I think the plastic ones and the small 2 inch miniature guns came out at about the same time.
Banning them wouldn’t do any good. Smart inquisitive children would still find ways to make exploding things. Our little group had chemistry sets, and microscopes.
Yeah, that microscope 'sploded real good.
Heh… you said if.
Oh, and smashing them with a hammer? Didn’t anyone else use big rocks? Something very primal about finding just the right shaped/heft rock, bearing down and putting all your might into a resounding smash.
Or maybe I was just weird – I also loved Brussel sprouts, not for their taste, but because I could pretend I was a giant eating up the villagers’ cabbages.
Or maybe I just couldn’t find a hammer. [NextPosterInAMontyPythonVoice]Oh, well, you were lucky, you had rocks… we had to smash our caps with bits of straw…[/NPIAMPV]
Anybody remember those little metal bombs? You loaded them with caps in the warhead, a small gap between two plates (the nose was rounded). They had a small parachute and fins to make sure (well, kind of) that they landed face down. Then you threw them, hoping they’d land on a hard enough surface to detonate. Weeeee!
Ah, paper caps. Smash 'em, shoot 'em, make them flair by rubbing them on the ground/with your nail, make bombs… so versatile!
Oh yeah! I haven’t thought about those in years. Not a lot of bang for your buck on that one though. Really kind of dissappointing.
When someone mentioned rolling them out on a sidewalk, my first thought was rolling them out in a line on a sidewalk and running a bicycle over them. Ever been done?
Not enough weght to set them off, probably. Roller skate wheel maybe.
Blast from the past. No pun intended:
Cap Bomb
http://www.epartyunlimited.com/cap-bomb.html
I swear, seeing this stuff again is like opening a time capsule or travel back in time.
I love when the packaging hasn’t been updated in six decades:
http://us.st11.yimg.com/us.st.yimg.com/I/candy-crate_1982_37487119
When did they stop using mercury fulminate in toy caps?
I had a pair of derringer style single shot pistols. They were loaded by using a brass cylindrical cartridge which looked like a shell casing and had a spring in the middle of it. A small gray plastic bullet was pressed against the spring until it snapped into place, and finally the greenie stickum cap was affixed to the rear, looking like a primer. Load the cartridge, pull back the hammer, pull the trigger, and you had a fairly realistic pistola.
Doubtful you could sell such a thing now-too many small parts that tots might swallow, plus you could put somebody’s eye out. 
I bought a pair of western-style cap guns from Wal-mart just a couple of years ago. I’ll bet they’re still on sale there now, spare caps and all.
The ring caps (or strip caps for automatics) were vastly superior. They fired off more reliably. Yet, the roll caps are still around.
Yes, I remember playing with the paper roll cap guns. The feed mechanism for the caps was not very good. Shooting one usually involved pulling the trigger as fast as you could. Sounded like click click pop click pop pop pop click click, and then you have to stop and pull out the caps which had become folded and tangled inside the gun.
When I was a kid we had those, but they used the paper caps as well. The trick was trying to get 4 or 5 caps in instead of one. Then you had to throw it real hard.
Yep I wasn’t the kind to play with fire when I was a kid, but I did play with the roll caps quite a bit. I do remember setting one off with my fingernail. It hurt a good bit, and left my fingernail blackened. I also used hammers and rocks, and I remember seeing flames more than once.
Just once? I went through a couple of summers with deformed, blackened, burnt-smelling thumbnails. It didn’t hurt enough to dampen the glee to be found by sneaking up behind that cute little girl next door, and Mom must have figured if it was dangerous I’d eventually lose a thumb and learn a lesson.
Did they make them from that? I know they use silver fulminate to make those “throw it on the ground and it goes bang” novelties.
I’m pretty sure the roll caps of my childhood were always Armstrong’s mixture. Which is right up there with nitrogen triiodide and flash powder on the list of things you shouldn’t try to make when your a n00b pyro!
CMC +fnord!
n00b pyro since the 1970’s