about the antimony pill, the less disturbing ritual was to drink wine from antimony cups (it's a component of pewter so it's been around since pre-Roman era) and the tartaric acid in the wine reacted with antimony metal to make (potassium) antimony tartrate in the wine, which served the same purgative effect. an antimony cup would be passed down between generations, because it leached so little substance out per use.
It reminds me of copper lined water vessels to mildly reduce unwanted things living in the water. I just love the combination of the objects as both part of the structure and also a reagent. It's the same with anti-moss zinc metal strips on roofs. Not talking about lead which is normal and used purely for its physical properties as flashing to seal gaps, zinc is simply run in thin strips across exposed areas so it very slowly reacts and the tiny tiny amount of runoff helps reduce moss growth on the roof. Sadly in some areas, years of this usage can eventually contribute to excess zinc in waterways.
Antimony and arsenic salts where commonly used to make white and blue eye makeup. In some areas, it was deemed a lesser evil, as it killed bacteria that could make you go blind. The good thing is that it was in places where adults where able to drink milk, so, they also tended to drink a lot of milk. Like some milk with every meal.
Funny how you said about lesser of two evils and could stop some germs that lead to blindness. If you read an old pharmacopoeia, or old Merck index from at least 70 years ago, yes indeed you'll find some curious entries for heavy metals for various different uses. There was opium mixed with arsenic, and mercury salts for topical ointment to treat syphilis! A different time.
Ok I'll bite. Here's my favorite science joke for the end screen: Heisenberg, Schrodinger, and Ohm are carpooling to a conference when they get pulled over by a cop. He comes to the window and asks, "Sir do you have any idea how fast you were going?" Heisenberg says, "No, but I know exactly where I am!". The cop says, "you were going 85 in a 70", to which Heisenburg shouts, "Great, now we're lost >:(". The cop thinks this is suspicious and decides to search the vehicle. He comes back and says "Are you aware there is a dead cat in the trunk of this car?" Schrodinger says "Well we do now, asshole". The cop arrests all of them for animal cruelty, but also get Ohm for resisting.
I see a couple of recurrent themes in the Chempilations, especially home chemistry mishaps: (1) Wanting to use a much larger quantity than actually needed to observe the reaction; (2) Not knowing, or not thinking about, how your chemical would react with other common substances in the vicinity (water, air, metals, oils, etc.) if it came in contact with them.
Just like the videos the USCSB puts out. There's always a few common themes in them. 1, Lax safety culture, 2 Low amounts of oversight, 3 ignoring warnings, I can't think of any others, but those are super common.
One time a chemisty teacher cut a chunk that looked like moldy cheeze was red orange and yellow crusted and it blew up spectacularly like a firework was set off. The chemistry teacher got burned pretty badly and made very harsh smoke. 😵😵😵
I have been to a fragrance company too. The GC-olfactometry is apparently standard in this field, but I had never seen it before either. It is fascinating. It is literally a GC with a plastic face mask at the end. As you can imagine, this thing can be quite hot. The user sniffs in this mask during the whole run and has a button to press when they smell a change. Afterwards, the chromatogram shows the button presses and you can select the different fractions. Sounds exhausting though.
Small molten metal story; my dad, because we were very poor growing up in the 90s, rebuilt the engines and other parts of our family van when they broke. One day, he was working underneath the van on the starter. He had disconnected the battery and was busy removing whatever it was holding the assembly in place. Somehow, the battery cables wiggled their way back to the battery terminals. So at some point my dad’s gold wedding ring shorts two electrical connections straight from the battery. The arc managed to melt a chunk of the ring and violently splatter it over my dad’s face (mostly his upper lip because of the grimace he was making trying to get the starter to come out). It hurt pretty bad and he couldn’t shave for months, but he avoided any serious injury luckily. And being not a stupid person, he never did work on a car without double-checking the safety of what he was doing first, like removing batteries, wearing gloves, etc. And that is the story of how my dad unwillingly grew a mustache for a year.
A similar story to the potassium pants predicament, in my first high school chemistry class we were told the story of a former student who had taken a liking to the similar reaction of sodium and water. This student snuck into the chemical storage room and decided to steal a golf ball sized piece of sodium which he put into his pants pocket. Over the next hour the moisture from his leg was causing the sodium to heat up in his pocket, so the student decided he had to get rid of it. To get rid of the warm lump of sodium the student had the genius idea of flushing the lump down the toilet. My teacher said that the entire school shook from the explosion and the student was found in the newly flooding bathroom with a broken leg from the piece of toilet that struck him in the leg. I’ve always wanted to see this reaction first hand but the school wisely banned continuing to use sodium around a bunch of high-schoolers.
This story actually sounds really familiar. Pretty sure one of my high school teachers told it to the class, but I don't remember if it happened at my high school or if they just heard it from a teacher they knew.
@@00muinamir it could be possible it’s a common high-school chemistry scare story so students don’t harm themselves unknowingly, but he told the story with a lot of conviction so 15 year old me believed it 😅
Here’s what sodium does when flushed down the toilet. Of course Grant Thompson (RIP) and Cody Reeder had to try it… ruclips.net/video/CEC64Bqeajs/видео.html
The electric kettle story reminds me of the time I was descaling our kettle on April Fool’s day. I accidentally left the vinegar in the kettle and pranked my dad when he was making coffee, making it the most appropriate day to forget to empty the kettle after descaling it. I’ve never had the problem of the descaling water getting discolored though - it sounds like that poster’s kettle is made out of pretty cheap stainless steel. I’d be a bit worried about it leaching metal ions into solution during regular use- the chromium in stainless steel is no joke!
A colleage has stakes in several foundries and can tell a lot of stories about the industry. He told me that the most dangerous metal to cast is aluminium because steel is so hot it just leidenfrosts off you and you won't be hurt, but aluminium is not hot enough and sticks. He told me that every so often a worker would get burnt and that first he won't feel anything but they start to give pain medication right away and call the ambulance and hope they arrive early enough to bring him to the hospital before the excrutiating pain of burns start. Tough industry, but he says workers are generally happy because they can directly see the fruit of their labor.
hm ya if i ever end up in metal working i will try to stick to steel just to make use of the leiden effect though i may need some time to get used to the extream heats as i still even with an oven instinctivly back away i never could fully get over my heat backing as i keeped away from the area a fire is really warm. ie right near it.
@@lechking941 not sure if steel casting is the best place to work at. Due to the high temperatures they don't use 'normal' but chromite sand which is much heavier and someone must shovel that in place.
@@lechking941Casting also basically looks like a satanistic ritual. Because most melts are undersaturated with gases the mold has to burn shortly before pouring so it starts by flames coming out all around it and then very heavy metal is poured which has such force that you can feel the floor shaking in the whole complex. And then there is a whole bunch of guys standing around completely covered in PPE.
@@Doping1234 :P good i was born in a hell (floridaman native :P i dont give a single fuck about rain or wind.) also i have seen a number of smithing vids and a handfull of shows involving the industry o ya i get the meansing of allt hat.
My dad taught me the same H2SO4 poem. Side note, my sister-in-law is studying anthropology and tracking the possible origins of things like that poem is a big part of it. So lately I've been having fun trying to trace possible origins of things passed through our family like that. The H2SO4 one seems to be documented back to at least the late 1800s, but no clear origin. Chemistry folklore (whether true or not) is quite interesting it might make a good video.
Max Gergel recounted a similar (childhood) story about stealing potassium in his memoir. Fortunately it was stored under mineral oil rather than something more flammable, which the thief (I don't remember if it was him or his friend) wiped off before stuffing the piece into his back pocket. Of course the fresh potassium started to react with air and eventually caught fire. They were caught, of course. Gergel's somewhat rambling memoir "Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide" is a must read. A lot of yikes-worthy stories. Gergel died just a few years ago, at the age of 96.
Possibly my favourite (and definitely yikes-worthy) story in the book was his account of his methyl iodide poisoning. This happened in the 60s, and it was extremely novel, no one had gotten enogh MeI in their body to cause acute poisoning symptoms before him. He eventually recovered but had to retire from doing labwork in their small scale chemical production business. Speaking of which, of course they dumped all their chemical waste just to their yard. I think more than one of the company's (which went out of business in the 70s) former locations is in the EPA superfund site list.
That is a classic , right up there with IGNITION! and The Green Flame . It was definitely a different universe back then, though I am not sure the results are entirely positive . People , especially inquisitive ones , will always tinker and experiment . Sadly this is now a cause for outright panic and the wrath of the Karens nowadays .
Regarding industry's sketch practices when it comes to hazardous chemicals: you would be amazed how much more unsafe things can get in non-lab settings. If you ever want to go down that rabbit hole, the USCSB actually has a youtube channel where they present real cases of industrial chemical accidents.
I work at a chemical company, making cleaning solutions. Making a pH14 solution is a bit sketchy, but not too bad, just don't splash any. Filling it into customer appropriate containers is, on the other hand, scary as shit, as dripping or spilling some is far too easy when working in large scale. I sloshed my left foot once as I was raking that days spill & water mix towards the waste well. My foot definately got clean, as did the grating in the showers.
Local man easily removes hair in one easy step! Click here to find out how he did it! Glad you made it unscathed dude. Used to work in a warehouse that stocked hospital cleaning chemicals. Much of that job was picking, and packing orders which meant we had to pick the heavy bastards up, and box them up, and label them. Bit munane, but the thought of dropping one on the concrete was scary enough a prospect to keep me careful.
I recall an 8th grade science class and a physical lab for earth science , where the students were to identify a suite of mineral samples by testing the physical properties of each sample . One of the tests was the ole acid test using a small beaker containing dilute HCL and an eyedropper , to determine the presence of carbonate minerals . It seems " SOMEBODY " encouraged their classmates to test the metallic samples with the acid , while others did so of their own accord . The metallics of course , were common lead and iron sulfides , and created H2S , which caused one student to vomit , which then triggered the dreaded sympathetic puke party and a stampede to fresh air for the remainder of the period . This would be a huge deal today , but , really didn't raise any eyebrows then , especially since the chemistry teacher routinely managed to set the chem lab on fire at least once a year , with the Carbon Disulfide .
A friend of mine was once a driver for an aluminum chemical truck. The truck was loaded, without his knowledge, with a caustic cleaning chemical instead of the soap it was supposed to be transporting. He managed to make it to his destination without a mishap, and parked the truck and went on with his day. Later (I don't remember how much) He was visited by DHS agents, investigating the truck's shocking but inevitable explosion. They had no sense of humor.
i dont mean to hamper the story but yeah, kinda on him, he aint fully at fault, but he aint blameless either why? the trucker takes responsibility of the load, its on him to check the paper work well now, if the paper work didnt get changed then ok, thats the dumbass who made the paper work
The pink thing reminds me of KMnO4. Handling it is a good reminder of how easily you can contaminate gloves, work benches etc. you start washing a surface and all these sub-milligram particles start dissolving and making pink splotches.
So, this story happened literally yesterday, and is really two stories in one that are related. I work at a shop that batch-manufactures various products to fight galvanic corrosion, and this month we're doing (for the first time) alkali-activated zinc anodes for rebar. Basically, they're Twinkie molds with a mixture of LiOH and KOH, boric acid, zinc sulfate, and mortar/concrete for the outside and cast zinc for the filling that get wired to the rebar in a structure as a sacrificial anode, the alkali acts as a PH control/electrolyte to help them work better than just straight zinc. Now, we take safety serious-ish but a lot of the lessons end up being trial and error, when we first started the process we were told the full-face respirators and Tyvek coveralls were only required for the dry-mix step in the negative pressure booth (no AC and it's 80-90F in the building, AND 2 exhaust fans are down for electrical work right now) and were all built around "don't inhale microcrystalline silica" with a lot less regard paid to how caustic our mortar mix is. The very first batch of mortar we're mixing, the guy on the mixing drill is dressed in what we considered "appropriate" PPE for the wet mortar tasks, just gloves taped to the sleeves of our shirts, n95 dust mask, and cheap safety glasses without shields. Halfway through the batch, he loses his footing a little on the transition between diamond-plate platform and drain grate and reflexively clenches his hands - around the mixing drill, including the trigger, flinging caustic sludge all over himself and the immediate vicinity. I chose to wear my full-face mask (without the coveralls) and just got splatter on the visor, as I was measuring out the dry mix for him on the floor below the platform and this happened at my eye level, but he got globs on his forehead and cheek. It didn't start burning immediately, hydroxides usually don't, so he just wiped off his safety glasses and continued (either not noticing or not caring) and only cleaned off when we went to break about half an hour later. He came in the next day with what looked to be 3rd degree caustic burns about the size of rice grains on the spots where droplets hit exposed skin, now we require people in the vicinity of the WET mix to wear full face masks. The shirts seemed to work though, so until we get the fans up again the bunny suits are optional. The other story is more just an anecdote, a couple processes ago we were soldering on wires to zinc mesh for bridge pier jackets and the tables we have in the shop are uncoated steel. We used ZnCl acid flux, which is pretty standard, and those tables have been a horrible rust-dust mess ever since. Once we started doing our cupcake anodes though, the tables which got our mortar spatter on them are suddenly no longer rusty, the mix is SO alkaline that, when combined with the rust layer, the caustic sludge has blued them like gun metal. I've been tempted to mix up a small thing of mix without the mortar to wipe on the other tables so that I don't keep coming home with big rust stains on my work shirts...
I have a friend with which I simultaneously did my bachelor's project in the same lab. I was just doing my thing and suddenly there was a bang, accompanied by sounds of glass pieces. It turns out that my friend, who was working on BODIPYs dyes (I think), made a rookie mistake. She was going to extract the compound with dichloromethane, but it took forever (turned out to be a very prominent dye). She decided that heating the dichloromethane would increase the solubility and make it go faster, so she grabbed the heat gun and heated up the big 2L separatory funnel. However, this turned out to be a bad idea when the valve is closed and you are holding the stopper closed tightly. The floor, the fume hood, the cupboards, her lab coat were all covered in purple. They tried to remove it, but it turns out that scrubbing the floor with DCM only removed the protective coating and made it even more visible. It has been 3.5 years and the stains are still there. Fortunately no one got harmed, but it could have gone really badly. Especially regarding the fact that this was luckily one of the few times she DID wear gloves.
The city of Warsaw, where I live, uses clams as a method of detecting impurities in the water supply. The clams are connected to sensors using springs and are constantly monitored by computers. This is of course just one of the many methods used in the water treatment, but the overall quality of the water is one of the best in the region.
Speaking of at home chemistry. I once decided to dry some lithium hydroxide solution I'd made at home, on a stovetop, in an open container, while drunk. Needless to say this was not a good idea. I inhaled a lungful of what I presume was aerosolised lithium hydroxide, which smelt like pretzels and pain. Ended up having to get checked at the hospital but was completely fine. Mild cough for a day or so. Lesson: don't drink alcohol and do chemistry.
@@wolfetteplays8894 Minor? I'd inhaled enough aerosolised LiOH for it to hurt; checked online and found that low level lethal alkali exposure to the lungs has a prodromal period where victims seem fine for a few hours before it starts to really kill them. at which point I called poison control who advised I go to the hospital for observation.
By petrol they might mean naphtha, kerosene, paraffin, whatever you name it. I remember that in the "old days" that'd be used sometimes as storage liquid for stuff like alkaline metals.
Yeah but unfortunately only about 1 person in a million seems to have the decency to do so. Everyone else will lie to your face, try to pretend they were joking, blame it on someone else, or just not say anything. At least this is the majority of my experiences over 25 years. The pretending to be joking one is especially common. And irritating. I just feel like they're assuming I'm dumber than they are if they they I'd believe that. And even if I were, joking's never an excuse for putting somebody's wellbeing in danger or doing some other jerkass thing. lol Sorry I feel like an angry old man or something.
There is an anecdote I found in Wikipedia (and cant find anymore) that tells this history: In 1979's LA, a nearby shop worker saw an industrial radiographer and picked it up. The Gamma-Ray lens detached and the radioactive source (Ir-192) fell to the floor. He picked it up and hid it in his right pocket for around 45 minutes. Around that time he started to experience nausea and medium radiation poisoning. His right buttock became very ulcerted, with a hole with a diameter of 4in and 1in deep. He had to suffer a very intense reconstructive surgery and almost died from severe radiation poisoning.
My inorganic chemistry teacher told us a story about a girl who was taking advanced chemistry clases with him. One time, he left her with a random student to do some experiments. They were doing some studies about solubility i think so there wasn't that much of trouble, but this dude decided to "prank" her and gave her unknowinglly (or that is what my teacher wants to believe) some potasium or sodium compound and it exploded so bad that the girl didn't survived. They never found out what was exactly what he gave her because he didn't knew either and the lab was almost in ruins, so no identification was possible. A lab is no place for "jokes" or "pranks". (sorry for grammar)
I've seen a someone do the potassium thing but with dry ice instead. Student in middleschool tried to steal a chunk in his pocket. He made it to the door before the cold hit and he panicked and dropped his pants. (Smarter than trying to keep them on at least)
The janitor needs to be praised not just for his bravery, but also the thinking to break the glass bottle to use to cut the jeans off. That's some really impressive calm thinking when absolute panic is going on. Guy legitimately deserves a medal
One day i was walking in front of a parked van as the battery randomly exploded. Never seen a lead acid battery explode like that before or since, but it blew a hole right though the plastic grill and stuck acid covered plastic shards in shrapnel all down one side of me. I was only wearing swim trunks as i was at work (at the beach renting jet skis) so there was pretty much zero protection. No safety shower either, so i used the safety running leap off the dock over a row of jet skis into the water. It was a freak accident, the van wasn't being used, and had been parked for a week or more. I walked by it every day once or twice where it was parked and one day, just as i was exactly in front of it, kablooey. I suspect the vents go clogged and it overheated, then overpressured in the hot sun and burst. And that''s how i ended up basically naked and soaked in battery acid with plastic shrapnel sticking out of me. Sometimes, no matter how safe you are, random unexpected shit can still happen out of nowhere for no reason other than coincidence. I wasn't in a lab, working with batteries, i was walking along a public sidewalk next to a parking lot on my way from taking a leak. It was as unforseeable as it gets, walking by a line of hundeds of parked cars, an every day thing anyone in a city or parking lot does, and one gets me like it's an IED. Or i can 'learn my lesson' and wear a lab coat and gogglesto the beach lol.
I jad a friend once , who was jump starting a car . Not sure who hooked up the cables , he or the person who was supposed to be helping him , but , the leads to his battery were hooked up backwards and his battery exploded . He still has scars years later and refuses to go near any lead acid battery .
@@deltab9768 i know they can explode, but it's not like they're blasting caps or anything. I've been playing with lead acid batteries since i was a kid, from charging rc cars and doing electronics projects to today where i have banks of golf cart batteries running my house. That's the only time I've ever seen one violently explode. I've seen them short, melt, catch on fire, bulge, boil, and all manner of abuses but nothing like this. And the odds of the timing of that happening is astronomical, or like something out of a cheesy horror movie.
@@rustymustard7798 I was just saying I think that’s how it happened. It slowly got overcharged at a low current until the water content was electrolyzing instead of the lead plates. Then it had to have an ignition source, before the gases had a chance to dissipate. That’s the part that makes it so rare. Multiple things have to go wrong in the “right” order to blow up a lead battery.
at my last job (industrial chemist at a cosmetic/toiletry factory), when the plant operators were making shampoos, bodywashes, and other coloured products, they had to weigh dyes out in the lab because their scales weren't sensitive enough - you only needed a few grams in a two-ton batch out of all the dyes, FD&C Blue 1 was the worst to deal with because it gives a bright intense colour at very low concentrations and it came as very fine particles even opening the tub had to be done very carefully, it'd spray anything within a 3-foot radius with tiny blue specks that were invisible until they became wet, and if you had an operator who was heavy-handed with the spatula, or spilled some while diluting it in water, it was an absolute nightmare to clean up the worst thing was if you managed to get a tiny wee bit on your lab coat, then the coat would invisibly stain everything it touched we also made semi-permanent hair dyes containing similarly persistent dyes, that were less soluble in water (hence harder to clean up - Basic Blue 124 and Basic Red 51 were particularly bad), but they were used at much higher levels, so the operators didn't have to weigh them out in the lab
In our high-school our science teacher would always take great pride in demonstrating the Thermite reaction each year for new students. It would be done at the front of the lab with a plexiglass screen in front, in a ceramic pot. He would often soup up the reaction with "a special ingredient" as he called it. One year it was a little too energetic, as soon as the magnesium ribbon hit it, the whole lot went up with a huge 'Fump', shooting molten iron straight up to the ceiling and showering down onto the students in the front row. Luckily except for a few burn holes in trousers and the ceiling no-one was injured!
My high school chemistry teacher was about to retire, so he had a stockroom full of old chemicals he needed to use up and zero hecks left to give. He did a lot of explosive demos at the beginning of class. I was assigned a seat in front, so I frequently shielded myself with my binder.
Two chemists walk into a bar - I'll take a glass of H2O, says the first one - I'll take a glass of H2O too, says another After they're served their glasses of liquids and drink them the second one dies.
My god, people should know that potassium is really really dangerous. The kid was lucky he just got his butt burned off, he could have put it in the front pocket (which would have been a medieval horror story)
My father raised chickens and he always had bags of sulfur lying around for treating mites and such. One day I was helping him with some welding. I didn't find out there was a bag of sulfur nearby until a spark went into it. Sulfur fumes everywhere! Being an asthmatic at a time when asthma medications were rare, it took hours to stabilise my breathing at the local hospital.
The "Billy Was a Chemist" poem is actually a great way to teach people to always know what they're working with, and research it before hand. Also always label your goop.
I accidently gave myself a very small third degree burn from brushing against a 300C heating element with the knuckle of my right index finger, despite nearly being able to see past the yellow fat, there is absolutely zero pain when the accident happens and during healing. Pretty sure this also ends up vaporizing some unimportant ligament in my hand, because now the finger is very flexible and I feel something trying to move that doesn't connect to anything when typing, which kind of tickles. The temperature is relatively low versus that molten dollop of aluminum, and I remember my accident smelling very good instead of burnt.
I worked as an aircraft engine mechanic and we had a ton of nasty stuff. But the most dangerous stuff is that you didn’t expect the danger. The engines are drained normally before delivered to the workshop. Normally. But sometimes are not. It happened regularly to me and my coworker to get soaked in oil or aircraft fuel. Kerosene (Jet A1) is hard to ignite and we had only a limited number of work clothes. One day, me and my coworker got a full load of jet fuel and soaked to the underwear. It’s jet fuel, it’s no big deal. I changed my clothes but my coworker did not. Instead he went to smoke a Cigaret. That day we learned, jet fuel on trousers is fucking flameable. But thanks good and a fire extinguisher, nothing happened expect a ruined trouser and a big shock. Ok, and he started to bragging around about his flame shaving of his private area.
Well yes, it's like the wick of a candle, making it possible to burn what wouldn't otherwise burn in ambient air. I wouldn't want to get kerosene on my privates without promptly stripping and washing it off well, flammability or no.
One molten metal story I have been told during a safety schooling is the the following: Two workers where working on a elevated walkway above a crucible. The walkway was made from metal floor grind, which did not combine well with the fact, that one of the workers had failed to notice some snow stuck to their boots. As is expected of a story told in a safety schooling things went horribly wrong, when the snow fell from the boot into the crucible. On contact with the molten metal it caused an explosion flinging molten metal several feet up to the walkway killing both workers. Molten metal is scary as it is firmly lodged in the category of lots of stored energy. Whever it is kinetic, thermal, chemical or potential energy, it will find a way to maim or kill you if you are not careful.
Don't fall into the trap that sodium is less dangerous/reactive than potassium, this also includes lithium. With enough of any of them you will get a columbic explosion. While the reactivity plays some role, I suspect the main difference is the melting point, as shortly after the metal melts is when you see the explosion (it is not instantly upon melting). Further proof is when you drop NaK (liquid) into water - it explodes instantly. Thunderf00t (Phil) did this and several videos on it as well as a paper.
not a chem incident but I'll share it anyway. I was studying at university. There was a clean room with a WERY expensive piece of technology called nanofab which btw could produce atom sized structures. So one day I worked there with a PhD student and we started hearing strange noise like boiling water. noise was becoming louder and louder and eventually we saw toilet water pouring from a drain on floor. not so clean anymore room was floated. water level with fecal masses continued rising for about an hour and reached 10 santimeters or so. sadly the nanofab has never worked as before ever since and university hasn't spent money to repare it. I guess the moral is don't ever place your clean rooms above sewer pipes
Regarding shipping chemicals... I'm not a chemist, but I work on cars as a hobby (mostly small rusty shitboxes from the 80s and 90s, because I'm an idiot) and I end up using and ordering a bunch of chemicals because of that. DCM for stripping paint, methanol as auxillary fuel, acetone for cleaning steel before welding, hexanes or naptha based wax and grease remover before paint, and, relevant to the story, phosphoric acid for rust treatment. The latter used in commercial rust treatments at about a 15% concentration. When you're dealing with something that's almost more rust than steel anymore you go through a lot, so I ordered 5l 99% phosphoric acid in bulk. It is supposed to be shipped by special courier. They sent it via regular post. A somewhat legit chemical supply company. They need special courier if you're ordering a 5l+ container of acetone. They will happily send you 2 2.5l containers in regular post though, or 10 1l containers in a box.
Got a molten aluminum story that basicly happened the same way. My friend and me made molds of our hands but didn't wait for them to dry properly so when we poured in the molten metal the sudden creation of steam made it explode everywhere. I was the one pouring it in and got splashed right in the face with a ring fingers worth of aluminum. Luckily none hit my eyes, mouth or nostrils. All of it hit my right cheek and just pearled off. I assume the evaporating water in the first layer of skin kept it from sticking. Glory to the Leidenfrost effect. Much more pleasant than burning plastic though still not recommended. Oh, and all of this was done with an improvised charcoal oven we powered with a leafblower while we were teens so there was basicly no PPE involved.
One time in HS chemistry, we were using iodine for something, and I'll admit that I snagged a couple of grams. I didn't have a container, so I put it on a piece of paper and folded it and wrapped it up as much as possible. Then I stuck it in my pocket and went to my next class. About half an hour later, it started to feel a bit "spicy" in my pocket. That was when I learned about the high volatility of iodine.
0:32 Reminds of that video where a family released a bunny into the wild after caring for it… Only for it to be caught by a bird of prey on camera. 2:31 It’s only a matter of time before someone experiences one of Joker’s many backstories. 2:59 NaOH (sodium hydroxide; caustic soda) + H3NSO3 (sulfamic acid) → NaH2NSO3 + H2O 4:36 GC-Sniffing sound fun til one of the products come out wrong. 6:34 Ah~ steam explosions, second only to dust explosions. 8:49 The principal and grandfather weren’t beating the kids to bring their vision back. Instead they were beating discipline into them. 9:42 UV light, for your invisible ink purposes. 11:04 Send some of that pink dye to rival laundromats. 13:18 Oof that guy was lucky to not have his leg amputated. Though, maybe not too lucky :P 15:18 Fun fact: Antimony doesn’t decompose into “anti-“ and “-mony.” It shares the same source as “stibium,” the other name for the element, which is the Egyptian “sedem,” which means “to apply makeup, medicine, or salves on the eyelids.”
The potassium story reminds me of a story my Inorganic professor told us. She used to work in a Waste Water Treatment facility as a part time, and they got Sodium leftovers to raise the pH of the water. One day she got a very big chunk of Sodium. She tied a rock around it and threw it into the airation pool. It first just bubbled under water, but than the chunck shot up and landed in a nearby forest. Luckily it had rained recently, so no wildfire started. My Grandmother was a Dental assistant. Among Dental assistants, they had a saying. "Bist du des Lebens froh, drinke H2O, bist du des Lebens Stier, drinke H2SO4." (If you are happy about your life, drink H2O, if you are "bull" about your life, drink H2SO4)
So here is one of mine. I am a machine operator specialised in metal machining on cnc lathes and mills and the programming of said machines here in Germany. In one of my old workplaces we had to clean out the coolant systems of our machines. Its generally just part of our job. We used pretty corosive cleening solutions to get the gunk in the tanks and the half way solidified oil that comes out of the coolant emulsion loose and out of the system. Nice thick rubber gloves, aprons and eyeprotection to not get burned by the mix of strong bases, slag, metal dust, old oil, very dirty water and a laundry list of other polutants. Basically an one in all ecological poison mix. We then sucked it up into this giant shop vacuum/pump monstrosity that looks like a barrel on wheels. All nice an dandy till then. What we did not notice was that the outflow hose had gotten extreamly brittle. So off we went to the disposal tanks, the outflow hose conected to them, and the vac/pump put on overpressure to pump it all into the tanks. The next thing I know is hearing a loud crack and getting showered by the putrid mixture and seeing the surrounding area get flooded by it. At that point I took a very quick trip to the showers and thankfully got away with a few days of nasty skin rashes. But the cleanup was an absulute nightmare.
Videos like this are a nice reminder that even if I love the idea of working on something like that it’s really only meant for a proper lab with proper safety because you never know when the worst can happen. I absolutely love studying propellants, and I would love to do some work on them. Obviously, doing this at home is extremely dangerous since these are usually mixtures of chemicals that are… One could generously call them simply “unsafe”. Want to say thanks for making these because actually hearing some disaster stories really is better encouragement to stay safe than reading SDSs and papers sometimes.
About hot dogs in kettle thing. So back in my dorm days we had 1 electric stove on 10 people to cook on but we had more than enough outlets and we being 19 yo decided to cook hot dogs in a kettle. We also used the water afterwards to steam ramen which was actually pretty good. But nobody washed the kettle after that and next tea we had was a bit meaty.
That sulphuric acid story reminds me of my white phosphorous story. I was and am not an experianced home chemist, but for some reason i got it in my head that makeing white phosphorus would be a good first project. so went about buying as much red p as i could, i started with match box strikers and when it was obvious that the yeilds would be terible (i wanted gram quantitys of white p) i went looking on the bezos bazar for some product with significantly more red p. unfortunately i found it. what i bought was these magic trick things where its just a whole load of red p on a sheet of paper. you burn it and produce white p then get some on your fingers and rub it together causeing a little bit of smoke. I was not in a good state of mind at the time and thought it would be funny to light one in my room at 7 in the morning after an all nighter. Needless to say that my 2m x 1.7m room did not have the propper ventilation and i was almost instantly engulfed in smoke consiting of P2O5 and white phosphorus. this needless to say woke my parents up. after i made sure that the pile of 100 of these papers hadn't caught alight i imediately ran downstares to wash my body with the garden hose. i did feel a bit ill after that, my jaw hurt but it was probably not phossy jaw. probably. i am very glad i didn't try and make that stuff at the scale i wanted.
The molten metal in the shoe story reminded me, don't tuck your pants into your boots when doing foundry work. Bad enough getting molten metal on you without also having it also go in your shoe.
as an addition to the molten metal one aluminium doesn't just create a steam 'explosion' but it also forms Hydrogen because it doesn't have the protective oxide layer. Molten aluminium is just scary stuff and should never get in contact with water because it can just explode. I also have a great one for the home chemists out there. A friend of a friend had the great Idea to cook up some butyric acid at home. Why? nobody knows. He took a pressure cooker and around 1.5 kg of butter melted it and then threw in a not so small amount of sodium hydroxide. He then put the lid on the pressure cooker and cranked up the heat. He then went away doing something else until he heard a loud bang. The lid exploded off the pressure cooker and it spewed the stuff in it over the kitchen. In the end he and his parents had to rip out the whole kitchen and buy a new one. He had to pay off the bill.
I have so many stories about the stupid stuff I used to do as a kid, but I figured I'd just share the highlights lol. I was probably 12 or 13, and a decided to put yeast and sugar into one of those short apple juice bottles made of glass. I screwed the cap on REAL tight (as you do), and promptly forgot about it for 2 weeks! I came back, and upon seeing the plastic cap was bulging several millimeters upwards, decided I should probably open it indoors immediately. After several minutes of trying my absolute best to unscrew it, it wouldn't move at all. The force from the pressure was that strong. Only at this point did I realize this might be a slight explosion hazard! So I took it outside and tossed it on the pavement and it was like a hand grenade lmao. It shot glass shards 20 feet up. I feel very lucky, and very stupid! I also decided to play around with a microwave oven transformer around the same time (yayy!). I was basically just waving the output which was like 2000volts and high current in a way I thought was safe. It ended up arcing to itself VERY close to my hand. I'm kinda amazed I survived that lmao On a slightly less terrifying note, I also decided to grind up those fire starter magnesium alloy shavings into an extremely fine powder, and then light it! It was almost exactly like the "chemist mixes wrong chemicals and things go WOOSH and turn your face black" thing. I couldn't see anything for about a minute! It was unbelievably bright. I wasn’t wearing any face protection, and I did this directly next to my bedding 😁
So like you've asked about geologist licking rocks before and I thought I'd try to clear some stuff up, note I am a forester and merely minored in geology so take this with a cystal of halite. There are a couple reasons to do it. One easy to work out one is that some rock have some very distinct tastes thanks to our evolution. Every 100 geology lab is going to have a mineral ID section where that is a valid way to ID the salt. But another use is that our tongues have the most sensitive touch receptors on our bodies. So if you are say trying to get a better idea of the grain size annd you newed more than the visial chart will tell you (something real small) then that's one way to go about it. Sedimentologist am I right? I don't get the soil scientist tasting dirt thing, I took a forest soils class, and we just ID stuff in our hands. Also a fun Forestry story: One of our main washout classes is Tree ID. There are a 140 plants you have to learn in the fall (so leaves are not a strong stratgy). There are a couple plants with strong odors so smalling a crushed up leaf or other plant part is one ID method. I remember on our third week some people trying that with Poison Ivy, putting it right up to their noses. This being the third week it was also the first week the professor wasn't warning us about ivy, mainly because he was in this case quizzing us on it and you can be giving away questions.
Yes , the sedimentologists are the incurable rock lickers . The ore petrologists , typically exercise more restraint . Mercury and Arsenic tend to discourage such investigative measures .
My dad used to be a forester. He later became a carpenter, so I know quite a few trees and types of wood. Cedar and Pine are 2 trees that you can consistently identify off of the smell alone.
One thing that happened at our place many years ago (before I was there, so this is second hand info) is that a cleaner had cleaned the floor in the ethidium bromide room and then cleaned the test of the floors. Because the floor in the ethidium bromide room is considered ‘contaminated’ all the other floors had to be cleaned by a special decontamination cleaning crew and all the water and wipes had to be disposed off as hazardous waste…
I woke up one day to the sound of my flatmate going "pfffff aaahh kdnebrjfj" really loud, then a pause, then screaming my name. Apparently I forgot to rinse our water kettle after cleaning it with citric acid (de-chalking), and she used the acidic water to make her morning coffee. woops. Pro tip: if you have a reverse osmosis system at home, use its water for the kettle - I do that for over a year now and haven't had to de-chalk it since.
I am a little surprised that no one (that I have seen) has yet mentioned Max Gergel of Columbia Chemical and his book ("Excuse Me sir, would you like to buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide?" )
If we're doing chemistry dad jokes, I have one: An atom of Helium walks into a bar. Bartender says, "Sorry, we don't serve noble gasses here." Helium doesn't react.
The olfactory GLC detector is a real thing, preferably with non toxic materials. Also, don’t try this with a FID, only thermal conductivity detectors need apply…. In the old days I used .25 inch packed GLC columns the GLCs had TC detectors. I could catch major peaks with a glass dispo pipet stuck in the outlet…a quick way to get pure materials from mixtures.
When I went on a tour of the McCormick R&D lab, their GC also had something similar that they called the sniffer port (theirs was basically a plastic tube with a funnel coming out from the detector) so they could take note of the retention times of smells that piqued their interest for building flavors.
Here's a fun story for you. In 1960 drag racers were just learning what nitromethane would do for them and driver Chris Karamesines discovered that adding just a little hydrazine to a tank of nitro would make the car go REALLY fast. They use it as an oxygen scavenger in steam boilers, so getting some is no problem. Karamesines also discovered that 5ml per liter provides the best results, which in this case means that you usually make it all the way to the end of the track before the car explodes. The Golden Greek determined this mix ratio through long and diligent experimentation, which means he found the fine point in the middle between "the car doesn't go much faster than it did without H in the fuel" and "the supercharger flew 125 feet in the air after the engine exploded." More entertainment: if the vapors from this mixture condense in a closed environment, your engine fills with white flakes. These flakes are methazodic salt of hydrazinium acid, which is a shock-sensitive high explosive not requiring much shock to detonate. Karamesines reports that another driver hounded him for some H, so the driver was provided with one pint and the only instruction for use - do not add all of this to the tank at once. Of course he did exactly that. H is hypergolic with nitromethane but the reaction takes long enough you can usually get all the way back to the pits before it goes off. The car was sitting on its trailer when the H and nitro reacted and started the engine all by itself. 30 seconds later the crankshaft had come free of the rods and bearings, then blew through both the oil pan and the trailer floor. The strange thing is it's the easiest thing in the world to catch someone using it: hydrazine makes nitromethane burn with an exquisite green flame you can't get any other way.
As an undergrad I worked as a lab assistant at a private school to get some funds. The head science teacher told me that a student once stole some white phosphorous and slipped it into his trouser pockets. I don’t know what the outcome was but I would imagine it was quite horrifying. This was quite a long time ago as I am now retired. I doubt that schools have access to such chemicals anymore. I have a friend who is a headmaster of a private school. He said even fairly “inocculous” chemicals like ammonium dichromate are banned so I very much that any form of phosphorous is used any longer.
The molten aluminum reminds me of when I was around 14 or 15 and my dad and I had made an aluminum foundry. We melted down a lot of cans and whatnot, and I still have some muffin shaped ingots from cooling the molten aluminum in mufin baking trays. Anyways, one time I got the bright idea of pouring the aluminum into a 5 gal bucket full of water, attempting to make one of those blobby aluminum sculptures. It turned out about as you'd expect, just a weird, kinda tall blob of aluminum. I wanted to reuse the aluminum so I went and used our bandsaw to cut it into quarters. I didn't think about the fact that the inside of the sculpture was porous and water came out when I was cutting it though, so once I melted down some cans to help transfer more heat into the sculpture chunks, I just tossed a piece in. After about 30 seconds or so the aluminum weakened enough and the water got more than hot enough to cause the liquid aluminum to start splattering out of the foundry. Luckily I've always been quite a safety freak and had eye/face and respiration protection on, as well as Kevlar arm guards. Unluckily I was wearing my crappy 'work' t-shirt and a blob of liquid aluminum splashed out and landed on my shoulder, melting right through my shirt and leaving me with a small burn. Luckily the t-shirt was thick enough to sap energy away as the aluminum burnt through. Had a discoloration on that shoulder for a while but it is gone now, about 6 years later. Definitely learned to wear even more protection than I was already doing. Still burn myself often tho, just did with a baking sheet two days ago. That's life
Or just plug the dog in the small fluorescent light receptacle😜 , it works.. Though I personally prefer the microwave if an open flame isn't an option. Just wrap in damp napkin and nuke...
@@petevenuti7355 That is a very alarming thing to read out of context. Still alarming in context, but much more out of. Lots of dorms don't allow microwaves. They literally don't want you to feed yourself
i just realized i have a story! When i was about 4 i grabbed the oven cleaner just before my mom was going to use it. I wanted to help by spraying down the oven, but it had a spray paint style nozzle and i blasted myself in both eyes. My mother water boarded me under the bathtub faucet for 15 minutes before taking me to the ER.
When I was in Boy Scouts they would boil hotdogs because they did not want the hassle of a fire. It is unquestionably the worst way to prepare them. It was so bad that I would almost go without eating because of it. But this is also where I learned the effects of skipping several meals, when I had my blood sugar crash and I had a form of delirium where I felt like I was actively dying.
I once walked into the office at a 711 I worked at in highschool. Every week or three we had to take a mop bucket full of very very high strength bleach and use it to scrub the piss, shit and vomit stains off the sidewalks outside. No real science to it, you filled the bucket with some water, ladled in powdered bleach of some sort until the smell made your eyes water, then scrubbed. Once you got the bucket outside the fumes wern't too bad, but it would ruin shoes/pants easily if spilled on them. Anyway, I open up the office door and find some twit had brought the bucket back inside after scrubbing the side walk (normally it gets poured into the storm drain because 711 respects the enviroment.), shoved it into the courner of the office up against a cabinet full of cleaning supplys. Clearly they had been in a bit of a hurry, the bucket hit the cabinet hard enough to slosh death water onto the cabinet and ruin the pain on it. Oh, and they knocked a bottle of toilet cleaner off the shelf, it landed in the bucket of bleach water, and they left it there... That was the day a Canadian 711 came one plastic cap away from chemical warfare.
That H2SO4 dad joke is something one of my favorite chemistry lab professors told to us on the first day of lab. I still have it scrawled down in my lab book somewhere (probably in the garage with the rest of my old lab books and various science books since there's no room in here for my bookshelves.
If you want to know the most expensive accident at our university...I don't mind sharing. This story is second hand as I wasn't even an undergrad yet when it happened and I heard it when I was working in the high field magnetic laboratory during my masters. I don't know the full details but I'll tell it as best as I can. A lot of this is guesswork by me and other students. I did find the news article covering this but it left out that it was caused by a failed experiment. So besides the normal every day NMR machines (like a normal 700MHz NMR, a super fancy 900MHz fully automatic NMR and a very cute desktop NMR) we had in the analysis wing (inside the main building), we also had a set of....if memory serves about 6 or maybe 7 very very big, very fancy NMR machines underneath the pond outside as well as a LOT of other very big magnets. This was all in the underground lab. The space was shared between the solid state NMR department and the high field magnetic research department. The other machines were for experiments that needed magnetic fields of 20T and above. The biggest magnet was big enough that within a circle of....I guess about 10-15 meters NOTHING ferromagnetic was allowed. Heck, if you even mentioned the word pacemaker you would be kicked out of the underground lab. Field strengths were written within circles everywhere and just walking around in there is super cool. There was also some equipment there that was only allowed to run during the night due to the high power draw. Anyway, a professor and a PhD wanted to do some unusual experiments. I am not sure what exactly but it required writing some code as the software didn't support what they needed. The PhD student started the experiment late in the evening and after a few minutes left to eat a late dinner. But....that code had a bug in it causing a way higher current draw than intended. This popped the massive fuse(These cost over 10k btw). (The next bit has a lot of guess work) The UPS kicked in and this supposedly triggers a graceful shutdown protocol in the normal software but....because the normal software was offline as the PhD's code was controlling the machine the graceful shutdown never happened. After a few minutes the UPS couldn't handle the load and promptly fried. Then the self induction caused by the sudden power interruption caused a high power spike to be send back into the (now local) power system. This caused a lot of damage to a lot of computers and machines (luckily these weren't completely destroyed but the UPS's of these had to be replaced as well) and they all had massive down time due to the required repairs. I expect the NMR machine in question had to be completely taken apart as the coil plates probably all welded together, if nothing else. While the lab was basically undergoing a meltdown, outside of the lab the power in a large section of the city shut down. This was covered in the news as "Due to the triggering of a safety mechanism, [list of sectors] lost power at 10 pm last night. The cause is as of yet unknown." Our guess is that it was caused by the sudden drop in power demand when the fuse popped. Imagine the look of absolute horror on the student's face when he came back to the dark lab filled with "Magic smoke", a half molten NMR and all the UPS systems blaring alarms. I don't know how much the total bill was but this was known as "The most expensive accident" at our university.
I rember when I was living with my sister I wanted to make some pasta and I preground the pepper on to a hot pan. This turns out is a bad idea because it gives off a Gas that filled the entire apartment with a mild pepper spray. The worse part was we just had the door and exhaust to air it out because the windows wouldn't open. It stung at the eyes but also the mouth.
That must have been some fresh pepper... I've gassed myself roasting my own cacao beans on the stove. I don't know for sure whether I got a lungful of acrylamide or if it was something else, but I did NOT feel well even with the fan going. So I'm never doing that again.
@@andreahighsides7756 Toasting peppercorns is a thing I thought I remembered, and shows up in Google searches too. However, this is peppercorns, not ground pepper. To toast the ground pepper would be not just to create a spicy gas but to lose a lot of the flavor.
Remember overhead projectors ? They used a high intensity light bulb that got incredibly hot . A sure fire way to have class outside was to dump several ounces of black pepper in the tray under the bulb . The variations on this theme are only limited by your imagination . Toasters , toaster ovens , coffee makers , all can be used as crowd control devices . Modern video projectors ( not sure about the led ones ) will also work .
The Petrol/Gasoline is probably wrong translation (imagine the smell). I don't know, what italians say, but in German, "Petroleum" is used for what englishmen call "paraffin oil" and americans call "Kerosine". Read, the thing, you put in oil lamps or store Kalium.
this intro unlocked a core memory of mine. we had cocoons in 3rd grade. i remember the smell of the room to this day, and how it looked. we had a mass release where everyone let their butterflies go at the same time and i remember mine being the only one that got snatched up by a passing bird. from that point on my life has been kinda dull, i think it legit scarred me for life.
I just remembered a story from my high school chemistry class. I prevented a disaster after reading the practical instructions. We were learning how to make a standard solution. The experiment involved making a solution of 0.1M sodium hydroxide. The steps were to measure out 0.01M of sodium hydroxide and add it to a beaker. Then we were to add 100mL of water to the beaker. I told the chemistry teacher that it seemed unsafe to add water to a dry base. The teacher told me that only applied to acids, I said she was wrong. The next day we got given a new set of instructions and we used sodium bicarbonate. She never mentioned that conversation again, but I assume she did her research after that class. I know that it was unlikely for anything bad to happen with the concentration we were making, however I feel like it’s a sin to add water to a strong acid or base, one video I saw of people doing this experiment had a part 1, but no part 2 after they cut it off with the guy stirring more water to get the undissolved crystals so I think part 2 would’ve gone against RUclips’s TOS
My dad is very keen on hygiene and order around the house. Sometimes he goes on a cleaning marathon and obviously doesn't skip the WC which is a very small room (something like 7m² of air volume) with no ventilation. His cleaning process involves using a large amount of drain cleaner in the toilets, closing the door to mob in front out it and completely forget about the toilets. More than once I have had an urge to go take a pee, open the door, enter the room, lock the door and almost faint at the first breath. Now that I am more aware of the risk, it happens that I have to relieve myself peeking my head outside of the room to breathe. Seriously if you use household chemicals make sure the room is well ventilated...
I remember second hand a story my uncle had told when he was working at a lab and they were moving from one lab to the next and they were upgrading some of the fume hoods. While cleaning around the space one attendant found three very old bottles of still sealed dimethyl cadmium they determined these had been sitting up there on a small shelf for over 16 years.
When I was a TA in an undergrad ochem lab course, I had to bring sodium witch was stored in a bottle of mineral oil to the students. I put it on a paper towel in thier fumehodd for them to cut it and then I put it back in the bottle. One time, when i wanted to put the sodium back in in front of 3 students, there was a similar bottle in their fumehood next to the one with mineral oil where I accidently dropped in the piece of sodium. It turned out that it was acetone and it immediatly started heating up and becoming yellow/brown. At first I was confused what happened, but then I managed to pull it out. Was a nice embarrasment.
On Monday we go a shipment of Anhydrous Sodium Bisulfate at work. I was the one who greeted the delivery drivers, they started handling the bags of 25kg powered acid like they were sand bags and had 0 PPE. I immediately asked them where their PPE was, atleast gloves and eye protection. Their response was something like ''oh we're used to it so it's fine. Powered acid is only dangerous if it's mixed with water.'' .. I was baffled. Also, did I forget to mention it was raining outside so the bags did get wet AND they had been mishandled so several bags had small cuts in them. After they left I wrote an email to the distributors sales person as the delivery had been done internally on their end. I put in CC their higher ups and mine, the president of that company responded that Sodium Bisulfate wasn't that dangerous but that some precautions still needed to be taken. To which I responded that absolutely no precautions had been taken and that even if NaHSO4 wasn't classified as being a dangerous material there were still some risks, eyes/skin/lungs. (I've had some on my skin before and every since then I'm itchy just looking at the bags.) I also mentioned that I wasn't trying to put anyone in trouble but that since most people aren't chemically literate and have a poor understanding of the risks associated with handling them. That it was important to have proper PPE, even for transporters. My boss called me later during the day and said ''DAMN! You lit those guys up lmfao, but it's fine because you're absolutely in the right''.
@@That_Chemist I sent them the SDS in my second email to them. I ended my email with ''I have informed you, do whatever you want with that information.'' 😂
I never worried too much about eye protection while making handmade soap in the past. However, a trip to the optometrist changed that. At the start of the appointment, I handed over my current glasses for the optometrist to ID my current prescription. She was *appalled.* "What have you done to your glasses??" Turns out the fumes from the 12M NaOH solution I use managed to etch the protective coating from the lenses. You could see spatters, etching, , and other definite damage to the coating. I just never really noticed. I did occasionally make soap without my glasses (I need them more for distance), but after realizing how close I apparently came to actual damage, I started wearing lab glasses while making soap.
When I was little I got a kids chemistry set. One of the chemicals was potassium permanganate. After doing an experiment with it in the bathroom on the counter like the instructions told I cleaned it up and went about my business. Whenever that sink and countertop got wet or even damp the pink would show up. It was actually a great lesson in chemistry. Just because a surface looks clean and you have tried to clean it doesn't mean a chemical isn't there.
I work in the hazardous and non-hazardous waste industry. 100% do not ship things as how they came to you. There’s strict methods for proper disposal and both state and federal regulations apply. You might think just because you can buy it, that it is safe…no. Household hazardous waste exists. Aerosols, batteries, lamps, mercury, paint, oils…so many. You should not store or ship these items without going through the proper channels. As a homeowner, reach out to your town. They’ll have yearly (usually) household hazardous waste days where they’ll collect and bulk all of these things (properly).
4:29 It's typically coupled with a single quadrupole mass spectrometer. GC-MSO: Gas Chromatography - Mass Spectrometry Olfactory detection. A normal GC-MS, but with a Y splitter after the column, splitting half going into the MS and the other half to a sniff port. That way you can identify each component with the mass spectrum and simultaneously get its smell documented. Pretty cool technique.
I remember the teacher told us that H2SO4 Rhyme in chemistry class when we were about to begin working with it in lab (this was early on so all of the chemicals we handled up to that point were relatively safe for newbies like us) primarily as an easy way to memorize that Sulfuric Acid was H2SO4 (it worked as I remember to this day while I've forgotten most others) and to demonstrate that the gloves were starting to come off, figuratively. Always wear your PPE
I work with railway track machines. One day i was working with the resurfacing machines instead of the undercutter I usually was with I thought, “gee this this is as dusty as the cutter.” They had broken a hydraulic fitting and were spraying like 50L of oil everywhere atomising it My nose ran for 12 hours, I took a bunch of antihistamines, the pharmacy told me to call the poisons hotline if it didn’t get better. It did. It’s been like 4 years and I can still smell panolin from 10 meters away *they actually broke the fitting like 2 hours earlier, replaced it, and didn’t tighten it up properly. Thanks guys.
all these stories made me remember my first time in a gas attack, I was 16, playing with electrolysis and I was young and inexperienced, I was collecting gases with my homemade setup, an upsidedown vial , on top of an electrode all hooked up to an old nokia cellphone charger, I saw on books and online that the electrolysis of water, give out hydrogen and oxigen, the hydrogen was easy.... but the oxygen was slow and when I managed to collect enough I didn't knew what to do, how to test it, so I had the brilliant idea of smell the gas from the vial just to see and feel what is like to breathe pure oxygen .... well, what is missing here is that I haven't told you what I did use for the electrolyte... well, it wasn't acid, it wasn't basic, if it were baking soda I'd be fine, but it was table salt(foreshadowing), the moment I put the vial in my nostril and inhale it, I felt the most terrible and amazing sensation ever, I chlorine gassed myself, and I discovered how to make chlorine gas, I didn't passed out, but was out of comission for at least half an hour, my mother screaming asking what is going on, I couldn't answer, couldn't even breathe properly! it was funny, I felt bad but it felt good. years later I learned that I was supposed to have used something like baking soda or an alkali base or something like diluted sulphuric acid, and if I knew that table salt would yield chlorine gas, I would never had inhaled . that being said, you shoul not be inhaling chemicals! no one should!!!
I have a story about alkali metal too.When i was around 15 years old,i learned about alkali metals would reacts with water,so silly me bought 250 grams of sodium and 100 grams of potassium.Later i found that NaK is more reactive than either Na or K.That night i made 10 grams of NaK.I wonder what will happen if i mix NaK with iodine. So i mix like 0.5g of NaK with 1g of iodine.It seems like nothing happened first,so i smashed the mixture with a hammer,the mixture actually detonate,it was really loud.And a small pieces of burning Nak are everywhere,fortunately im not harm during that because of ppe.After that i always wear ppe while doing chemistry whether safe or deadly regeants.
about the antimony pill, the less disturbing ritual was to drink wine from antimony cups (it's a component of pewter so it's been around since pre-Roman era) and the tartaric acid in the wine reacted with antimony metal to make (potassium) antimony tartrate in the wine, which served the same purgative effect. an antimony cup would be passed down between generations, because it leached so little substance out per use.
Based and antimony-pilled
I love stories like this.
It reminds me of copper lined water vessels to mildly reduce unwanted things living in the water. I just love the combination of the objects as both part of the structure and also a reagent.
It's the same with anti-moss zinc metal strips on roofs. Not talking about lead which is normal and used purely for its physical properties as flashing to seal gaps, zinc is simply run in thin strips across exposed areas so it very slowly reacts and the tiny tiny amount of runoff helps reduce moss growth on the roof. Sadly in some areas, years of this usage can eventually contribute to excess zinc in waterways.
Antimony and arsenic salts where commonly used to make white and blue eye makeup. In some areas, it was deemed a lesser evil, as it killed bacteria that could make you go blind. The good thing is that it was in places where adults where able to drink milk, so, they also tended to drink a lot of milk. Like some milk with every meal.
Funny how you said about lesser of two evils and could stop some germs that lead to blindness.
If you read an old pharmacopoeia, or old Merck index from at least 70 years ago, yes indeed you'll find some curious entries for heavy metals for various different uses. There was opium mixed with arsenic, and mercury salts for topical ointment to treat syphilis!
A different time.
Ok I'll bite. Here's my favorite science joke for the end screen:
Heisenberg, Schrodinger, and Ohm are carpooling to a conference when they get pulled over by a cop. He comes to the window and asks, "Sir do you have any idea how fast you were going?" Heisenberg says, "No, but I know exactly where I am!". The cop says, "you were going 85 in a 70", to which Heisenburg shouts, "Great, now we're lost >:(". The cop thinks this is suspicious and decides to search the vehicle. He comes back and says "Are you aware there is a dead cat in the trunk of this car?" Schrodinger says "Well we do now, asshole". The cop arrests all of them for animal cruelty, but also get Ohm for resisting.
Hahaha
This is amazing
Yeah, your humor is a little too intellectual for me
Never heard of the Ohm variation of the joke
I see a couple of recurrent themes in the Chempilations, especially home chemistry mishaps:
(1) Wanting to use a much larger quantity than actually needed to observe the reaction;
(2) Not knowing, or not thinking about, how your chemical would react with other common substances in the vicinity (water, air, metals, oils, etc.) if it came in contact with them.
100%
Just like the videos the USCSB puts out. There's always a few common themes in them. 1, Lax safety culture, 2 Low amounts of oversight, 3 ignoring warnings, I can't think of any others, but those are super common.
gotsta remember them basics!! if not ya might go BOOM🤯
these videos are a great safety learning experience.
In the Periodic Videos episode for potassium, the metal was referred to as "evil".
One time a chemisty teacher cut a chunk that looked like moldy cheeze was red orange and yellow crusted and it blew up spectacularly like a firework was set off. The chemistry teacher got burned pretty badly and made very harsh smoke. 😵😵😵
@@christopherleubner6633 wow! sounds like it could’ve developed a film of potassium superoxide
I have been to a fragrance company too. The GC-olfactometry is apparently standard in this field, but I had never seen it before either. It is fascinating. It is literally a GC with a plastic face mask at the end. As you can imagine, this thing can be quite hot. The user sniffs in this mask during the whole run and has a button to press when they smell a change. Afterwards, the chromatogram shows the button presses and you can select the different fractions. Sounds exhausting though.
I would totally do a video on that
The food chem department in our university got them as well.
@@ChemEDan XD
Apparently some people can smell small changes before it can be measured by GC-MS
Small molten metal story; my dad, because we were very poor growing up in the 90s, rebuilt the engines and other parts of our family van when they broke.
One day, he was working underneath the van on the starter. He had disconnected the battery and was busy removing whatever it was holding the assembly in place. Somehow, the battery cables wiggled their way back to the battery terminals.
So at some point my dad’s gold wedding ring shorts two electrical connections straight from the battery. The arc managed to melt a chunk of the ring and violently splatter it over my dad’s face (mostly his upper lip because of the grimace he was making trying to get the starter to come out).
It hurt pretty bad and he couldn’t shave for months, but he avoided any serious injury luckily. And being not a stupid person, he never did work on a car without double-checking the safety of what he was doing first, like removing batteries, wearing gloves, etc.
And that is the story of how my dad unwillingly grew a mustache for a year.
He made a grimace - that is the only reason he survived
@@That_Chemist omg I didn’t even realize I said Grimace. Lol
based grimace
@@That_Chemist Safety grimace
In general do not wear metal jewelry when working on cars or electric power of any kind. Don't hang your keys on your belt either.
A similar story to the potassium pants predicament, in my first high school chemistry class we were told the story of a former student who had taken a liking to the similar reaction of sodium and water. This student snuck into the chemical storage room and decided to steal a golf ball sized piece of sodium which he put into his pants pocket. Over the next hour the moisture from his leg was causing the sodium to heat up in his pocket, so the student decided he had to get rid of it. To get rid of the warm lump of sodium the student had the genius idea of flushing the lump down the toilet. My teacher said that the entire school shook from the explosion and the student was found in the newly flooding bathroom with a broken leg from the piece of toilet that struck him in the leg. I’ve always wanted to see this reaction first hand but the school wisely banned continuing to use sodium around a bunch of high-schoolers.
This story actually sounds really familiar. Pretty sure one of my high school teachers told it to the class, but I don't remember if it happened at my high school or if they just heard it from a teacher they knew.
@@00muinamir it could be possible it’s a common high-school chemistry scare story so students don’t harm themselves unknowingly, but he told the story with a lot of conviction so 15 year old me believed it 😅
Here’s what sodium does when flushed down the toilet. Of course Grant Thompson (RIP) and Cody Reeder had to try it…
ruclips.net/video/CEC64Bqeajs/видео.html
The electric kettle story reminds me of the time I was descaling our kettle on April Fool’s day. I accidentally left the vinegar in the kettle and pranked my dad when he was making coffee, making it the most appropriate day to forget to empty the kettle after descaling it. I’ve never had the problem of the descaling water getting discolored though - it sounds like that poster’s kettle is made out of pretty cheap stainless steel. I’d be a bit worried about it leaching metal ions into solution during regular use- the chromium in stainless steel is no joke!
A colleage has stakes in several foundries and can tell a lot of stories about the industry. He told me that the most dangerous metal to cast is aluminium because steel is so hot it just leidenfrosts off you and you won't be hurt, but aluminium is not hot enough and sticks. He told me that every so often a worker would get burnt and that first he won't feel anything but they start to give pain medication right away and call the ambulance and hope they arrive early enough to bring him to the hospital before the excrutiating pain of burns start.
Tough industry, but he says workers are generally happy because they can directly see the fruit of their labor.
hm ya if i ever end up in metal working i will try to stick to steel just to make use of the leiden effect though i may need some time to get used to the extream heats as i still even with an oven instinctivly back away i never could fully get over my heat backing as i keeped away from the area a fire is really warm. ie right near it.
@@lechking941 not sure if steel casting is the best place to work at. Due to the high temperatures they don't use 'normal' but chromite sand which is much heavier and someone must shovel that in place.
@@lechking941Casting also basically looks like a satanistic ritual. Because most melts are undersaturated with gases the mold has to burn shortly before pouring so it starts by flames coming out all around it and then very heavy metal is poured which has such force that you can feel the floor shaking in the whole complex. And then there is a whole bunch of guys standing around completely covered in PPE.
@@Doping1234 :P good i was born in a hell (floridaman native :P i dont give a single fuck about rain or wind.) also i have seen a number of smithing vids and a handfull of shows involving the industry o ya i get the meansing of allt hat.
@@Doping1234 so i can get a hell of a workout with that sand. :P a benofite because i need to get into shape somehow XD
My dad taught me the same H2SO4 poem.
Side note, my sister-in-law is studying anthropology and tracking the possible origins of things like that poem is a big part of it. So lately I've been having fun trying to trace possible origins of things passed through our family like that. The H2SO4 one seems to be documented back to at least the late 1800s, but no clear origin.
Chemistry folklore (whether true or not) is quite interesting it might make a good video.
that does sound like a perfict vid.
Max Gergel recounted a similar (childhood) story about stealing potassium in his memoir. Fortunately it was stored under mineral oil rather than something more flammable, which the thief (I don't remember if it was him or his friend) wiped off before stuffing the piece into his back pocket. Of course the fresh potassium started to react with air and eventually caught fire. They were caught, of course.
Gergel's somewhat rambling memoir "Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide" is a must read. A lot of yikes-worthy stories. Gergel died just a few years ago, at the age of 96.
Possibly my favourite (and definitely yikes-worthy) story in the book was his account of his methyl iodide poisoning. This happened in the 60s, and it was extremely novel, no one had gotten enogh MeI in their body to cause acute poisoning symptoms before him. He eventually recovered but had to retire from doing labwork in their small scale chemical production business.
Speaking of which, of course they dumped all their chemical waste just to their yard. I think more than one of the company's (which went out of business in the 70s) former locations is in the EPA superfund site list.
That is a classic , right up there with IGNITION! and The Green Flame .
It was definitely a different universe back then, though I am not sure the results are entirely positive .
People , especially inquisitive ones , will always tinker and experiment . Sadly this is now a cause for outright panic and the wrath of the Karens nowadays .
Regarding industry's sketch practices when it comes to hazardous chemicals: you would be amazed how much more unsafe things can get in non-lab settings. If you ever want to go down that rabbit hole, the USCSB actually has a youtube channel where they present real cases of industrial chemical accidents.
I love their videos - I binge watched basically all of them
I work at a chemical company, making cleaning solutions. Making a pH14 solution is a bit sketchy, but not too bad, just don't splash any.
Filling it into customer appropriate containers is, on the other hand, scary as shit, as dripping or spilling some is far too easy when working in large scale.
I sloshed my left foot once as I was raking that days spill & water mix towards the waste well. My foot definately got clean, as did the grating in the showers.
oof close call but ya cleaned foot that day
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Glad you made it unscathed dude. Used to work in a warehouse that stocked hospital cleaning chemicals. Much of that job was picking, and packing orders which meant we had to pick the heavy bastards up, and box them up, and label them. Bit munane, but the thought of dropping one on the concrete was scary enough a prospect to keep me careful.
I recall an 8th grade science class and a physical lab for earth science , where the students were to identify a suite of mineral samples by testing the physical properties of each sample .
One of the tests was the ole acid test using a small beaker containing dilute HCL and an eyedropper , to determine the presence of carbonate minerals .
It seems " SOMEBODY " encouraged their classmates to test the metallic samples with the acid , while others did so of their own accord .
The metallics of course , were common lead and iron sulfides , and created H2S , which caused one student to vomit , which then triggered the dreaded sympathetic puke party and a stampede to fresh air for the remainder of the period .
This would be a huge deal today , but , really didn't raise any eyebrows then , especially since the chemistry teacher routinely managed to set the chem lab on fire at least once a year , with the Carbon Disulfide .
HOLD UP WHAT! "routinely managed to set the chem lab on fire at least once a year" ok fucking hell that man would be on the streets today.
Glad everyone was okay. Hydrogen Sulfide is no joke.
@@deltab9768 on the contrary.
H2S is the worlds oldest fart joke.
A friend of mine was once a driver for an aluminum chemical truck. The truck was loaded, without his knowledge, with a caustic cleaning chemical instead of the soap it was supposed to be transporting. He managed to make it to his destination without a mishap, and parked the truck and went on with his day. Later (I don't remember how much) He was visited by DHS agents, investigating the truck's shocking but inevitable explosion. They had no sense of humor.
well at lest he could complain to HQ about the change of load with out ever being told.
i dont mean to hamper the story but yeah, kinda on him,
he aint fully at fault, but he aint blameless either
why?
the trucker takes responsibility of the load, its on him to check the paper work
well now, if the paper work didnt get changed then ok, thats the dumbass who made the paper work
The pink thing reminds me of KMnO4.
Handling it is a good reminder of how easily you can contaminate gloves, work benches etc. you start washing a surface and all these sub-milligram particles start dissolving and making pink splotches.
So, this story happened literally yesterday, and is really two stories in one that are related.
I work at a shop that batch-manufactures various products to fight galvanic corrosion, and this month we're doing (for the first time) alkali-activated zinc anodes for rebar. Basically, they're Twinkie molds with a mixture of LiOH and KOH, boric acid, zinc sulfate, and mortar/concrete for the outside and cast zinc for the filling that get wired to the rebar in a structure as a sacrificial anode, the alkali acts as a PH control/electrolyte to help them work better than just straight zinc.
Now, we take safety serious-ish but a lot of the lessons end up being trial and error, when we first started the process we were told the full-face respirators and Tyvek coveralls were only required for the dry-mix step in the negative pressure booth (no AC and it's 80-90F in the building, AND 2 exhaust fans are down for electrical work right now) and were all built around "don't inhale microcrystalline silica" with a lot less regard paid to how caustic our mortar mix is.
The very first batch of mortar we're mixing, the guy on the mixing drill is dressed in what we considered "appropriate" PPE for the wet mortar tasks, just gloves taped to the sleeves of our shirts, n95 dust mask, and cheap safety glasses without shields. Halfway through the batch, he loses his footing a little on the transition between diamond-plate platform and drain grate and reflexively clenches his hands - around the mixing drill, including the trigger, flinging caustic sludge all over himself and the immediate vicinity. I chose to wear my full-face mask (without the coveralls) and just got splatter on the visor, as I was measuring out the dry mix for him on the floor below the platform and this happened at my eye level, but he got globs on his forehead and cheek. It didn't start burning immediately, hydroxides usually don't, so he just wiped off his safety glasses and continued (either not noticing or not caring) and only cleaned off when we went to break about half an hour later.
He came in the next day with what looked to be 3rd degree caustic burns about the size of rice grains on the spots where droplets hit exposed skin, now we require people in the vicinity of the WET mix to wear full face masks. The shirts seemed to work though, so until we get the fans up again the bunny suits are optional.
The other story is more just an anecdote, a couple processes ago we were soldering on wires to zinc mesh for bridge pier jackets and the tables we have in the shop are uncoated steel. We used ZnCl acid flux, which is pretty standard, and those tables have been a horrible rust-dust mess ever since. Once we started doing our cupcake anodes though, the tables which got our mortar spatter on them are suddenly no longer rusty, the mix is SO alkaline that, when combined with the rust layer, the caustic sludge has blued them like gun metal. I've been tempted to mix up a small thing of mix without the mortar to wipe on the other tables so that I don't keep coming home with big rust stains on my work shirts...
Yikes!
well the gunmetal finish maybe useful but yeesh. maybe a tad risky
That janitor is the embodiment of the “Almighty Janitor” trope
I have a friend with which I simultaneously did my bachelor's project in the same lab. I was just doing my thing and suddenly there was a bang, accompanied by sounds of glass pieces. It turns out that my friend, who was working on BODIPYs dyes (I think), made a rookie mistake. She was going to extract the compound with dichloromethane, but it took forever (turned out to be a very prominent dye). She decided that heating the dichloromethane would increase the solubility and make it go faster, so she grabbed the heat gun and heated up the big 2L separatory funnel. However, this turned out to be a bad idea when the valve is closed and you are holding the stopper closed tightly. The floor, the fume hood, the cupboards, her lab coat were all covered in purple. They tried to remove it, but it turns out that scrubbing the floor with DCM only removed the protective coating and made it even more visible. It has been 3.5 years and the stains are still there. Fortunately no one got harmed, but it could have gone really badly. Especially regarding the fact that this was luckily one of the few times she DID wear gloves.
The city of Warsaw, where I live, uses clams as a method of detecting impurities in the water supply. The clams are connected to sensors using springs and are constantly monitored by computers. This is of course just one of the many methods used in the water treatment, but the overall quality of the water is one of the best in the region.
This is amazing
Speaking of at home chemistry.
I once decided to dry some lithium hydroxide solution I'd made at home, on a stovetop, in an open container, while drunk.
Needless to say this was not a good idea. I inhaled a lungful of what I presume was aerosolised lithium hydroxide, which smelt like pretzels and pain. Ended up having to get checked at the hospital but was completely fine. Mild cough for a day or so.
Lesson: don't drink alcohol and do chemistry.
Imagine going to the hospital at a minor injury lmfao 🤣
@@wolfetteplays8894 Minor? I'd inhaled enough aerosolised LiOH for it to hurt; checked online and found that low level lethal alkali exposure to the lungs has a prodromal period where victims seem fine for a few hours before it starts to really kill them. at which point I called poison control who advised I go to the hospital for observation.
I think the real lesson is that you need to inhale less next time.
By petrol they might mean naphtha, kerosene, paraffin, whatever you name it. I remember that in the "old days" that'd be used sometimes as storage liquid for stuff like alkaline metals.
"Nobody else deserves to deal with your mistakes... Take responsibility, and don't create problems", That Chemist, 2022
Yeah but unfortunately only about 1 person in a million seems to have the decency to do so. Everyone else will lie to your face, try to pretend they were joking, blame it on someone else, or just not say anything. At least this is the majority of my experiences over 25 years. The pretending to be joking one is especially common. And irritating. I just feel like they're assuming I'm dumber than they are if they they I'd believe that. And even if I were, joking's never an excuse for putting somebody's wellbeing in danger or doing some other jerkass thing. lol Sorry I feel like an angry old man or something.
There is an anecdote I found in Wikipedia (and cant find anymore) that tells this history:
In 1979's LA, a nearby shop worker saw an industrial radiographer and picked it up. The Gamma-Ray lens detached and the radioactive source (Ir-192) fell to the floor. He picked it up and hid it in his right pocket for around 45 minutes. Around that time he started to experience nausea and medium radiation poisoning. His right buttock became very ulcerted, with a hole with a diameter of 4in and 1in deep. He had to suffer a very intense reconstructive surgery and almost died from severe radiation poisoning.
Yikes! Not quite Goiania Incident level yikes, but pretty yikes nonetheless.
My inorganic chemistry teacher told us a story about a girl who was taking advanced chemistry clases with him. One time, he left her with a random student to do some experiments. They were doing some studies about solubility i think so there wasn't that much of trouble, but this dude decided to "prank" her and gave her unknowinglly (or that is what my teacher wants to believe) some potasium or sodium compound and it exploded so bad that the girl didn't survived. They never found out what was exactly what he gave her because he didn't knew either and the lab was almost in ruins, so no identification was possible. A lab is no place for "jokes" or "pranks".
(sorry for grammar)
sodium compounds are not geneally explosive, you put them on your fries. Sodium metal on the other hand...
@@tsm688 yeah, I must have missheard the possible candidates.
It might have been sodium-potassium alloy, NaK, a liquid at room temperature which can ignite on contact with air or water.
Awful story, so sad
Sounds like both an explosion and a fire?
I've seen a someone do the potassium thing but with dry ice instead. Student in middleschool tried to steal a chunk in his pocket. He made it to the door before the cold hit and he panicked and dropped his pants. (Smarter than trying to keep them on at least)
The janitor needs to be praised not just for his bravery, but also the thinking to break the glass bottle to use to cut the jeans off. That's some really impressive calm thinking when absolute panic is going on. Guy legitimately deserves a medal
One day i was walking in front of a parked van as the battery randomly exploded. Never seen a lead acid battery explode like that before or since, but it blew a hole right though the plastic grill and stuck acid covered plastic shards in shrapnel all down one side of me. I was only wearing swim trunks as i was at work (at the beach renting jet skis) so there was pretty much zero protection. No safety shower either, so i used the safety running leap off the dock over a row of jet skis into the water. It was a freak accident, the van wasn't being used, and had been parked for a week or more. I walked by it every day once or twice where it was parked and one day, just as i was exactly in front of it, kablooey. I suspect the vents go clogged and it overheated, then overpressured in the hot sun and burst.
And that''s how i ended up basically naked and soaked in battery acid with plastic shrapnel sticking out of me. Sometimes, no matter how safe you are, random unexpected shit can still happen out of nowhere for no reason other than coincidence. I wasn't in a lab, working with batteries, i was walking along a public sidewalk next to a parking lot on my way from taking a leak. It was as unforseeable as it gets, walking by a line of hundeds of parked cars, an every day thing anyone in a city or parking lot does, and one gets me like it's an IED. Or i can 'learn my lesson' and wear a lab coat and gogglesto the beach lol.
I jad a friend once , who was jump starting a car .
Not sure who hooked up the cables , he or the person who was supposed to be helping him , but , the leads to his battery were hooked up backwards and his battery exploded .
He still has scars years later and refuses to go near any lead acid battery .
Oh my gosh
That’s awful luck. I don’t know if it’s just the heat, sometimes those batteries produce H2 and O2 gases, evenly mixed, in a ratio of 2:1…
@@deltab9768 i know they can explode, but it's not like they're blasting caps or anything. I've been playing with lead acid batteries since i was a kid, from charging rc cars and doing electronics projects to today where i have banks of golf cart batteries running my house. That's the only time I've ever seen one violently explode. I've seen them short, melt, catch on fire, bulge, boil, and all manner of abuses but nothing like this. And the odds of the timing of that happening is astronomical, or like something out of a cheesy horror movie.
@@rustymustard7798 I was just saying I think that’s how it happened. It slowly got overcharged at a low current until the water content was electrolyzing instead of the lead plates.
Then it had to have an ignition source, before the gases had a chance to dissipate. That’s the part that makes it so rare. Multiple things have to go wrong in the “right” order to blow up a lead battery.
at my last job (industrial chemist at a cosmetic/toiletry factory), when the plant operators were making shampoos, bodywashes, and other coloured products, they had to weigh dyes out in the lab because their scales weren't sensitive enough - you only needed a few grams in a two-ton batch
out of all the dyes, FD&C Blue 1 was the worst to deal with because it gives a bright intense colour at very low concentrations and it came as very fine particles
even opening the tub had to be done very carefully, it'd spray anything within a 3-foot radius with tiny blue specks that were invisible until they became wet, and if you had an operator who was heavy-handed with the spatula, or spilled some while diluting it in water, it was an absolute nightmare to clean up
the worst thing was if you managed to get a tiny wee bit on your lab coat, then the coat would invisibly stain everything it touched
we also made semi-permanent hair dyes containing similarly persistent dyes, that were less soluble in water (hence harder to clean up - Basic Blue 124 and Basic Red 51 were particularly bad), but they were used at much higher levels, so the operators didn't have to weigh them out in the lab
I work in cleaning supplies and I can confirm the awfulness of FD&C blue 1. You look at that stupid stuff and it foofs everywhere.
In our high-school our science teacher would always take great pride in demonstrating the Thermite reaction each year for new students. It would be done at the front of the lab with a plexiglass screen in front, in a ceramic pot.
He would often soup up the reaction with "a special ingredient" as he called it.
One year it was a little too energetic, as soon as the magnesium ribbon hit it, the whole lot went up with a huge 'Fump', shooting molten iron straight up to the ceiling and showering down onto the students in the front row.
Luckily except for a few burn holes in trousers and the ceiling no-one was injured!
My high school chemistry teacher was about to retire, so he had a stockroom full of old chemicals he needed to use up and zero hecks left to give. He did a lot of explosive demos at the beginning of class. I was assigned a seat in front, so I frequently shielded myself with my binder.
Terrifying
Two chemists walk into a bar
- I'll take a glass of H2O, says the first one
- I'll take a glass of H2O too, says another
After they're served their glasses of liquids and drink them the second one dies.
He should have said, “I’ll have one too”
@@shardinalwind7696 this could've saved his life :)
My god, people should know that potassium is really really dangerous. The kid was lucky he just got his butt burned off, he could have put it in the front pocket (which would have been a medieval horror story)
So, roasted nuts.
"My uncle died of dihydrogen monoxide poisoning. When it got to his lungs he stopped breathing."
My father raised chickens and he always had bags of sulfur lying around for treating mites and such. One day I was helping him with some welding. I didn't find out there was a bag of sulfur nearby until a spark went into it. Sulfur fumes everywhere! Being an asthmatic at a time when asthma medications were rare, it took hours to stabilise my breathing at the local hospital.
Oh my gosh
I know the feeling.
The "Billy Was a Chemist" poem is actually a great way to teach people to always know what they're working with, and research it before hand. Also always label your goop.
100%
I accidently gave myself a very small third degree burn from brushing against a 300C heating element with the knuckle of my right index finger, despite nearly being able to see past the yellow fat, there is absolutely zero pain when the accident happens and during healing. Pretty sure this also ends up vaporizing some unimportant ligament in my hand, because now the finger is very flexible and I feel something trying to move that doesn't connect to anything when typing, which kind of tickles. The temperature is relatively low versus that molten dollop of aluminum, and I remember my accident smelling very good instead of burnt.
I worked as an aircraft engine mechanic and we had a ton of nasty stuff. But the most dangerous stuff is that you didn’t expect the danger.
The engines are drained normally before delivered to the workshop. Normally. But sometimes are not. It happened regularly to me and my coworker to get soaked in oil or aircraft fuel.
Kerosene (Jet A1) is hard to ignite and we had only a limited number of work clothes. One day, me and my coworker got a full load of jet fuel and soaked to the underwear. It’s jet fuel, it’s no big deal. I changed my clothes but my coworker did not. Instead he went to smoke a Cigaret.
That day we learned, jet fuel on trousers is fucking flameable.
But thanks good and a fire extinguisher, nothing happened expect a ruined trouser and a big shock.
Ok, and he started to bragging around about his flame shaving of his private area.
This story needs to be shared with all the idiots who think cigarettes can't ignite gasoline.
Well yes, it's like the wick of a candle, making it possible to burn what wouldn't otherwise burn in ambient air.
I wouldn't want to get kerosene on my privates without promptly stripping and washing it off well, flammability or no.
One molten metal story I have been told during a safety schooling is the the following:
Two workers where working on a elevated walkway above a crucible. The walkway was made from metal floor grind, which did not combine well with the fact, that one of the workers had failed to notice some snow stuck to their boots. As is expected of a story told in a safety schooling things went horribly wrong, when the snow fell from the boot into the crucible. On contact with the molten metal it caused an explosion flinging molten metal several feet up to the walkway killing both workers.
Molten metal is scary as it is firmly lodged in the category of lots of stored energy. Whever it is kinetic, thermal, chemical or potential energy, it will find a way to maim or kill you if you are not careful.
Don't fall into the trap that sodium is less dangerous/reactive than potassium, this also includes lithium. With enough of any of them you will get a columbic explosion. While the reactivity plays some role, I suspect the main difference is the melting point, as shortly after the metal melts is when you see the explosion (it is not instantly upon melting). Further proof is when you drop NaK (liquid) into water - it explodes instantly. Thunderf00t (Phil) did this and several videos on it as well as a paper.
not a chem incident but I'll share it anyway. I was studying at university. There was a clean room with a WERY expensive piece of technology called nanofab which btw could produce atom sized structures. So one day I worked there with a PhD student and we started hearing strange noise like boiling water. noise was becoming louder and louder and eventually we saw toilet water pouring from a drain on floor. not so clean anymore room was floated. water level with fecal masses continued rising for about an hour and reached 10 santimeters or so. sadly the nanofab has never worked as before ever since and university hasn't spent money to repare it. I guess the moral is don't ever place your clean rooms above sewer pipes
Regarding shipping chemicals... I'm not a chemist, but I work on cars as a hobby (mostly small rusty shitboxes from the 80s and 90s, because I'm an idiot) and I end up using and ordering a bunch of chemicals because of that. DCM for stripping paint, methanol as auxillary fuel, acetone for cleaning steel before welding, hexanes or naptha based wax and grease remover before paint, and, relevant to the story, phosphoric acid for rust treatment. The latter used in commercial rust treatments at about a 15% concentration. When you're dealing with something that's almost more rust than steel anymore you go through a lot, so I ordered 5l 99% phosphoric acid in bulk. It is supposed to be shipped by special courier. They sent it via regular post. A somewhat legit chemical supply company.
They need special courier if you're ordering a 5l+ container of acetone. They will happily send you 2 2.5l containers in regular post though, or 10 1l containers in a box.
Ever resurrect a Vega, or is that too old (70s)? That was a fairly cool car, but also fell and corroded apart all too readily.
Got a molten aluminum story that basicly happened the same way. My friend and me made molds of our hands but didn't wait for them to dry properly so when we poured in the molten metal the sudden creation of steam made it explode everywhere. I was the one pouring it in and got splashed right in the face with a ring fingers worth of aluminum. Luckily none hit my eyes, mouth or nostrils. All of it hit my right cheek and just pearled off. I assume the evaporating water in the first layer of skin kept it from sticking. Glory to the Leidenfrost effect.
Much more pleasant than burning plastic though still not recommended. Oh, and all of this was done with an improvised charcoal oven we powered with a leafblower while we were teens so there was basicly no PPE involved.
One time in HS chemistry, we were using iodine for something, and I'll admit that I snagged a couple of grams. I didn't have a container, so I put it on a piece of paper and folded it and wrapped it up as much as possible. Then I stuck it in my pocket and went to my next class. About half an hour later, it started to feel a bit "spicy" in my pocket. That was when I learned about the high volatility of iodine.
0:32 Reminds of that video where a family released a bunny into the wild after caring for it… Only for it to be caught by a bird of prey on camera.
2:31 It’s only a matter of time before someone experiences one of Joker’s many backstories.
2:59 NaOH (sodium hydroxide; caustic soda) + H3NSO3 (sulfamic acid) → NaH2NSO3 + H2O
4:36 GC-Sniffing sound fun til one of the products come out wrong.
6:34 Ah~ steam explosions, second only to dust explosions.
8:49 The principal and grandfather weren’t beating the kids to bring their vision back. Instead they were beating discipline into them.
9:42 UV light, for your invisible ink purposes.
11:04 Send some of that pink dye to rival laundromats.
13:18 Oof that guy was lucky to not have his leg amputated. Though, maybe not too lucky :P
15:18 Fun fact: Antimony doesn’t decompose into “anti-“ and “-mony.” It shares the same source as “stibium,” the other name for the element, which is the Egyptian “sedem,” which means “to apply makeup, medicine, or salves on the eyelids.”
So that's why it's Sb
The potassium story reminds me of a story my Inorganic professor told us. She used to work in a Waste Water Treatment facility as a part time, and they got Sodium leftovers to raise the pH of the water. One day she got a very big chunk of Sodium. She tied a rock around it and threw it into the airation pool. It first just bubbled under water, but than the chunck shot up and landed in a nearby forest. Luckily it had rained recently, so no wildfire started.
My Grandmother was a Dental assistant. Among Dental assistants, they had a saying. "Bist du des Lebens froh, drinke H2O, bist du des Lebens Stier, drinke H2SO4." (If you are happy about your life, drink H2O, if you are "bull" about your life, drink H2SO4)
That sure must be one flexible rock
So here is one of mine. I am a machine operator specialised in metal machining on cnc lathes and mills and the programming of said machines here in Germany. In one of my old workplaces we had to clean out the coolant systems of our machines. Its generally just part of our job. We used pretty corosive cleening solutions to get the gunk in the tanks and the half way solidified oil that comes out of the coolant emulsion loose and out of the system. Nice thick rubber gloves, aprons and eyeprotection to not get burned by the mix of strong bases, slag, metal dust, old oil, very dirty water and a laundry list of other polutants. Basically an one in all ecological poison mix. We then sucked it up into this giant shop vacuum/pump monstrosity that looks like a barrel on wheels. All nice an dandy till then. What we did not notice was that the outflow hose had gotten extreamly brittle. So off we went to the disposal tanks, the outflow hose conected to them, and the vac/pump put on overpressure to pump it all into the tanks. The next thing I know is hearing a loud crack and getting showered by the putrid mixture and seeing the surrounding area get flooded by it. At that point I took a very quick trip to the showers and thankfully got away with a few days of nasty skin rashes. But the cleanup was an absulute nightmare.
Yikes!
Videos like this are a nice reminder that even if I love the idea of working on something like that it’s really only meant for a proper lab with proper safety because you never know when the worst can happen.
I absolutely love studying propellants, and I would love to do some work on them. Obviously, doing this at home is extremely dangerous since these are usually mixtures of chemicals that are… One could generously call them simply “unsafe”. Want to say thanks for making these because actually hearing some disaster stories really is better encouragement to stay safe than reading SDSs and papers sometimes.
About hot dogs in kettle thing. So back in my dorm days we had 1 electric stove on 10 people to cook on but we had more than enough outlets and we being 19 yo decided to cook hot dogs in a kettle. We also used the water afterwards to steam ramen which was actually pretty good. But nobody washed the kettle after that and next tea we had was a bit meaty.
Hot dog bouillon.
That sulphuric acid story reminds me of my white phosphorous story.
I was and am not an experianced home chemist, but for some reason i got it in my head that makeing white phosphorus would be a good first project. so went about buying as much red p as i could, i started with match box strikers and when it was obvious that the yeilds would be terible (i wanted gram quantitys of white p) i went looking on the bezos bazar for some product with significantly more red p. unfortunately i found it. what i bought was these magic trick things where its just a whole load of red p on a sheet of paper. you burn it and produce white p then get some on your fingers and rub it together causeing a little bit of smoke.
I was not in a good state of mind at the time and thought it would be funny to light one in my room at 7 in the morning after an all nighter. Needless to say that my 2m x 1.7m room did not have the propper ventilation and i was almost instantly engulfed in smoke consiting of P2O5 and white phosphorus. this needless to say woke my parents up. after i made sure that the pile of 100 of these papers hadn't caught alight i imediately ran downstares to wash my body with the garden hose.
i did feel a bit ill after that, my jaw hurt but it was probably not phossy jaw. probably.
i am very glad i didn't try and make that stuff at the scale i wanted.
The molten metal in the shoe story reminded me, don't tuck your pants into your boots when doing foundry work. Bad enough getting molten metal on you without also having it also go in your shoe.
as an addition to the molten metal one aluminium doesn't just create a steam 'explosion' but it also forms Hydrogen because it doesn't have the protective oxide layer. Molten aluminium is just scary stuff and should never get in contact with water because it can just explode.
I also have a great one for the home chemists out there. A friend of a friend had the great Idea to cook up some butyric acid at home. Why? nobody knows. He took a pressure cooker and around 1.5 kg of butter melted it and then threw in a not so small amount of sodium hydroxide. He then put the lid on the pressure cooker and cranked up the heat. He then went away doing something else until he heard a loud bang. The lid exploded off the pressure cooker and it spewed the stuff in it over the kitchen. In the end he and his parents had to rip out the whole kitchen and buy a new one. He had to pay off the bill.
I have so many stories about the stupid stuff I used to do as a kid, but I figured I'd just share the highlights lol. I was probably 12 or 13, and a decided to put yeast and sugar into one of those short apple juice bottles made of glass. I screwed the cap on REAL tight (as you do), and promptly forgot about it for 2 weeks! I came back, and upon seeing the plastic cap was bulging several millimeters upwards, decided I should probably open it indoors immediately. After several minutes of trying my absolute best to unscrew it, it wouldn't move at all. The force from the pressure was that strong. Only at this point did I realize this might be a slight explosion hazard!
So I took it outside and tossed it on the pavement and it was like a hand grenade lmao. It shot glass shards 20 feet up. I feel very lucky, and very stupid!
I also decided to play around with a microwave oven transformer around the same time (yayy!). I was basically just waving the output which was like 2000volts and high current in a way I thought was safe. It ended up arcing to itself VERY close to my hand. I'm kinda amazed I survived that lmao
On a slightly less terrifying note, I also decided to grind up those fire starter magnesium alloy shavings into an extremely fine powder, and then light it! It was almost exactly like the "chemist mixes wrong chemicals and things go WOOSH and turn your face black" thing. I couldn't see anything for about a minute! It was unbelievably bright. I wasn’t wearing any face protection, and I did this directly next to my bedding 😁
Powdered Mg & Saltpeter, in pill capsules, & tinny bit of flashpaper , left in ashtrays. Too often...
Well, at least until that one glass ashtray...
So like you've asked about geologist licking rocks before and I thought I'd try to clear some stuff up, note I am a forester and merely minored in geology so take this with a cystal of halite.
There are a couple reasons to do it. One easy to work out one is that some rock have some very distinct tastes thanks to our evolution. Every 100 geology lab is going to have a mineral ID section where that is a valid way to ID the salt. But another use is that our tongues have the most sensitive touch receptors on our bodies. So if you are say trying to get a better idea of the grain size annd you newed more than the visial chart will tell you (something real small) then that's one way to go about it. Sedimentologist am I right? I don't get the soil scientist tasting dirt thing, I took a forest soils class, and we just ID stuff in our hands.
Also a fun Forestry story: One of our main washout classes is Tree ID. There are a 140 plants you have to learn in the fall (so leaves are not a strong stratgy). There are a couple plants with strong odors so smalling a crushed up leaf or other plant part is one ID method. I remember on our third week some people trying that with Poison Ivy, putting it right up to their noses. This being the third week it was also the first week the professor wasn't warning us about ivy, mainly because he was in this case quizzing us on it and you can be giving away questions.
Yes , the sedimentologists are the incurable rock lickers .
The ore petrologists , typically exercise more restraint .
Mercury and Arsenic tend to discourage such investigative measures .
My dad used to be a forester. He later became a carpenter, so I know quite a few trees and types of wood. Cedar and Pine are 2 trees that you can consistently identify off of the smell alone.
@@nyssfairchild2244 Mhm. Though the one tripping people up in the class Sweetgum if I recall. A very distinctive smell if you crush up a leaf.
One thing that happened at our place many years ago (before I was there, so this is second hand info) is that a cleaner had cleaned the floor in the ethidium bromide room and then cleaned the test of the floors. Because the floor in the ethidium bromide room is considered ‘contaminated’ all the other floors had to be cleaned by a special decontamination cleaning crew and all the water and wipes had to be disposed off as hazardous waste…
I woke up one day to the sound of my flatmate going "pfffff aaahh kdnebrjfj" really loud, then a pause, then screaming my name. Apparently I forgot to rinse our water kettle after cleaning it with citric acid (de-chalking), and she used the acidic water to make her morning coffee. woops.
Pro tip: if you have a reverse osmosis system at home, use its water for the kettle - I do that for over a year now and haven't had to de-chalk it since.
I am a little surprised that no one (that I have seen) has yet mentioned Max Gergel of Columbia Chemical and his book ("Excuse Me sir, would you like to buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide?" )
That story brought it to mind .
Excellent book .
If we're doing chemistry dad jokes, I have one:
An atom of Helium walks into a bar.
Bartender says, "Sorry, we don't serve noble gasses here."
Helium doesn't react.
Ugh
"It's not the janitor the school deserves, but it's the one it needs right now." 14:34
The olfactory GLC detector is a real thing, preferably with non toxic materials. Also, don’t try this with a FID, only thermal conductivity detectors need apply…. In the old days I used .25 inch packed GLC columns the GLCs had TC detectors. I could catch major peaks with a glass dispo pipet stuck in the outlet…a quick way to get pure materials from mixtures.
When I went on a tour of the McCormick R&D lab, their GC also had something similar that they called the sniffer port (theirs was basically a plastic tube with a funnel coming out from the detector) so they could take note of the retention times of smells that piqued their interest for building flavors.
I've heard of the Antimony "everlasting pill" thing, supposedly George Washington had one too
Here's a fun story for you.
In 1960 drag racers were just learning what nitromethane would do for them and driver Chris Karamesines discovered that adding just a little hydrazine to a tank of nitro would make the car go REALLY fast. They use it as an oxygen scavenger in steam boilers, so getting some is no problem. Karamesines also discovered that 5ml per liter provides the best results, which in this case means that you usually make it all the way to the end of the track before the car explodes. The Golden Greek determined this mix ratio through long and diligent experimentation, which means he found the fine point in the middle between "the car doesn't go much faster than it did without H in the fuel" and "the supercharger flew 125 feet in the air after the engine exploded."
More entertainment: if the vapors from this mixture condense in a closed environment, your engine fills with white flakes. These flakes are methazodic salt of hydrazinium acid, which is a shock-sensitive high explosive not requiring much shock to detonate.
Karamesines reports that another driver hounded him for some H, so the driver was provided with one pint and the only instruction for use - do not add all of this to the tank at once. Of course he did exactly that. H is hypergolic with nitromethane but the reaction takes long enough you can usually get all the way back to the pits before it goes off. The car was sitting on its trailer when the H and nitro reacted and started the engine all by itself. 30 seconds later the crankshaft had come free of the rods and bearings, then blew through both the oil pan and the trailer floor.
The strange thing is it's the easiest thing in the world to catch someone using it: hydrazine makes nitromethane burn with an exquisite green flame you can't get any other way.
As an undergrad I worked as a lab assistant at a private school to get some funds. The head science teacher told me that a student once stole some white phosphorous and slipped it into his trouser pockets. I don’t know what the outcome was but I would imagine it was quite horrifying.
This was quite a long time ago as I am now retired. I doubt that schools have access to such chemicals anymore. I have a friend who is a headmaster of a private school. He said even fairly “inocculous” chemicals like ammonium dichromate are banned so I very much that any form of phosphorous is used any longer.
The molten aluminum reminds me of when I was around 14 or 15 and my dad and I had made an aluminum foundry. We melted down a lot of cans and whatnot, and I still have some muffin shaped ingots from cooling the molten aluminum in mufin baking trays. Anyways, one time I got the bright idea of pouring the aluminum into a 5 gal bucket full of water, attempting to make one of those blobby aluminum sculptures. It turned out about as you'd expect, just a weird, kinda tall blob of aluminum. I wanted to reuse the aluminum so I went and used our bandsaw to cut it into quarters. I didn't think about the fact that the inside of the sculpture was porous and water came out when I was cutting it though, so once I melted down some cans to help transfer more heat into the sculpture chunks, I just tossed a piece in. After about 30 seconds or so the aluminum weakened enough and the water got more than hot enough to cause the liquid aluminum to start splattering out of the foundry. Luckily I've always been quite a safety freak and had eye/face and respiration protection on, as well as Kevlar arm guards. Unluckily I was wearing my crappy 'work' t-shirt and a blob of liquid aluminum splashed out and landed on my shoulder, melting right through my shirt and leaving me with a small burn. Luckily the t-shirt was thick enough to sap energy away as the aluminum burnt through. Had a discoloration on that shoulder for a while but it is gone now, about 6 years later. Definitely learned to wear even more protection than I was already doing. Still burn myself often tho, just did with a baking sheet two days ago. That's life
I'm more horrified by the boiled hotdogs in the kettle than the vinegar
The kind of thing people are forced to do when your dorms don't allow any appliances but kettles
@@tsm688 Makes sense actually, you can have a water kettle and a "cooking" kettle
Lmao
Or just plug the dog in the small fluorescent light receptacle😜 , it works..
Though I personally prefer the microwave if an open flame isn't an option. Just wrap in damp napkin and nuke...
@@petevenuti7355 That is a very alarming thing to read out of context.
Still alarming in context, but much more out of.
Lots of dorms don't allow microwaves. They literally don't want you to feed yourself
i just realized i have a story! When i was about 4 i grabbed the oven cleaner just before my mom was going to use it. I wanted to help by spraying down the oven, but it had a spray paint style nozzle and i blasted myself in both eyes. My mother water boarded me under the bathtub faucet for 15 minutes before taking me to the ER.
👀
When I was in Boy Scouts they would boil hotdogs because they did not want the hassle of a fire. It is unquestionably the worst way to prepare them. It was so bad that I would almost go without eating because of it. But this is also where I learned the effects of skipping several meals, when I had my blood sugar crash and I had a form of delirium where I felt like I was actively dying.
Boiling hotdogs is fine, but boiling them in a water kettle was the weird part
Johnny was a chemist's son,
but he is no more.
What he thought was H20...
I don't know why, but the pink floor story is so funny to me. Imagine pranking someone by making all their floors and clothes bright pink lol
And I suppose there was nothing that could be easily added to it to eliminate the pink.
I once walked into the office at a 711 I worked at in highschool. Every week or three we had to take a mop bucket full of very very high strength bleach and use it to scrub the piss, shit and vomit stains off the sidewalks outside. No real science to it, you filled the bucket with some water, ladled in powdered bleach of some sort until the smell made your eyes water, then scrubbed. Once you got the bucket outside the fumes wern't too bad, but it would ruin shoes/pants easily if spilled on them. Anyway, I open up the office door and find some twit had brought the bucket back inside after scrubbing the side walk (normally it gets poured into the storm drain because 711 respects the enviroment.), shoved it into the courner of the office up against a cabinet full of cleaning supplys.
Clearly they had been in a bit of a hurry, the bucket hit the cabinet hard enough to slosh death water onto the cabinet and ruin the pain on it.
Oh, and they knocked a bottle of toilet cleaner off the shelf, it landed in the bucket of bleach water, and they left it there...
That was the day a Canadian 711 came one plastic cap away from chemical warfare.
That H2SO4 dad joke is something one of my favorite chemistry lab professors told to us on the first day of lab. I still have it scrawled down in my lab book somewhere (probably in the garage with the rest of my old lab books and various science books since there's no room in here for my bookshelves.
3:09 I *KNEW* you were a man of culture, now I have confirmation
Hamilton Morris is a subscriber of the channel!
@@That_Chemist Holy shit!
If you want to know the most expensive accident at our university...I don't mind sharing. This story is second hand as I wasn't even an undergrad yet when it happened and I heard it when I was working in the high field magnetic laboratory during my masters. I don't know the full details but I'll tell it as best as I can. A lot of this is guesswork by me and other students. I did find the news article covering this but it left out that it was caused by a failed experiment.
So besides the normal every day NMR machines (like a normal 700MHz NMR, a super fancy 900MHz fully automatic NMR and a very cute desktop NMR) we had in the analysis wing (inside the main building), we also had a set of....if memory serves about 6 or maybe 7 very very big, very fancy NMR machines underneath the pond outside as well as a LOT of other very big magnets. This was all in the underground lab. The space was shared between the solid state NMR department and the high field magnetic research department. The other machines were for experiments that needed magnetic fields of 20T and above. The biggest magnet was big enough that within a circle of....I guess about 10-15 meters NOTHING ferromagnetic was allowed. Heck, if you even mentioned the word pacemaker you would be kicked out of the underground lab. Field strengths were written within circles everywhere and just walking around in there is super cool.
There was also some equipment there that was only allowed to run during the night due to the high power draw.
Anyway, a professor and a PhD wanted to do some unusual experiments. I am not sure what exactly but it required writing some code as the software didn't support what they needed. The PhD student started the experiment late in the evening and after a few minutes left to eat a late dinner. But....that code had a bug in it causing a way higher current draw than intended. This popped the massive fuse(These cost over 10k btw). (The next bit has a lot of guess work) The UPS kicked in and this supposedly triggers a graceful shutdown protocol in the normal software but....because the normal software was offline as the PhD's code was controlling the machine the graceful shutdown never happened. After a few minutes the UPS couldn't handle the load and promptly fried. Then the self induction caused by the sudden power interruption caused a high power spike to be send back into the (now local) power system. This caused a lot of damage to a lot of computers and machines (luckily these weren't completely destroyed but the UPS's of these had to be replaced as well) and they all had massive down time due to the required repairs. I expect the NMR machine in question had to be completely taken apart as the coil plates probably all welded together, if nothing else.
While the lab was basically undergoing a meltdown, outside of the lab the power in a large section of the city shut down. This was covered in the news as "Due to the triggering of a safety mechanism, [list of sectors] lost power at 10 pm last night. The cause is as of yet unknown." Our guess is that it was caused by the sudden drop in power demand when the fuse popped.
Imagine the look of absolute horror on the student's face when he came back to the dark lab filled with "Magic smoke", a half molten NMR and all the UPS systems blaring alarms.
I don't know how much the total bill was but this was known as "The most expensive accident" at our university.
I rember when I was living with my sister I wanted to make some pasta and I preground the pepper on to a hot pan. This turns out is a bad idea because it gives off a Gas that filled the entire apartment with a mild pepper spray. The worse part was we just had the door and exhaust to air it out because the windows wouldn't open. It stung at the eyes but also the mouth.
That must have been some fresh pepper...
I've gassed myself roasting my own cacao beans on the stove. I don't know for sure whether I got a lungful of acrylamide or if it was something else, but I did NOT feel well even with the fan going. So I'm never doing that again.
Don’t put pepper on the heat, pepper will burn affecting the flavor. Salt will not burn but all other spices should be added later
@@andreahighsides7756 Toasting peppercorns is a thing I thought I remembered, and shows up in Google searches too. However, this is peppercorns, not ground pepper. To toast the ground pepper would be not just to create a spicy gas but to lose a lot of the flavor.
I worked at an Indian restaurant for many years, there was one dish that was so Hot , just the fumes made some people leave...
Remember overhead projectors ?
They used a high intensity light bulb that got incredibly hot .
A sure fire way to have class outside was to dump several ounces of black pepper in the tray under the bulb .
The variations on this theme are only limited by your imagination .
Toasters , toaster ovens , coffee makers , all can be used as crowd control devices .
Modern video projectors ( not sure about the led ones ) will also work .
The Petrol/Gasoline is probably wrong translation (imagine the smell). I don't know, what italians say, but in German, "Petroleum" is used for what englishmen call "paraffin oil" and americans call "Kerosine". Read, the thing, you put in oil lamps or store Kalium.
this intro unlocked a core memory of mine. we had cocoons in 3rd grade. i remember the smell of the room to this day, and how it looked. we had a mass release where everyone let their butterflies go at the same time and i remember mine being the only one that got snatched up by a passing bird. from that point on my life has been kinda dull, i think it legit scarred me for life.
I just remembered a story from my high school chemistry class. I prevented a disaster after reading the practical instructions. We were learning how to make a standard solution. The experiment involved making a solution of 0.1M sodium hydroxide. The steps were to measure out 0.01M of sodium hydroxide and add it to a beaker. Then we were to add 100mL of water to the beaker. I told the chemistry teacher that it seemed unsafe to add water to a dry base. The teacher told me that only applied to acids, I said she was wrong. The next day we got given a new set of instructions and we used sodium bicarbonate. She never mentioned that conversation again, but I assume she did her research after that class. I know that it was unlikely for anything bad to happen with the concentration we were making, however I feel like it’s a sin to add water to a strong acid or base, one video I saw of people doing this experiment had a part 1, but no part 2 after they cut it off with the guy stirring more water to get the undissolved crystals so I think part 2 would’ve gone against RUclips’s TOS
The dry base should have been added to the water...
@@SeekingTheLoveThatGodMeans7648yes, my teacher didn't believe me at first when I told her that though
My dad is very keen on hygiene and order around the house. Sometimes he goes on a cleaning marathon and obviously doesn't skip the WC which is a very small room (something like 7m² of air volume) with no ventilation. His cleaning process involves using a large amount of drain cleaner in the toilets, closing the door to mob in front out it and completely forget about the toilets. More than once I have had an urge to go take a pee, open the door, enter the room, lock the door and almost faint at the first breath. Now that I am more aware of the risk, it happens that I have to relieve myself peeking my head outside of the room to breathe. Seriously if you use household chemicals make sure the room is well ventilated...
The kettle mist have had copper somewhere on the inside lining. Some pots have copper in the bottom to help with thermal conductivity.
>Broke a glass bottle and cut away the jeans.
How was that possibly any better/faster than just pulling the pants off???
Didn't want to pull the dude's skin off or fiddle with buttons and zippers
I remember second hand a story my uncle had told when he was working at a lab and they were moving from one lab to the next and they were upgrading some of the fume hoods. While cleaning around the space one attendant found three very old bottles of still sealed dimethyl cadmium they determined these had been sitting up there on a small shelf for over 16 years.
The dye that turns pink and gets everywhere reminds me of The Cat in the Hat
When I was a TA in an undergrad ochem lab course, I had to bring sodium witch was stored in a bottle of mineral oil to the students. I put it on a paper towel in thier fumehodd for them to cut it and then I put it back in the bottle. One time, when i wanted to put the sodium back in in front of 3 students, there was a similar bottle in their fumehood next to the one with mineral oil where I accidently dropped in the piece of sodium. It turned out that it was acetone and it immediatly started heating up and becoming yellow/brown. At first I was confused what happened, but then I managed to pull it out. Was a nice embarrasment.
The antimony pill might have actually been somewhat effective as an anti-parasitic. Think the various intestinal worms and such.
On Monday we go a shipment of Anhydrous Sodium Bisulfate at work. I was the one who greeted the delivery drivers, they started handling the bags of 25kg powered acid like they were sand bags and had 0 PPE. I immediately asked them where their PPE was, atleast gloves and eye protection. Their response was something like ''oh we're used to it so it's fine. Powered acid is only dangerous if it's mixed with water.'' .. I was baffled. Also, did I forget to mention it was raining outside so the bags did get wet AND they had been mishandled so several bags had small cuts in them.
After they left I wrote an email to the distributors sales person as the delivery had been done internally on their end. I put in CC their higher ups and mine, the president of that company responded that Sodium Bisulfate wasn't that dangerous but that some precautions still needed to be taken.
To which I responded that absolutely no precautions had been taken and that even if NaHSO4 wasn't classified as being a dangerous material there were still some risks, eyes/skin/lungs. (I've had some on my skin before and every since then I'm itchy just looking at the bags.) I also mentioned that I wasn't trying to put anyone in trouble but that since most people aren't chemically literate and have a poor understanding of the risks associated with handling them. That it was important to have proper PPE, even for transporters.
My boss called me later during the day and said ''DAMN! You lit those guys up lmfao, but it's fine because you're absolutely in the right''.
Good on you! I will include this in a future episode!! Keep up the good work!
@@That_Chemist I sent them the SDS in my second email to them. I ended my email with ''I have informed you, do whatever you want with that information.'' 😂
the hotdog person deserved it for boiling hot dogs because who tf boils hotdogs
I never worried too much about eye protection while making handmade soap in the past. However, a trip to the optometrist changed that. At the start of the appointment, I handed over my current glasses for the optometrist to ID my current prescription. She was *appalled.* "What have you done to your glasses??"
Turns out the fumes from the 12M NaOH solution I use managed to etch the protective coating from the lenses. You could see spatters, etching, , and other definite damage to the coating. I just never really noticed. I did occasionally make soap without my glasses (I need them more for distance), but after realizing how close I apparently came to actual damage, I started wearing lab glasses while making soap.
The fact that the kids were beaten after already suffering physically for their actions...
When I was little I got a kids chemistry set. One of the chemicals was potassium permanganate.
After doing an experiment with it in the bathroom on the counter like the instructions told I cleaned it up and went about my business.
Whenever that sink and countertop got wet or even damp the pink would show up.
It was actually a great lesson in chemistry. Just because a surface looks clean and you have tried to clean it doesn't mean a chemical isn't there.
I work in the hazardous and non-hazardous waste industry. 100% do not ship things as how they came to you. There’s strict methods for proper disposal and both state and federal regulations apply. You might think just because you can buy it, that it is safe…no. Household hazardous waste exists. Aerosols, batteries, lamps, mercury, paint, oils…so many. You should not store or ship these items without going through the proper channels. As a homeowner, reach out to your town. They’ll have yearly (usually) household hazardous waste days where they’ll collect and bulk all of these things (properly).
That puppy joke make me laugh way more than it should have
That potassium incident happened in my school too, the kid had a 3 inch hole burnt into their leg.
Honestly that university should have switched to having pink floors, it would have saved them money.
4:29 It's typically coupled with a single quadrupole mass spectrometer. GC-MSO: Gas Chromatography - Mass Spectrometry Olfactory detection. A normal GC-MS, but with a Y splitter after the column, splitting half going into the MS and the other half to a sniff port. That way you can identify each component with the mass spectrum and simultaneously get its smell documented. Pretty cool technique.
I remember the teacher told us that H2SO4 Rhyme in chemistry class when we were about to begin working with it in lab (this was early on so all of the chemicals we handled up to that point were relatively safe for newbies like us) primarily as an easy way to memorize that Sulfuric Acid was H2SO4 (it worked as I remember to this day while I've forgotten most others) and to demonstrate that the gloves were starting to come off, figuratively. Always wear your PPE
The antimony pill was a real thing. The victorians did some weird stuff man
Physicians also used liquid mercury as a laxative sometimes. I don't know if serious efforts were made to reclaim the mercury.
@@SeekingTheLoveThatGodMeans7648 I wouldn't want to try and recover that one haha
Ever see one of the electric vibrators from that era? 220v, shoddy wire, no ground... Yeiks!!!
I work with railway track machines. One day i was working with the resurfacing machines instead of the undercutter I usually was with
I thought, “gee this this is as dusty as the cutter.” They had broken a hydraulic fitting and were spraying like 50L of oil everywhere atomising it
My nose ran for 12 hours, I took a bunch of antihistamines, the pharmacy told me to call the poisons hotline if it didn’t get better. It did.
It’s been like 4 years and I can still smell panolin from 10 meters away
*they actually broke the fitting like 2 hours earlier, replaced it, and didn’t tighten it up properly. Thanks guys.
all these stories made me remember my first time in a gas attack, I was 16, playing with electrolysis and I was young and inexperienced, I was collecting gases with my homemade setup, an upsidedown vial , on top of an electrode all hooked up to an old nokia cellphone charger, I saw on books and online that the electrolysis of water, give out hydrogen and oxigen, the hydrogen was easy.... but the oxygen was slow and when I managed to collect enough I didn't knew what to do, how to test it, so I had the brilliant idea of smell the gas from the vial just to see and feel what is like to breathe pure oxygen .... well, what is missing here is that I haven't told you what I did use for the electrolyte... well, it wasn't acid, it wasn't basic, if it were baking soda I'd be fine, but it was table salt(foreshadowing), the moment I put the vial in my nostril and inhale it, I felt the most terrible and amazing sensation ever, I chlorine gassed myself, and I discovered how to make chlorine gas, I didn't passed out, but was out of comission for at least half an hour, my mother screaming asking what is going on, I couldn't answer, couldn't even breathe properly! it was funny, I felt bad but it felt good. years later I learned that I was supposed to have used something like baking soda or an alkali base or something like diluted sulphuric acid, and if I knew that table salt would yield chlorine gas, I would never had inhaled . that being said, you shoul not be inhaling chemicals! no one should!!!
GC-Sniff is the funniest thing I have ever heard of
I have a story about alkali metal too.When i was around 15 years old,i learned about alkali metals would reacts with water,so silly me bought 250 grams of sodium and 100 grams of potassium.Later i found that NaK is more reactive than either Na or K.That night i made 10 grams of NaK.I wonder what will happen if i mix NaK with iodine. So i mix like 0.5g of NaK with 1g of iodine.It seems like nothing happened first,so i smashed the mixture with a hammer,the mixture actually detonate,it was really loud.And a small pieces of burning Nak are everywhere,fortunately im not harm during that because of ppe.After that i always wear ppe while doing chemistry whether safe or deadly regeants.
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