A friend wants this for his birthday. I’m not worried that he’s going to do anything nuts like make pipe bombs, but my question is, is it worth spending $15+ for it?
Considering that, when I was fifteen, I got the whole thing off a BBS for free, I’d say that fifteen bucks is a bit of a rip-off.
NO! It’s a horrible book! It’s really dumb and insulting for anyone over 12 who has taken a science class. It recommends putting gas in light bulbs so they blow up when you flip the switch. Sorry, doesn’t work! You need a vaccuum in the bulb to do that! In addition, a lot of the drug formulas and bomb ideas are flat out wrong and dangerous. This stuff rings of “well, I haven’t tried it, but my friend says that his brother knew a guy who swears it would work” stuff. Take it from one who has read the book and disproven just about everything in it.
Besides, look online for it and you will find the book in it’s entirety. It is a worthless book. Get him some army demolition manuals instead.
See, the problem with that book is not that it enables people to blow other people up–it’s that it enables them to blow themselves up. Since this guy is your friend, I assume that that would be a non-optimal outcome from your point of view. If he just wants it for the amusement value of having it on the shelf, but will never, ever try to actually implement any of its instructions, it might be OK. If there’s any chance that he would start experimenting with it, I would recommend against it. I view it either a shock-value knickknack or a slow game of Russian roulette. It’s not worth $15.
FTR, I made plenty of dangerous stuff as a teen, but I used good instructions, followed proper safety procedures, and never made enough at a time to do any really major damage.
Interesting obituary of the author just published in the New York Times:
He regretted writing it, which the article mentions, but what the article doesn’t mention is that most of the texts which bear the name “The Anarchist’s Cookbook” have absolutely nothing to do with anything he wrote. The name was used by a number of different textfile authors who independently created variably incompetent works which got distributed on BBSes and, later, FTP sites and websites.
You can relive some of the glory days in the Anarchy subdirectory of textfiles.com, a major repository of classic textfiles.
That’s an oddly worded obit, since if you read it carefully you’ll notice that quietly buried in the middle of it mentions that he died last July. Even stranger, is that it just gives a link to a facebook post. I tried to find something online, maybe another article from closer to that day, but nothing. Just more facebook posts, posts from his family and funeral home posts.
It’s like the NYT author just happened to notice yesterday. But still, you’d think they would have mentioned that up in the first line or two. Kinda buried the lead there.
Considering the OP was almost 15 years ago, I’m curious how the friend turned out.
You know, I always read it as the Antichrist Cookbook.
For some reason, he goes by the moniker ‘Lefty’ now.
Not often I do a 15 year old quote. But. Not sure why Red Dragon thought gasoline in a vacuum would explode. I have however, pursued the myth of the exploding light bulb on my own.
First step is to pierce the glass bulb, I used a red hot piece of tungsten wire and it pokes right through. I used a syringe to inject a few ounces of gas and taped over the hole. Off to the firing range!
I hung the bulb by the socket and cord over a rock bed to avoid setting anything on fire and flipped the switch. It lit up just fine. Let me repeat that. It lit up just fine. Looked just like a normal light bulb in fact.
Hmm. Obviously too rich to explode. Tried it again with less gasoline. Nothing. I eventually got down to purging the bulb with oxygen from a welding torch and putting a drop of gasoline inside. Finally!
And even then it wasn’t much. The bulb lit dimly and began filling with smoke. After a few seconds the glass cracked and dumped the tiny amount of gasoline out.
Never got any explosion.
In retrospect, I should have tried oxy-acetylene, that explodes just fine.
We were trying once to get rid of a large hornet nest hanging from a tree branch at work. We tossed a cord over the branch and hauled up a few firecrackers with a glow wire wrapped around the fuse and touched our end of the cord to a battery. Nice boom, but the nest wasn’t damaged much.
A co-worker suggested a an oxy-acetylene balloon, which I had never done before. Someone came back from lunch with balloons. You light a small flame on the torch and set it to a perfect stoichiometric flame, then tap the tip on a block of metal to extinguish the flame without moving the valves. Filled the balloon, hooked up a hot wire and hauled it up and touched to the battery.
Holy M Effing Christ! A tremendous flash momentarily blinded us, and a thunderclap echoed down the valley. It was like that last salute in a volley of fireworks, except it was only 50 feet away. The branch dropped to the ground trailing smoke. The nest itself vaporized. A few burning hornets spiraled to the ground like shot down fighter planes.
We soon got a call from security asking if everything was all right (we were a hazardous area anyway, a rocket testing facility). The guys in the control room a half mile away called.
As a side note, a few years later some guy actually near to my home was killed trying this on a larger scale on the 4th of July. He had filled a garbage bag and was stuffing it in a galvanized garbage can when static set it off.
Dennis
Don’t leave us in suspense. What happened?
As A kid, I used to make acetylene balloons by putting the balloon over a flask with water and Calcium Carbide. If the balloon was mostly empty to start, you got a nice, red sooty ball of flame. If you pre-filled the balloon with some air, you got the aforementioned flash-crack explosion.
Back in our college days, a friend worked at a gas station. With access to all the matches we could ever dream of, my bored friends and I proceeded to cut the heads off a few hundred boxes worth of matches, resulting in a 5-gallon bucket full of match heads, resulting in quite a lot of very smoky, very ill-advised fun. Most of the time we weren’t even smart enough to do it outside.
Around 1970 Purdue pulled books from its library.
It seems that, as a ROTC school, it had the Army Manuals for "How to improvise weapons and explosives when trapped behind enemy lines.
As a good soldier, you would conduct “terrorist” operations using nothing but materials common to the civilian market.
It seems that people with long hair and love beads were taking an interest in them.
Times have changed since my innocently misspent youth, where one could visit the local drugstore, claim to be working on a science project for school, and walk out with the makings for some pretty noisy fun. Waterproof fuse could be ordered from the back pages of Popular Mechanics.
I do remember someone introducing me to an online version of the A C in the early 1990’s, the recipes in it were largely familiar but the personal stakes were higher and societies general tolerance much lower.
From the context, I imagine that the static charge resulting from sliding the plastic bag into the metal garbage can created a spark that exploded the mixture. A regular size garbage bag full of an optimal mix of oxygen and acetylene would tear the garbage can apart.
Thank you! It didn’t sound quite right, so I’m glad you did the ground-work.
(Depressing that it doesn’t go ka-thoom, but at least you got some reaction!)