I’m not much of a football fan, so I’ve spent a good chunk of this afternoon lazing on the couch, watching Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel.
Ever see it? It’s a hoot. These two Hollywood special effects guys take on various urban legends and myths, and actually field-test them to see if they could be true or not. Like the guy whose wife had poured several different drain cleaners into the toilet, and not knowing this, he’d parked himself on the can, done his business, and just prior to flushing, dropped his lit cigarette butt between his thighs, and…
Yeah. They tested this with an actual toilet and a crash test dummy, although I’m pretty sure nobody ever tried to clean a toilet with gunpowder. They didn’t mind. Judging from their wild cackling and hooting, they were having a fine time.
I know how they feel. Blowin’ stuff up is loads of fun.
As I sit here in the library of Castle Bedlam, typing away, I look at the bookshelves around me. There used to be several tomes on the uses of various explosives. I got rid of my copy of the Anarchist’s Cookbook, as, over the years, I found its information to be inaccurate to the point of dangerousness. One of its recipes, which explains how to make plastic explosive out of household chemical cleaners, is unstable as all hell; they TELL you it won’t blow until it’s dry, but I found out the hard way that they don’t know what they’re talking about; I accidentally blasted a fist-sized hunk of wood out of my dad’s workbench when I was twelve, fooling with a one-square-inch block of the stuff that I thought was safe because it was still wet.
I don’t remember what I told my dad, but he believed me. It was one of those brilliant lies brought on by raw necessity and sheer terror of what he’d do to me if he found out I was mixing explosives in the garage. A shame I couldn’t remember what, exactly, I’d told him… and I never had the guts to ask him about it later…
I used to have a copy of The Poor Man’s James Bond, a much more accurate text on the creation of various illicit chemical compounds. It lacks the drug recipes to be found in the Anarchist’s Cookbook, but I found out, again, the hard way, that most of those were hooey, too; bananadine won’t get you high no matter how much of it you smoke, and eating an entire nutmeg WILL get you high, if your idea of “high” approximates a good, solid, New Years Day hangover. Yeesh. The explosive recipes in *The Poor Man’s James Bond * were spot on, though, and clearly explained in detail the dangers of dinking with explosives, and how to minimize the danger while maximizing the effects. I’ve always regretted loaning TPMJB out; naturally, I never saw it again. sigh
I still have my first book, though… the one that got the whole thing started. Modern Chemical Magic, copyright 1936. Swiped it from the county library when I was ten. It had recipes for making your own fireworks.
Flipping through it now, it amazes me that anyone would ever have written a book like this… a book on how to make and handle explosive compounds, aimed at adolescents. Anyone trying to do that nowadays would be laughed out of any publishing house on the planet, shortly before lawyers were consulted and the Department of Homeland Security was discreetly phoned.
Apparently, though, this stuff was considered good clean fun back in the 1930s.
I grew up in deep south Texas, you see, in the 1970s. This would be kind of like growing up anywhere else would be in the 1950s; it takes things a while to permeate out into the backwaters. As a teenager, my favorite forms of entertainment generally involved drinking lots of beer and getting out of town for a while. These options were not open to me during my late childhood and early adolescence. When Mom kicked me out of the house and told me to go outside and play, it was generally hot, dry, and miserable, and there wasn’t anything to do. What was I supposed to do?
Well… as one’s elders will so often tell one… we made our own fun.
It began with carefully opening up bottle rockets and M-80s, and examining the strange grey-black powder within. Will it explode if you touch a match to it? No, but it does flash up real nice. What would happen if we got a soup can, and FILLED it with the stuff, and…?
We found out about rockets that way. We also learned that if you upended a trash can, it took very little explosive force to split it up the side, and only a little more to make it into an aluminum hula skirt. This is how we learned about tamping charges, you see. Learned a fair bit about metallurgy, too, when we tried it with a steel 55-gallon drum.
We experimented with the mix. We also found it was cheaper to mix our own powder than to buy fireworks; plus, after I found Modern Chemical Magic, we learned ways to increase the potency, and alter the colors of the blast effects, using various powdered chemicals available at any hardware store. It also explained the difference between corned powder and meal powder, which helped us considerably.
We knew of a field not so far away by bicycle, where no one ever seemed to hear the muted explosions or bother us. There was a rusty old-timey washing machine out there that we played with, too. We’d load a charge in a hole, tamp it, and then flip the washing machine over onto it, to see how many foot-pounds of explosive force it took to knock the thing upright. When we got bored with that, we began experimenting with ways to launch the thing entirely into the air. You had to use multiple charges to do that; we never could get one single charge centered quite right, although we sent it hurtling sideways any number of times.
When we finally tore the thing apart one Saturday afternoon, unintentionally, by overloading a charge, I felt the keen sense of sorrow a child feels upon accidentally breaking a favored and beloved toy.
After that, we began stealing manhole covers, to see if we could flip them, and how high we could get them to go.
We made rockets, too. Lightnin’ showed up one afternoon with a handful of Estes rocket engines, the kind model rocketry enthusiasts use to launch their models. We played with them, and concluded that actual rocketry was really kind of dull. You ignite, the rocket goes up, the rocket falls down. Whoopee. Say, what would happen if you aimed the rocket at something?
We tried it. The results weren’t particularly impressive. It did lead to further experiments, though – like, what would happen if the rocket was encased in sheet metal, with a razor blade at the tip?
After it chased us around the back yard, we began designing stabilizer fins and drag rods to make sure it would keep going where it was pointed.
We did research in volumes that would have astonished our teachers, had they known. We dug for information. We compared airfoils. We varied the mixes. We set up control groups and flight tests. We blew shit up right and left. We eventually wound up being able to replicate, without much effort, a rocket that would reliably punch through three-quarter-inch plywood upon impact, although it wasn’t real accurate at ranges beyond forty feet or so, and ghod help you if the flight path was deflected inside the first ten feet of firing range.
We learned that by curling the fins slightly, we could increase the accuracy of a rocket, by imparting a corkscrew spin; although this meant the payload was decreased; it wouldn’t reliably punch through three-quarter-inch plywood, but it would blast through quarter-inch paneling with ease. This led to our development of a man-portable single-shot rocket launcher, constructed from an aluminum tent pole, parts from a plastic toy dart gun, and a nine-volt battery.
After a great many tests, it proved sturdy, reusable, and actually fairly lethal. We glowed with pride. We’d built our first actual usable weapon! Yeah, maybe Billy Ray’s gang, out on South Side, thought slingshots were hot stuff, but we knew better, and we gloated smugly about what we could, conceivably, do to them if they came messin’ with US!
We had our setbacks, of course. We occasionally injured ourselves, usually through carelessness with matches or powder. Candy set himself on fire, once, by forgetting he’d been handling gasoline before trying to light a match, and I’d narrowly avoided the mother of all parental punishments with the aforementioned workbench incident in the garage. Probably worst of all was the time we tried to upgrade the rocket launcher to a clip-fed model, without taking into account what would happen if any sparks backfired into the clip while there were rockets in there. No one was injured, but we did get the crap scared out of us when the clip erupted, launching flaming rudderless rockets every whichway, sending us all diving for cover, damaging the side of Loopy’s shed, setting two small fires, and shattering the back window of his dad’s Caddy.
When the Mythbusters launched their crash test dummy out of an improvised cannon made from a culvert pipe, dirt, and a ten-pound black powder charge, it was like old home week to me. My wife remarked about how they seemed to laugh like loons every time something blew up or caught fire, jumping up and down and throwing their hats.
I said nothing. I knew how they felt, you see. When something you’ve created erupts in fire and thunder and a shower of sparks, you can’t help laughing… which is, perhaps, as good a reason as any for not letting amateurs handle the Thunderbolts of Zeus, y’know?
There’s something to be said for sufficient adult supervision. Learning experiences aren’t always in the classroom…
