I’m watching YT clips on “The most explosive substances” or “The smelliest substance” or “The strongest acid”
How the hell did chemists live long enough to pass on their knowledge? What even led chemists to look for these things??
“Hey. If i burn away this stuff…whats left? What is it? Will it clean? Will it explode?”
More than a few died or were seriously injured along the way.
We learn from our mistakes. The next guy/gal (hopefully) learned the previous person’s lesson and builds on it.
Akin to us learning how to fly airplanes. It was dangerous early on but, over time, lessons were learned and now it is pretty safe.
This I can answer: when chemists were still alchemists, they looked for a way to transform lesser metals into gold. Reaching for that goal, they involuntarily discovered all kinds of interesting phenomena and substances. The line between alchemy and chemistry was blurry, but some time in the 18th century it became serious science. Isaac Newton for instance was already a serious physicist grounded on scientific principles, but he still practiced alchemy on the side.
Explosions are not necessarily bad from a chemist’s point of view: A Mr. Alfred Nobel got very rich selling explosions. On the other hand Mr. Emil Nobel, his brother, was blown to pieces while preparing nitroglycerin.
This is not only something which happened a long time ago; here is something which happened less than 30 years ago in a well known university to a chemistry professor who was following the recommended safety procedures:
True that. My high school chemistry teacher had only three fingers on his right hand, and we all knew that he had lost them in a lab accident. He never talked about it.
Legions of them did die of cancer in their 40’s, but that’s enough for a couple of decades’ run.
It’s not just explosions that are dangerous - or profitable. I’d like to quote the Wikipedia page on the history of fluorine:
Progress in isolating the element was slowed by the exceptional dangers of generating fluorine: several 19th century experimenters, the “fluorine martyrs”, were killed or blinded. Humphry Davy, as well as the notable French chemists Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and Louis Jacques Thénard, experienced severe pains from inhaling hydrogen fluoride gas; Davy’s eyes were damaged. Irish chemists Thomas and George Knox developed fluorite apparatus for working with hydrogen fluoride, but nonetheless were severely poisoned. Thomas nearly died and George was disabled for three years. French chemist Henri Moissan was poisoned several times, which shortened his life. Belgian chemist Paulin Louyet and French chemist Jérôme Nicklès [de] tried to follow the Knox work, but they died from HF poisoning even though they were aware of the dangers.
So yeah, it was pretty dangerous, and in a number of cases they didn’t “live long enough”, they died trying. Fluorine is an industrially important element, but learning to work with it was really touch-and-go for a long time.
And Marie Curie eventually died from radiation poisoning, right? Yeah, dangerous work. But I guess if you live long enough to write up your results, you can pass that knowledge along.
Derek Lowe is a chemist who used to publish articles on things he would not work with. Fluorine compounds were up there. One example:
“Being a high energy oxidizer, dioxygen difluoride reacted vigorously with organic compounds, even at temperatures close to its melting point. It reacted instantaneously with solid ethyl alcohol, producing a blue flame and an explosion. When a drop of liquid 02F2 was added to liquid methane, cooled at 90°K., a white flame was produced instantaneously, which turned green upon further burning. When 0.2 (mL) of liquid 02F2 was added to 0.5 (mL) of liquid CH4 at 90°K., a violent explosion occurred.”
And he’s just getting warmed up, if that’s the right phrase to use for something that detonates things at -180C (that’s -300 Fahrenheit, if you only have a kitchen thermometer). The great majority of Streng’s reactions have surely never been run again. The paper goes on to react FOOF with everything else you wouldn’t react it with: ammonia (“vigorous”, this at 100K), water ice (explosion, natch), chlorine (“violent explosion”, so he added it more slowly the second time), red phosphorus (not good), bromine fluoride, chlorine trifluoride (say what?), perchloryl fluoride (!), tetrafluorohydrazine (how on Earth. . .), and on, and on. If the paper weren’t laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you’d swear it was the work of a violent lunatic. I ran out of vulgar expletives after the second page. A. G. Streng, folks, absolutely takes the corrosive exploding cake, and I have to tip my asbestos-lined titanium hat to him. - SOURCE
This video is worth a watch if you want to do chemistry (great YouTube channel):
That’s interesting. I need to look into how we got from “Guys threw stuff into a campfire to see what happens” to today.
Yeah, “Things I Won’t Work With” was a cool series of articles.
Not exactly. She died from aplastic anemia due to her bone marrow being damaged by many years of exposure to radiation. That is distinct form radiation “sickness” or “poisoning” caused more immediately by direct exposure to radiation.
Remember to always right down beforehand what experiment you are planning to do and follow the procedure to the letter. That way people will know what killed you. Not much good for you, but it helps the advancement of science.
I liked Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide?; plenty of good examples there of old-school what not to do, with his vivid descriptions of getting poisoned and exploded and creating Superfund sites…
Yes, but also
… after more than 100 years, much of Marie Curie’s stuff – her papers, her furniture, even her cookbooks – are still radioactive. Those who wish to open the lead-lined boxes containing her manuscripts must do so in protective clothing, and only after signing a waiver of liability.
Many scientists, not just chemists, are excellent, if not obsessive, at taking notes and documenting their work. Then there are the surviving assistants who are already familiar with the work being done by the senior.
Hopefully the documents and assistants are outside the blast radius when the event occurs.
I watch a lot of those kinds of videos as well. I just recently watched this one by The Backyard Scientist where he tries pouring molten aluminum over blocks of glass, heating a solid sphere of glass in a kiln and submerging it in water, melting and mixing alumninum to see what properties a glass / aluminum alloy might have, etc.
I was actually a bit worried for the guy while watching, because other than safety glasses and heavy gloves he has no safety protection whatever, and he’s slinging molten aluminum all over the place and trying to get glass blocks to explode from the heat. He seems like he’s one errant exploding glass shard or one spilled dollop of aluminum away from an ER visit or worse:
Maybe they did what I would do:
Jasmine: “Hey, Frank, I’ve been working on a really exciting and interesting project! Would you like to help?” 