partington (1946). This, unlike modern text-books, proceeded, after a couple of boring chapters rambling on about atomic structure, energy shells and so forth, to discuss the properties of every known element and its compounds together with detailed instructions about how to make them and their practical uses. Today the nomenclature has changed somewhat; instead of ferric and ferrous, for example, they now refer to Iron two and Iron three, a rather childish system borrowed, I believe, from the Americans.
Deep within the pages of this admirable tome were to be found descriptions of such exciting and unstable compounds and mixtures as fulminating mercury, picric acid, certain ammonium compounds and a host of others, including nitro-glycerine and dynamite. News of this fount of knowledge was soon communicated to my three school companions and we immediately became passionate amateur chemists. How we managed not to blow ourselves up is, on reflection, somewhat of a mystery.  We also observed that certain gases were extremely foul-smelling whilst other liquids such as ammonium sulphide formed the basis of stink-bombs, in those days sold in small glass spheres.
On Fridays in assembly, we were, in addition to the morning hymn, the day’s bible reading [by a prefect] and the headmaster’s notices, exposed to a musical performance by some aspiring performer, and I recollect that on one particular Friday we were being treated to a particularly dire cello performance by a fourth-former (who actually later became a fairly well-known session guitarist at the BBC). Ol (one of our gang of four) had his latest chemical invention with him. This consisted of a glass medicine bottle half-full of HNO3 with a lump of FeS lodged in the neck and fitted with a cork. Being unimpressed by the dirge on stage he was fiddling about with this when the inevitable happened – the lump somehow became dislodged and fell into the acid, where it began to fizz enthusiastically. The Great Hall was filled with all the 1200 pupils of the school and all the staff. Unable to think of another solution to the potential disaster, Ol rammed the cork in as hard as he could and stood the bottle under the row of chairs in front, hoping that the H2S being evolved would somehow be contained until assembly was over. Of course, this was too much to hope for. About a minute later there was a loud pop, the cork shot out and the foulest imaginable stench began to spread throughout the rows of seated boys, causing loud remarks and not a little consternation. The head, who was a chemistry graduate, and, moreover, had more than an inkling about our little group, merely stopped the performance and dismissed the assembled company, adding the ominous words “And the first five rows on the left will remain behind.”
All four of us received what was termed ‘A good beating’ later that morning. Well worth it, as our reputation grew from that point on. 

On the explosives front we would have done credit to any terrorist group, although we never actually blew anyone up – we’ll come to the milk-float incident presently. We started off with relatively harmless things like matchheads (quite good if tightly wrapped in foil and heated strongly), the contents of fireworks (usually a bit feeble, and only available in late Autumn) home-made gunpowder (surprisingly difficult to manufacture consistently, as the ingredients must be mixed in exact proportions and ground very finely [and separately!] to form a satisfactory explosive. Naturally, metalwork lessons were utilised to make miniature brass cannons, from which we used to fire ¼” ball-bearings. 
We then moved on to a most reliable combination: weed-killer [sodium chlorate] and sugar. This was packed into a metal tube and detonated by a very fine wire inside connected to long wires through holes in the casing and sealed with plasticene or putty. When the ends of the leads are contacted to a battery the wire inside becomes red-hot and sets the thing off. 
We found the method particularly useful for underwater applications. Find a deep stretch of a salmon river above a weir, Fire the bomb and collect the stunned fish as they float down to the fall. Actually it’s not too bad ecologically – the fish you don’t collect soon recover and the products of the explosion are not particularly poisonous. It is certainly preferable to the washing-up liquid method. 
Another exciting combination is Potassium Chlorate and Red Phosphorous, but it is extremely unstable and must be mixed very carefully. It doesn’t need a detonator, as merely dropping a container of it will set it off. Not the kind of thing to carry in one’s pocket! On one occasion we gingerly mixed up an ink bottle of the stuff, stood it on a tree-lined path in the park next to the school and let go at it with catapults from some way off. After a few attempts someone scored a direct hit, with most satisfactory results: an ear-splitting bang, a fog of smoke, a crater in the path and the nearest trees (they were fairly low and overhanging) suddenly looked decidedly stark as far as their foliage went. 
Mr Partington was also very helpful on the topic of nitro-glycerine. The ingredients are readily available (glycerine is used to make soft cake icing), acids etc from our obliging supplier. By stabilising it in Fuller’s earth (used to clean furs) and packing it in cardboard tubes, lo and behold – dynamite! I shall forbear to provide the precise method and the internet is also rather reticent about the topic. Suffice it to say that it is advisable to conduct mixing and separating operations in a cold fridge.  
Fireworks are made to produce coloured and other effects by the addition of metallic salts and anyone familiar with the flame test will be able to tell you the various possibilities – salts of barium, strontium, iron filings etc.
We experimented with home-made rockets but they never really got off the ground! However, just across the park was a private school. This was attended by a really loathsome shower of obnoxious boys, driven there by their doting parents. We had push-bikes, of course. Our school and theirs were at a constant state of war. 
Enter secret weapon no 1: the rocket launcher. This consisted of an 18” length of steel tube about ¾” bore with a skeleton stock at the back and a short handle underneath. Insert the stick of a sixpenny rocket into this device, point it in the general direction of the opposition and ask your assistant to light the blue touch paper in the time-honoured way. It takes a bit of practice to get the trajectory angle right, but the range is quite surprising – far exceeding that of a catapult. An excellent way to put the opposition to flight, and so much more fun than launching upwards, especially if you get the range such that the pretty final effect coincides with the arrival of the missile in the enemy camp. Talk about seeing stars! It is best to find one particular kind of rocket and to stick to it for the sake of accuracy. 
At this time I seem to remember that we were studying the elements of group 1 (Na, K, Li etc) and the class demonstration of minute fragments of these put into water led to another interesting line of action. A 5/- tin of Na represented tremendous value for money! The contents are a couple of hundred greyish metallic rough-cut cylinders about 1 cm in diameter and slightly longer. To prevent reaction they are immersed in mineral oil. Whereas the school lab demo produced a tiny flame, due to the size of the Na chip used, the reaction of a full lump is far more impressive. Which brings us to the tale of the milk-float. 
It so happened that near the school was a series of side-streets with terraced houses running downwards to the road along the edge of the school grounds. It had been raining heavily and the water in the drains and gutters was flowing freely. We had nipped out to the corner shop for some cakes and a quick smoke when Dave stopped short. “Look at that!” One drain-grating further down the hill was a parked milk-float. Too good to miss. Five lumps of sodium were quickly dropped into the drain we were standing by. 
Now, as we all know, the reaction of sodium with water is rather exothermic and liberates H2. After a short time the heat generated by the Na (which melts in the process) ignites the gas, together with atomic Na, producing the characteristic yellow flame. Obviously the thin coating of oil on the surface of the metal delays the onset of the reaction slightly. Confine the H2 to a drainpipe and the expansive effect is more evident. It couldn’t have worked better. There was a great whoosh and the float was enveloped in a glowing yellow flame. Spectacular, but we didn’t stick round to wait for further developments. 
One thing, as they say, leads to another, and Ol formed a desire to see what a really big lump would do. He was of the opinion that the effect would be seen better at night, so we arranged to meet one evening down by the canal. This time he had managed to obtain a lump of Na the size of a small house-brick. This we tied in a plastic bag with a stone to weigh it down, hurled it into the cut and awaited developments. 
It took several minutes for the water to find its way into the bag. There was a violent explosion and a flaming mass surfaced, only to explode again, scattering smaller lumps of the element in a wide circle, where they continued the display for some minutes. Incidentally, this definitely is environmentally harmful as the end product is NaOH, which doesn’t do a lot for the pH value of the water, although in this case it might have helped to break down the oil on the surface.
Alas, tempus fugit and our schooldays passed all too quickly.