Electric Hot Stuff

Discussion in 'Other Reminiscences' started by Frank Sanoica, Sep 22, 2020.

  1. Frank Sanoica

    Frank Sanoica Supreme Member
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    Believe this? Advertisement circa 1900, touting cure for overweight:

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    Advertisement offering "sanitized tape worms jar packed" under the heading "Fat! the enemy that is shortening your life - banished!", c. 1900. It promises "no ill effects", but side effects include diarrhoea and abdominal pain.
     
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  2. John Brunner

    John Brunner Senior Staff
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    Only someone who is trying to sell you something would refer to diarrhea and abdominal pain as "no ill effects."

    I'd say you're blowing smoke up my ass, but that actually used to be a thing, too:
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    Tobacco enema, anyone?
    Please tell me they had menthol.
     
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  3. Frank Sanoica

    Frank Sanoica Supreme Member
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    @John Brunner

    When I was a kid, the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, a most wonderful place for a science-minded kid, had a large display of human parasites (those visible). Large glass jars of perhaps 3 gallons each. One had a tapeworm removed from a person's intestine. It FILLED the bottle! 30 feet long, disgusting to imagine, I'll never forget it. Somewhere along the ensuing years, perhaps due to viewer flak, the display was removed. A shame we cannot any longer face the true facts of parasites affecting life.

    Nevertheless, that museum is one of the truly unforgettable places I remember. The building itself was constructed of huge limestone blocks for the 1893 Columbian Exposition, opened as a museum in 1933 Worlds Fair.

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    A truly magnificent building!


    Frank
     
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  4. John Brunner

    John Brunner Senior Staff
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    @Frank Sanoica

    I grew up playing with a huge Gilbert Chemlab set that the government would arrest any parent for giving their kid, and the EPA would make a clean-up site of their home.
    [​IMG]

    For some reason, there was a retail lab supply place in town I was in all the time. The guy would prep deceased cats in the back room for use in college biology classes. I can still smell the formaldehyde.

    I've often gone to the various Smithsonian museums in DC. As you say, the architecture is just as much the attraction as what's inside the buildings. And I also mourn that when the truth offends these days, you just get rid of it.
     
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  5. Frank Sanoica

    Frank Sanoica Supreme Member
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    @John Brunner

    My Chemistry Set, as we called it, I swear was housed in a red metal box like the Erector Set, but I could be wrong there. The bottles of chemicals were small screw-top wide-mouth, slightly smaller than baby food jars. Included were Sulfur and Sodium Nitrite, which I discovered by accident burned together beautifully with yellow-orange color. I think the Lionel train set, first one, preceded the Erector Set, which was followed by Chemistry.

    Others here know the story: 8th grade, Fall, maybe November, my basement "lab" took on the spectre of bad accident......mixing "Berge's Blasting Powder", perhaps 4 ounces, in my big porcelain mortar & pestle, suddenly and instantly conflagrated, leaving me with 2nd. degree burns to face and mixing hand. This even was responsible for cruelly shaping my on-coming puberty. High school was a flop, with a purple-plum colored face for a long time....


    Frank
     
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  6. John Brunner

    John Brunner Senior Staff
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    Wow! But you're alive.

    I had an encounter with sulphur, and with my pipe-stem alcohol torch and a bottle.
    Darwin tries to weed out adolescent boys, and somehow we elude him.

    Was yours like this:
    [​IMG]
     
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  7. Frank Sanoica

    Frank Sanoica Supreme Member
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    @John Brunner

    Yes! The jars were squarish- like those shown.
    Frank
     
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  8. Frank Sanoica

    Frank Sanoica Supreme Member
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    Lionel caused the "spark" of interest, from there electricity became one of the most important sources of interest and learning in my young life. My Mother's toaster was acting up, so I got the old one. They have heating elements in them like this:

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    Operate on 120 volts, I wanted a short piece of element, ~ 3 inches long, to ignite test powders out back. I found a 6-volt dry cell would bring a short piece of that element to red heat in a second or two, just right for "count-downs". Drilled a hole through the basement window frame which was at ground level of back yard, ran a pair of Lionel derived wires about 50 feet out into the middle of the yard, buried beneath the grass. From the "bunker", countdown meant closing a knife switch:

    [​IMG]

    A small pile of home-made what-cha-call-it powder, Sulfur, Sodium Nitrate, Charcoal, sometimes "colors" like Strontium or Barium.......ignited out in the yard giving rise to a small mushroom cloud of smoke!

    [​IMG]

    The neighbors on one side were understanding; the others, I never thought about it much until years later I realized they probably feared me; it was the kind of folks they were, "hand-wringers", all-fearing people whose heads were irretrievably buried in another world.......

    The big-one was some years later, when my Mother's big Holly-hock bush had become sufficiently unwanted that 1/4 stick of 40% dynamite buried in it's roots dispatched it: clear over into the fearful neighbors' yard! I swept up the dirt, amidst weak complaints......No further consequence experienced.

    Frank
     
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  9. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    I don't know if I've mentioned it before, @Frank Sanoica but, although I often don't know enough about what you're talking about to participate, I very much appreciate your posts.
     
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  10. Ed Wilson

    Ed Wilson Veteran Member
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    What male child doesn't like blowing stuff up. We just used firecrackers and cherry bombs though.
     
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  11. John Brunner

    John Brunner Senior Staff
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    The closest I've come to that stuff (except for commercial M80s & Black Cats) was making cannons out of empty beer cans with holes drilled in the bottom. You would tape them end-to-end until you had a tube about 8-10 cans long. Squirt in a little lighter fluid, shake the assembly to get it distributed and atomized, then put a match to the end.

    BOOM!

    I often wondered why the pressure did not blow the cans or the taped joints apart.
     
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  12. Frank Sanoica

    Frank Sanoica Supreme Member
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    @John Brunner

    Even more ingenious (though costly and destructive):

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    The old milk cans- 10 gallon size.

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    The lids were tapered so as to seal and fit tightly. Often, to loosen one required hammering on the lip from below.

    As a kid, my Dad lived across the alley from a dairy bottling company in Chicago. They had racks of cans standing outdoors......after inclining one at an angle, punching a tiny hole in the bottom edge, a handful of calcium carbide was thrown in with some water, the lid hammered on tight.......then after a suitable time for the can to fill with acetylene gas (extremely flammable), a torch was held to the "touch-hole", causing an extremely percussive explosion, sometimes throwing the heavy lid into the air for half a block distance. He never revealed if he himself partook of this madness, though I imagine not.

    A burst can, or lid hitting a bystander, could easily have caused death.

    Frank
     
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  13. John Brunner

    John Brunner Senior Staff
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    I had no idea that's how acetylene was made, although I read that it is naturally occurring.

    I had a job where I bought reactive gases for the ion microfabrication equipment we manufactured: argon, helium, liquid nitrogen, oxygen. But never acetylene. We also did sputter coaters on the side for electron microscopy using some of those same gases.

    I am not a propeller head, but I did get the chance to work around some. We had one guy who worked in our lab, and if he had enough beers at lunch, he'd dunk a banana in the liquid nitrogen and shatter it on the floor. I don't know how he retained all his fingers.
     
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  14. Frank Sanoica

    Frank Sanoica Supreme Member
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    @John Brunner

    Most interesting! This ancient item used acetylene gas for lighting purposes in mining:
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    [​IMG]

    I had a couple of them as a kid. Very poor light output, plus open flame meant Methane gas (firedamp) in a mine could be ignited by the lamps. The bottom ribbed container unscrewed and was filled with Calcium Carbide granules. Typical carbide found commercially:

    [​IMG]
    Because it combines vigorously with water to form explosive acetylene gas, it must be stored and kept dry.

    Upper part of the lamp had a smaller screw-top which allowed filling the upper chamber with water. A small valve operated by the lever on top controlled the water drip-rate onto the carbide below it. Burned this way, much carbon as lampblack was formed, requiring cleaning off the reflector often. A tiny wheel visible on the reflector in first picture was rilled to strike flint, igniting the lamp. Find them in antique stores today.

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    This is a "Big Bang" toy carbide cannon; noise-maker (though I shot marbles out of mine!). The top plunger struck a flint to fire the cannon after water and carbide was introduced. Many varieties were sold; mine was ordered from Johnson Smith & Co., Detroit. Carbide is incidentally not easily made, by roasting carbon with calcium; chemical identification, CaC2. Acetylene is C2H2, more correctly HC:CH, having a TRIPLE bond, the simplest of the ALKYNE SERIES.

    Acetylene gas is no longer commercially made by use of carbide, but rather by the partial combustion of Methane gas (Natural Gas), since about the 1950s.

    Frank
     
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  15. Ed Wilson

    Ed Wilson Veteran Member
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    Calcium carbide was once used by coal miners to light their way underground before there were battery lamps as Frank mentioned. A childhood friend of mine found some and mixed it with water in a jar to see it explode. When nothing happened after a while he picked it up and shook it. It exploded in his hand and he lost an eye.
     
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