The sort of science you don't see much these days

One of the marvels of the Internet age is the variety of public domain works that are available online. For instance, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the second oldest scientific journal in the world (and the oldest in English) has put their entire archives online. Looking at these articles, one finds some interesting things. For instance, here you can find the article from 1800 where Edward Howard describes the discovery of an interesting new chemical compound. Some of his observations probably would not have been made today:

Upon evaporating a portion of the saturated sulphuric liquor, I found nothing but sulphate of potash; nor had it any metallic taste. (p. 218/p. 16 of the PDF)

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The muriatic acid digested with the mercurial powder, dissolves a portion of it, without extricating any notable quantity of gas. The dissolution evaporated to a dry salt, tastes like corrosive sublimate; and the portion which the acid does not take up, is left in the state of an uninflammable oxalate. (p. 222/20 of the PDF)

Now I don't know about you, but if I was working with mercury compounds, I sure as heck wouldn't be tasting the stuff willy-nilly. (Incidentally, "corrosive sublimate" is an archaic term for mercuric chloride, one of the nastier mercury compounds). Of course, back in those days the concept of bioaccumulation may not have been known... which may be part of the reason so many chemists died young in those days. Howard, for instance, died in 1816 at the ripe old age of 42.

Cool chemistry videos

Did you know that liquid oxygen is magnetic? I'd read this, but I'd never seen it demonstrated, until now.


He has a bunch of other good ones here. Check them out.

Backyard nuclear experiments

I can't believe I hadn't come across this story before:

What the men in the funny suits found was that the potting shed was dangerously irradiated and that the area's 40,000 residents could be at risk. Publicly, the men in white promised the residents of Golf Manor that they had nothing to fear, and to this day neither Pease nor any of the dozen or so people I interviewed knows the real reason that the Environmental Protection Agency briefly invaded their neighborhood. When asked, most mumble something about a chemical spill. The truth is far more bizarre: the Golf Manor Superfund cleanup was provoked by the boy next door, David Hahn, who attempted to build a nuclear breeder reactor in his mother's potting shed as part of a Boy Scout merit-badge project.

You've got to have some admiration for his cleverness and his determination, that's for sure. Incidentally, the book mentioned in the article (The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments) can be found in PDF form here, among other places (it's virtually impossible to find a hard copy, and those that do exist cost hundreds of dollars from rare book dealers). I remember that book as a kid; the library at my junior high had a copy, and I did a number of the experiments therein. Many of them, however, would not be considered suitable material for a kids' book in this day and age. For that matter, back in the 1970s I received a chemistry set for Christmas one year, and one of the experiments involved the making of hydrogen sulphide - a gas which, dose for dose, is more toxic than hydrogen cyanide. Of course, at the levels I made it the main risk was its characteristic rotten-egg smell, but I still doubt that you'd see such an experiment in a modern chemistry set.

As for Mr. Hahn's experiments, those thinking of following in his footsteps should check out his picture here.