Quite a while ago I had some old dirty, tarnished pennies. So I dumped them in a bowl with vinegar and lots of salt. A bit after that I started to rise them off, thinking I was going to need to dry them, so I went to get paper towels. I didn’t have any, but was planning a shopping trip anyway so I went to the store. I have no recollection of the exact sequence of events after that, but just now searching for a bowl, I found a jar in the cupboard with a bunch of really tarnished pennies covered in pretty blue tumors.
In high school chemistry, which I took long enough ago that we were allowed access to genuinely dangerous chemicals and experiments (instead of today’s “Okay, kids, stand way over there and I’ll blow up this balloon”), some lab pairs had the bad habit of dumping their waste stuff into a 1L beaker under the sink. A pair I had lab with ended up with a really pretty blue gel, about an inch of it. Then one of them dumped the next waste beaker into it and…
They had about a cubic yard of really pretty blue foam that stained absolutely everything including stainless steel sinks, granite countertops, their clothes and a good part of their skin that same really, really pretty blue.
The “Hey, Bud, did you know your hand’s blue?” line from The Abyss never fails to kill me.
ETA: Oh, the point. I have NO idea what the chemistry involved is or was. Don’t want to.
Yeah, that really sucks. What would make people adopt such a ludicrously safety-first, excitement-last approach?
Ah.
That said, a friend and I did once - as so many others have - do the classical home chemistry set experiment of “Let’s put everything in once test-tube and shake it to see what happens!”. What happened was we gained a new appreciation for the importance of safety goggles.
When I was a kid I used to enjoy mixing up all the solvents and chemicals my dad kept in the garage to see what would happen.
One day, when I was about 10 or 11, I was mixing up a toxic brew of stuff in a big glass jar, like a pickle jar, that smelled wonderfully horrible but wasn’t doing much- it was just a muddy brown sludge.
Looking around for something else I could add, I noticed the large bucket of powdered chlorine additive for our pool. It had large warnings on it-- DANGER! HIGHLY TOXIC!! DO NOT MIX WITH ANYTHING- EXPLOSION DANGER!!! So naturally I had to add some of the chlorine powder to my toxic mix.
So I put the jar on a shelf at the back of the garage, poured about a half a cupful of the chlorine powder in the mix, and quickly ran away in case it blew up. Watching from the opening of the garage, I was impressed-- it was bubbling fiercely and the formerly muddy-brown sludge was turning bright red!
After I was satisfied it wouldn’t blow up, I went into the garage to get a closer look. That’s when I got a whiff of a VERY strong chlorine odor- the mix must have released chlorine gas into the air. I immediately ran back out of the garage, forcibly exhaling all the air I could out of my lungs. I felt a quick layer of mucous build up in my throat, to protect me and flush out the irritant. I kept exhaling all the air I could out of my lungs and coughing up phlegm for a while, but eventually I seemed to be none the worse for wear. At least I hoped I didn’t do any long-term damage. But 40 years on I appear to be fine.
Fortunately, I grew out of my experimental phase without losing any eyes, organs or appendages.
I once did something similar to the OP, but with different results. I, too, had a bunch of grungy old pennies that needed cleaning, so I, too, put them in a bowl with some vinegar. But I also had a grungy old nickel, and I decided to toss that in with them, too. End result, a bunch of clean pennies and one copper-plated nickel.
And speaking of pennies and acids, no thread like this would be complete without the discovery that nitric acid acts upon copper.