The supply room of my high school chemistry lab had a huge glass jar of liquid nicotine. I and those of my classmates with an interest in chemistry thought this was strange, as we knew nicotine to be a deadly poison that can be absorbed through the skin.
In reflecting upon this after twenty years, I wonder why a high school chemistry lab would have had nicotine in the first place. Are or were there any experiments likely to be carried out in a high school chemistry class that would make use of nicotine? Or is it possible I have misjudged the danger of letting students have ready access to it? (Students were sometimes permitted to stay in the classroom during the lunch break, without the teacher present, and at these times the supply room was sometimes left open or at least unlocked. This I know because we sometimes pilfered small quantities of relatively* harmless chemicals like iodine and menthol crystals, magnesium strips, and chloroform, but were smart enough to leave the nicotine alone.)
*Yes, I understand that these substances are not entirely safe. But handling small quantities isn’t risking death the way I imagine handling nicotine would.
At my school (in the late 50s) my friends and I found some metallic sodium in the chemistry lab store.
We had a lot of fun with it: Cutting a small pellet and dropping it in water or putting a small piece on a solid surface and whacking it with a wooden plank for example.
One day a boy (not me) was watching a pea-sized piece fizzing away in a pool of water at the bottom of the lab sink when a teacher came in. He promptly swept it down the drain and was very lucky that he managed to avoid the explosive drain-cleaning effect.
I have no idea why it was in the store in the first place, but it could have been there for many years.
Having a condition that affects both the nicotinic and muscarinic receptors, Myasthenia Gravis, that was my first guess . . . but I couldn’t find a damned cite!
It could have been very old. Like, decades. The logistics of disposing chemicals in a high school can be very complex: you have to get someone from outside the school to come get them, and it can be hard to schedule, and it’s easy to just put it off forever.
Given the appearance of the bottle, I don’t doubt that it was from the 1960s, or even earlier. But the question still remains as to what it was doing there in the first place.
Which means that you had decades worth of time for any one person to do one stupid thing. Maybe some teacher, way back when, ordered one bottle each of everything the chemical supply company had. Maybe someone wanted to use it in a demonstration to kill an animal, to scare students away from smoking. Maybe some teacher was addicted to the stuff, and decided that using school funds to feed their addiction was cheaper than always buying cigarettes. Maybe nobody ordered it, but the guy in charge of order fulfillment at the chemical supply company included it in an order by accident. Maybe it was in some drugstore for decades before the school even opened, and when the old druggist retired, he decided that the easiest way to get rid of his inventory was to donate it to the school.
Unless someone can identify a fairly routine high school chemistry experiment that actually makes use of nicotine, then one of those explanations is probably correct.
We used metallic sodium in highschool for the sodium fusion test. Would take a small glass vial, fill it with powdered charcoal and a small organic sample, and a small piece of Sodium metal. Would seal the vial with more carbon and heat it red hot. Then we would plunge it into a beaker containing water - the red hot glass would crack, the unreacted sodium will react with water. We’d filter the water and check for Cyanides, Chlorides, Sulfate … just like inorganic chemistry.
It was probably there for that type of demonstration. I went to high school in the 90s, and we’d get the sodium-in-water demonstration in class. (One time – I had a couple chem classes – it spectacularly erupted and a chunk of sodium lodged itself into the ceiling.) Another day, when we were trying to (unsuccessfully) make nitrogen triiodide (a contact explosive), our teacher and another chem teacher took some white phosphorus out of the store. It was in a jar immersed in liquid (water, I believe) to keep it from reacting with the oxygen. The two teachers wanted to show us what happens when phosphorus reacts with air.
They took it out from the jar and placed it on a lab dish and … nothing. They waited a little bit and still nothing. They shrugged their shoulders and resumed their conversation in another part of the room. About three or so minutes later, we hear a hiss and see a bright white point of light and the room begins filling with thick, white smoke. We get ushered out and they take care of it.
So, yeah, finding sodium or other combustibles – not all that odd in a chemistry lab in my experience. Nicotine I ain’t got no answer for, though.
Nicotine does have a very interesting phase diagram with water. It’s possible it was meant for a demonstration like that, though the upper bound requires high pressure since you need water at 210 C.
Our teacher did the sodium in water demo—I had actually noticed some burn marks in the ceiling from when he’d done it in years past. He turned out the lights and we saw the embers glow.
As for phosphorus, our teacher just pulled it above the water, let us watch it smoke, then put it back in the water. It seems to be making a comeback on the battlefield.
Human rights organizations have warned that the use of white phosphorus to produce obfuscating smoke screens carries deadly risks in an urban setting. Amnesty International says the substance can cause “horrific injuries, burning deep into the muscle and bone.” The incendiary substance can reignite weeks after being deployed, causing potential harm to those fleeing or returning.
That’s some nasty shit.
On contact, white phosphorus can also burn people, thermally and chemically, down to the bone as it is highly soluble in fat, and therefore in human flesh. White phosphorus fragments can exacerbate wounds even after treatment and can enter the bloodstream and cause multiple organ failure. Already dressed wounds can reignite when dressings are removed and they are re-exposed to oxygen. Even relatively minor burns are often fatal.
Nicotine was commonly sold in the past in garden centers as Black Leaf 40, and it was a very effective and environmentally friendly pesticide (biodegradable within a couple of days).
Unfortunately it was also very toxic to humans and undoubtedly other mammals. I remember using it decades ago, very cautiously (when warnings of DEATH appear on the label, you tend to pay attention - people have died from nicotine poisoning via skin absorption). Retail sale of nicotine sulfate for garden/agricultural purposes has been banned in the U.S. for years. Some people make their own preparations using chewing tobacco and the like. The disadvantage there (aside from toxicity) is getting an effective, reproducible concentration. There are biodegradable pesticides like pyrethrin that are vastly safer to handle.
We used to use it in class on Daphnia and other creatures to show greatly increased heartbeat rates. Just add a drop to the slide while watching through the microscope.