Just for Julian

http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/sillymolecules/sillymols.htm

You've probably seen it before, but hey...

 

not seen it before but bloody funny.
cheers


julian

 

Brilliant!

 

Damnit, I've just finished with chemistry forever (just done my exams and had my last lessons, and I dare say I won't be doing any chem at uni), and *now* somebody tells me the funny stufff :newbie:

 

Believe me, chemistry isnt funny at University.

 

Oh I don't know. I remember one lab session with some amusement. The instructions said to place chemical A in a test tube in a beaker of crushed ice and add chemical B one drop at a time. I guess my Malaysian lab partner's English wasn't so good 'cos he held the two test tubes in mid air. As he brought them together, a white mist started to form in the air between them. The word 'Noooooooooooooooooooooo' issued from my lips as I dived under the opposite bench. There was a sort of 'FOOM' sound as the entirety of chemical B landed in chemical A and a big white cloud appeared. I have never seen anyone put a test tube down so fast. We had to evacuate the lab for 20 minutes while we all stopped choking and the extractors took the fumes away. And my Malaysian friend was excused to go and change his trousers. So you see chemistry really can be fun

 

Incidentally, I've worked with a few of the compounds listed on that site!

 

Robbo
that would be arsole then?

 

Plenty of those, but some real chemicals as well!

 

working for an American company can sometimes show the language deficiency of the yanks.
Currently being investigated is atomic resolution storage.
Or ARS for short, they still dont know why we laughed at it

 

Just remembered another one. This one was at school. We were playing in the lab one lunchtime with a jar of sodium. We got a piece out of the jar but it crumbled and bits fell on the bench so we took the biggest bit and put it in a test tube and brushed the rest into the nearest sink where we washed it down the plughole. We added a drop of water to the test tube and it started fizzing and giving off hydrogen. What jolly fun. Then the tube caught fire. And the tube got hot. So my mate put the tube down on the bench. The tube decided to roll away. Towards the sink. The sink which was by now nicely hydrogenated from the sodium we had washed down the plughole. There was a 'FOOM' type noise and all 5 sinks down the side of the lab ejected their contents straight at the ceiling leaving 5 disgusting brown marks. Amazingly, we were never caught

 

chemistry can be fun, theres all those things like magnesium, sodium, various acids and bunsen burners, no end of fun can be had with a gas tap, a length of rubber tubing and a match!
of course you have to endure the ramblings of a vodka soaked teacher in order to get access to these things but the eyebrowless fun fas worth it.
cheers


julian

 

How about the guy in our class who decided to inhale the contents of a gas jar full of chlorine gas for a bet. Unfortunately, he wasnt able to collect his winnings that day as he had to spent the night in hospital

 

Oh, indeed chemistry could be fun...

One a-level experiment I recall was synthesising Cyclohexene (foul smelling stuff). We were meant to keep the cyclohexene for a yield calculation, but someone had misunderstood, and poured theirs into the sink.

Moments later, someone else idly chucked the glowing remenants of the splint they'd used to light their bunsen burner into the same sink.

The flames were rather tall...

 

Nice one. In my first job, I worked in a chemical plant. One day I was dispensing Germanium Tetrachloride (which gives of fumes of HCl when exposed to air - nice). The stuff was in a glass dispensing vessel from which I could decant it into plastic containers on a set of scales. I was happily dispensing when I heard a 'crack'. I looked around but couldn't see anything and wondered if I had imagined it. Err, no. I hadn't imagined it. The tap had broken and GeCl4 was gently cascading onto the floor, producing clouds of HCl in the process. I legged it. It filled the entire building and we couldn't go in for two hours. My boss bravely ran in to switch on an extractor and came out spluttering. I forget how many litres it was but I asked later how much it was worth. Errm, £5000. Ooops!

 

I do worry about the place I work.

It's an old cotton mill (so made of wood, and quite flammable). I work on the first floor. On the ground floor there's semiconductor packaging processes, with all their associated chemicals. On the third floor (I don't know who decided this) there is the wafer fab with diffusion and epitaxial processes. And all the associated chemicals for that.

We've had the fire alarm go off once while I've been there, and we only got three fire engines (which is a poor turnout for us).

 

Hmm all this talk makes some of our A level mishaps seem tame, we only managed to destroy a whole worksurface after someone knocked over a large container of conc HCl, or there was some reflux experiment gone wrong which left a massive scorch mark on the ceiling after a jet of something blasted out the top of the equipment with a loud 'pfffft' noise.

Then theres the story of how caesium came to be banned from schools,(I say 'story' as I don't know how true it is, it may well be one of those urban myths that spread in all schools, but our teacher swore it to be true and that it happened where she used to work) - some kids stole a container of caesium from the science prep room, and dropped a chunk of it into a school toilet, with such explosive consequences that it cracked the pan and flooded the whole block...sounds unlikely, but then again caesium is very reactive....

 

I remember the chemistry teacher showing us an experiment, he was supposed to heat test tube and wahtever was in it then let a little air in, he musta had a few jars at lunchtime(think he wiz an alky) and decided to try it with oxygen instead, another "Foom" and we all dived for cover, luckily it blew upwards and not out at us round the table, and when one of the other teachers ran in to see if we were allright, he noticed some glass embeded in the ceiling tile, and cool as you like he climbed onto desk and proceeded to write on tile next to glass, "Mr Dickie was here"

 

Caesium could easily do that. The video that my school had went through, sodium, potassium, Rubidium to Caesium. You've seen sodium and potassium. The Rubidium was the next order of magnitude more violent, splitting and spitting all over... This was all done in a large vessel about 2 ft across and 10 in deep. The Small bit of caesium (less than 1cm in any direction) was dropped in from tongs held in a heavily gloved hand.... it destroyed the vessel.

 

I'd be very surprised if any school had caesium to play with, its too dangerous and expensive.