Playing with chemicals

A chemistry set!  When I was about 12 or 13, my parents finally gave in, despite their better judgment, and bought me a chemistry set for my birthday, or maybe for Christmas. 

I guess they still make chemistry sets, but they no longer possess the glamor and universal appeal they had decades ago.  When you can wipe out an entire planet in virtual reality, what's the fun of making a stink bomb?

The most popular sets were made by Gilbert (which also made American Flyer trains), but mine was a Chemcraft, a larger and more elaborate set than I've shown in the illustration.  It came with test tubes, other small pieces of glassware, and a large number of bottles and stoppered tubes filled with a wide variety of chemicals.  I also dreamed of beakers, flasks, and glass retorts -- the apparatus of Dr. Frankenstein's laBORatory -- but these larger pieces had to be ordered separately.

So did my joy of ownership segue quickly into depth of scientific knowledge?  Not exactly.  Most of the "experiments" outlined in the manual that accompanied the set pertained to "magic" -- turning water to wine and back to water, through the magic of phenolphthalein (a pH indicator).  That was the simplest of the tricks, but most of the others also involved the production, instantaneously, of variously colored liquids.

From these tricks -- and the little magic shows by which I bewitched the younger kids in the neighborhood -- I progressed to serious stuff.  Like heating a combination of sulfur and paraffin in a test tube, producing hydrogen sulfide gas.  That little stunt -- performed in our basement -- rendered that portion of the house uninhabitable for several days, as well as destroying the test tube.  Or making a makeshift gunpowder, by nervously grinding potassium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoal together.  By god -- it works!

These recollections are occasioned by my in-progress reading of Oliver Sacks's memoir of his childhood, especially with respect to his extensive experimentation with chemistry, Uncle Tungsten.  I felt guilty, even as a kid, that I did nothing more than play with chemicals.  I never made much effort to understand the nature of the chemical reactions involved in my experiments.

But Sacks's introduction to chemistry was exactly the same.  He was in love with the colors he could make.  He made explosives.  He bought pure sodium metal, dumped it in a London lake, and watched it scurry explosively along the water's surface.  From his basement "laboratory," he made his own family's house uninhabitable.

Writing in 2001, Sacks lamented the fact that so many of the chemicals he loved to play with -- acids, explosives, poisons -- were no longer available to modern children.  In a footnote, he quotes Linus Pauling, winner of Nobel Prizes for both chemistry and peace:

Just think of the differences today.  A young person gets interested in chemistry and is given a chemical set.  But it doesn't contain potassium cyanide.  It doesn't even contain copper sulfate or anything else interesting, because all the interesting chemicals are considered dangerous substances.  Therefore, these budding young chemists don't have a chance to do anything engrossing with their chemistry sets.  As I look back, I think it pretty remarkable that Mr. Ziegler, this friend of the family, would have so easily turned over one-third of an ounce of potassium cyanide to me, an eleven-year old boy.

My own set did come with copper sulfate, and a microscope set that I also owned contained a small tube of potassium nitrate.  But alas, even in those earlier days, when we eagerly walked downtown to replenish our supplies of that latter precious substance from a local pharmacy, we were met with a polite refusal to sell.

The moral that Sacks draws, and in which I would concur, is that science is fun, and that many or most scientists (or at least chemists) have been drawn to their profession through childhood play.  Kids need the opportunity for that play.  I never got beyond the stink bomb and magic trick level of chemical research.  Sacks, with greater intelligence and sharper focus, worked his way into a deeper and deeper appreciation of chemistry, without ever leaving behind his spirit of play, his repeated reaction that "Jeez, isn't this cool?" 

I went on to spend a number of summers doing chemical analyses in an industrial laboratory.  There was a certain amount of play, or at least fun, in that work as well.  But I had skipped over the steps that Sacks walked through, where the play leads directly to understanding, and curiosity to innovation.  In my summer job, I learned to understand the concept of "cookbook chemistry," which, intellectually, wasn't really much beyond what I'd been doing out of my Chemcraft manual when I was thirteen!