When kids really had fun with science

). As$ hole characters are a dime-a-dozen in the wntlesirg business. Johnson had more success because The Rock was funny and Vince pushed him and pushed him. But he brought nothing new to the business. Other performers were doing funny promos at the time (Stone Cold, Mick Foley, Y2J, Eddie Guerrero, even Vince McMahon); they, too, repeated popular catchphrases regularly. Stone Cold is a legend because he introduced and popularized a new type of gimmick AND he defined what the Attitude Era was all about (rebelling against authority); The Rock was just one of the players in that era . Mick Foley is a legend because of his hardcore wntlesirg style and what he was willing to put his body through to entertain fans all over the world; The Rock was a pretty-boy who wrestled the generic punch and kick style of the WWF/E. Eddie is a legend because of his unparalleled charisma and ability to connect with fans all over the world, and for bringing the lucha style to the mainstream and making it popular; The Rock is nowhere near the best of the Samoan performers.The Rock was an average punch and kick in-ring performer, with a generic gimmick. What he WAS, was a good stand-up comedian. But without those jokes and catchphrases he would have remained a mid-card performer hearing Rocky sucks! Rocky sucks! his whole (short) career.The Rock brought nothing new to wntlesirg and he didn't make any real (and lasting) changes to the business (as guys like Hogan, Stone Cold, and Flair did). The Rock was a major (and popular) star a decade ago. But he is not a legend.

The rocket a friend & I made was 4 ft long and 4 in in diameter, filled with magnesium powder & potassium chlorate with just enough glue to keep the propellant from falling apart. My friend machined the nose cone and ehhaust nozzle. We set it off on December day from a beach in Brooklyn. We calculated a maximum altitude of about 1300 to 1400 feet, high enough for the radar installation at Floyd Bennett Field across the bay to see it and send a jet up to investigate. That scared the woollies out of us.
I strongly suggest reading "Falling for Science," by Sheri Turkle, a professor at MIT. Each semester she asks her students to write an essay about whatever got them interested in science or engineering. The objects ranged from the inevitable LEGOs to mud, cartons, chocolate layer cakes, steps, and a host of other unlikely objects. The book is a compilation of some of those essays. All are interesting, many are fascinating, and a few are sheer poetry. Very highly recommended.

Virtually every engineer I know did three things in the basement as a kid:
1: Rockets with home-made fuel.
2: Things that exploded, often the same as 1:,
3: Horribly dangerous electrical experiments.

Bet you guys are too young to remember little boxes of science projects that came in the mail. Clue #1: Blue box with Gold address label ..... still stumped? Clue #2: Each box had simple science projects in them for the "young lad"to learn from ........ O.K. they were called "Things of Science" available only by mail............ NO not the Pony Express!

Imagine where we would be if such nanny types prevented Thomas Edison from getting the chemicals he used in his early experiments.
Experiments using sodium bicarbonate and vinegar are somewhat limiting.

THINGS OF SCIENCE! I loved those things. George Moody documents them quite nicely here:
ecg.mit.edu/george/tos/

Reminds me of the time holding a drycleaner bag over the gas stove (making a lighter than air craft), when the lit stove pilot decided to participate. Ah well, ended up losing most of my hair when I got older anyways....
Then there was the microphone made of razor blades and pencil lead. Definitely did not work when powered by 120VAC.

I remember the Gilbert chemistry set that I just got rid of when we moved recently but I got started building crystal sets with the help of my dad when I was 5 and was a certified electronic/industrial tech at 15 via R.E.T.S in Detroit. One experiment that I vividly remember was slowing down time when I was around 8 or 9 years old, circa 1959. We had this reel-to-reel tape recorder that I modified to run at high speed. I found that everything was in 'slow-motion' when I played it back at normal speed. I remember two different items that really impressed me. The first was a brass rod about 24" long that I dropped on end and the other was a breaking light bulb. The rod had this huge crash and then a waa waa waa effect that was spooky as I could envision the vibrations. The breaking of the light bulb was really enticing as the immediate crash was followed by the whoosh of air into the partial vacuum. The tinkles that followed were the shards of glass falling back to the floor. Since then I remember Eggerton's strobed photo's of a light bulb breaking which always brings those memories back. I've since retired and moved to Arizona from Michigan where I worked in R&D for over 40 years but I still keep my toes in the water.

@sm6mom: See 2:53 to 4:34 here www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy-mTH4j-X0

I got interested early in electronics. At age 12 (~1954) I had built my own simple oscilloscope. No amplifiers, just a 2" CRT with focus, intensity and position potentiometers. The power supply was with a large power transformer from some beautiful radio. It had a 2 x 350 V winding, a rectifier tube and plenty of capacitor. For some improvement I needed to solder, and to reach I had to raise the chassis a little. Not having enough hands, I put the wrapped-up solder in my mouth and stuck it in the circuitry. It touched the B and I had a good grip of the chassis with the left hand! The muscle reaction threw me out of my chair and it took hours until I recuperated. Now, many shocks later, I am an Electronics Engineer and a Ham operator!

>rpcy commented:
>
>Go read "The Radioactive Boy Scout." You won't >believe it.
coincidentally, www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,292111,00.html, he is in the news again...

"Don't handicap your children by making their lives easy." Robert Anson Heinlein
I just caught up with my e-mail reading and read your article on kid science. I laughed so hard I snorted milk out of my nose. Really! Milk!
There was this kid, Artiie Tuttle, in my neighborhood who was this max-mad-kid-scientist. One day, in his basement, I briefly observed him soldering shut the re-folded tops of 12 ga shotgun shells that he had pried open and taken the shot out of. Naturally, have been sent through the NRA course on gun safety for kids, I beat a hasty retreat. Later, from an even greater distance, I even more briefly observed Artie shooting a the primers of said shells, that he had buried in the ground, with is BB gun. Do they even make BB guns any more?
As for me, later I duct-taped a cherry bomb and a Bic propane lighter to the shaft of an arrow. I could persuade only one of my bravest friends to light the fuse of the cherry bomb while I held the arrow, trembling, at full draw. I loosed the arrow into the air and it fell I knew not where. The cherry bomb went off. And Count Marcel Bich's el-cheapo lighter, much to the disappointment of all observers, emerged unscathed. Drat! (However, shooting propane tanks with an AP rifle round with a lit candle nearby produces spectacular results!)
I guess I was like most kids. I indeed got a chemistry set and did not read the manual at all. I just mixed stuff at random, hoping for an explosion.

As a kid I was into anything that went bang, and experimented with making all sorts of explosives in my dad's garage. The riskiest thing was nitroglycerin; I was very careful to mix the ingredients in an ice bath and keep it very cold. But then to test if I had been sucessful, I put one drop in a test tube and put a bunsen burner under it and quickly ran to the other end of the garage! The resulting explosion deafened me for the rest of the day, and there was no sign of the test tube, but a nearby wooden cabinet looked like it had suddenly developed woodworm...
Then there was a time when I threw a 250gm lump of sodium into the local pond to 'see what would happen'. It fizzed a bit before exploding with pretty orange streamers everywhere. Good job the ducks were nowhere near.

I remember not having the comprehensional continuity that some of the rest displayed at an early age. Ohms law baffled the heck out of me when I was 12 and I surely wasnt even in the ballpark of ssomehow synthesizing an explosive from my mother's silverware.
For example, my dad had a continuity tester which was a box that (2-wire) plugged directly into the AC line with a neon light. I think it had a large value resistor inside - that's it. You could hold the probes, one in each hand and get the neon to illuminate. Never felt anything; apparently regardless of plug-position, which I'm certain I was unaware of the matter.
The guy next door repaired TVs on the side. He showed me how to relieve the vacuum on a CRT. He also gave me a GE radio chassis with corresponding amplifier / powersupply. It had 4 6V6's in it. I enjoyed shoving other tubes into the push-pull amplifier positions, to see if I could "make it have more power". This radio/amp was also good for frying small television speakers when cranked all the way; white smoke puffing out their voice coils. I ended up leaving the amp portion at a house I was renting in my junior year at SUNYAB.

When I was a kid I read several books by Alfred Morgan, such as "A Boy's First Book of Electronics", etc. I recently purchased a 1929 edition of his book "The Boy Electrician". He shows how to make batteries using stuff like sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, sodium dichromate, sodium hydroxide (lye), and a paste made from sulfuric acid and lead oxide. He does include suggestions of what to do should you spill something on the carpet. Of course he also shows how to make Jacob's ladders and other electrical toys.

The rocket reminiscing reminded me of a rocket we had made in my freshman year, using Estes D-motors, of course. We decided a proper rocket would need to have two stages, along with a "payload" of shredded aluminum "chaff' that the military could spot on radar when we got up high enough - despensed, of course, with an M80 that was lit after the second stage motor finnished.
The design of the coupling got us into a debate. I was for a slip-sleeve to join the two paper towel tubes, but got outvoted after a half hour of arguing and three thin pieces of masking tape prevailed....
We pulled the battery out of my rommate's Fiat and set up in the quad around 10pm. Word got out quickly and we had a crowd of about 200 students gathered as we set up, with about 20 or so watching out the window of the 10 story residence hall forming one side of the quad. We lit it, with the trajectory from the coathangar guide tilting on launch from the rocket weight, just barely missing that 10 story building...then it staged. LOL. The second stage lit, but one of the pieces of tape was still stuck for a brief moment, not breaking in tension as was argued in the design decision ("the tape is thin, it'll break"). The out of control spiralling rocket with the M80 in the nose had everyone running for their lives. It exploded on the ground, in the quad, sending the chaff all over the place. Of course, we all disappeared (never seen a guy run so fast with a car battery) before campus security came to see what the big boom was :-)

Et al,
OMG complete with ion trail cloud chamber! Indeed the lawyers would be pounding at the door today.
Potassium nitrate, sulpher, sugar, deep pan, oven set at ... Pour syrup into 25gm CO2 cartridges, bit of Jetex fuse, length of pipe, Bazooka! Thank the Lord younguns do not read these pages. Then came Estes, Centuri, Midway rocket motors.
Today, 42 years in electronics and a member of the North South Skirmish Association. Can you say real mortar, cannon, musket with live rounds? Safety rules are followed. www.n-ssa.org
HEY Y'ALL WATCH THIS!
Take care and be safe
pfb

I loved reading about everyones experiences as a kid. I love explosives and electricity. At 12 years old, I discovered there was a commerical chemical company near by. I made up a company name and ordered the chemicals over the phone and then went down with my wagon to pick them up at will call. Told them I was picking them up for my father, paid cash, and got anything I wanted, no questions ask. I made my own gun power and other explosives. Loved making small pipe bombs and placing them in red ant hills and blowing up the ants. At 13, I converted and old ARC-5 transmitter to the broadcast band and put my first radio station on the air. I used the call KOKA. I build a spark transmitter and made contact with a commerical CW station KOK. Blew up a lot of TV picture tubes. Liked dropping them off a high bridge into the river below, smashing on the rocks and cement liner in the riverbed. At 14 I got my ham radio license. That took all my interest and I gave up all the chemical experments. Still like shooting off rockets and bombs. I became an electronics engineer and radiation effects scientist spending over 50 years working in aerospace. Still have the same ham radio call I got in 1954. Love Ham Radio.

Well I have been working with electricity & electronics for about 55 years. I installed at 220-volt circuit for a large window air conditioner when I was about 12. I've rewired four homes--before I got my electrician's license last year. Now I do wiring for a friend's construction company as a retirement job. But I started at a very early age.

In the 7th grade I was given an old Grunow Teledial radio. I was interested in becoming a radio amateur and wanted to listen to Morse code but the radio didn't have a BFO (beat frequency oscillator). Using a 1952 ARRL handbook I wired up a BFO per the schematic for BFOs. The old radio probably had about 300 V volts DC on the red wire that appeared to run everywhere in the radio and connected it to my BFO's B input. All the ground connections for the BFO went to the metal chassis (a scrapped out old radio chassis). I hooked up the filament and the high voltage to the correct spots the Handbook suggested. Tuning the metal Teledial to the code parts of the ham bands I still couldn't hear any Morse code. As I reached my hand to adjust the BFO I got the return path of that 300 volts through my body. About 2 minutes later when I recovered I 'discovered' that the ground symbols for the BFO evidently MUST be connected to the Grounow's chassis. Yes, I did become a radio amateur the following year.

Go read "The Radioactive Boy Scout." You won't believe it.

Wow! So pathetic…chemistry kit without chemicals! How the mighty have fallen! I suppose this is the result of too many attorneys from NYU looking for any reason to protect us to death.
In my misspent youth, we didn’t fool around with wimpy chlorate or nitrate salt based homemade firecrackers. We made the real deal…high explosives. Simple nitrated esters were the easiest. Methyl alcohol worked the best with nitric acid made from potassium nitrate and dehydrated sulfuric acid used in car batteries. Later we used reagent grade nitric purchased from the local chemical company that supplied pool chemicals to the locals. That vendor thought nothing of selling nitric acid to a minor, since he was my Dad’s friend, and he knew I was using it as an ingredient for a metal browning solution…for the antique-browning of our old 22 cal pump action rifles. Yes…we had guns too! Oh yeah - we set the high explosives off with mercury fulminate that we made in the back yard with mercury, nitric acid, and ethanol. It smelled like 1000 rotting eggs with acetaldehyde fumes! Good thing we normally carried on that reaction in the woods bordering the back yard. By the way, we had paths throughout the woods for miles. It’s all overgrown now since kids don’t play in the woods anymore. How about model rocketry? Did anybody ever watch “October Sky”? The Chinese don’t need to build their military. They will easily take over in another generation or two and we’ll be pulling their rickshaws…at least the folks that aren’t fifty pounds overweight will be…

I did more than the usual things because my dad had lived in the area and had done tennis ball and potato canons in the forties with thousand foot ranges. In 1970 I began attending a High School built immediatly after Sputnik that had wonderful books in the applied technology section and college grade labs. I made a list of books to read that came to little when the FBI came though in the summer of 1972 and purged the library. All of the farm co-op books on bucket chemistry disappeared and the books on rocket construction went with them. I only had a dozen books on my list but only two remaind. Three shelves out of five were removed for "the safty of the students."

What wonderfull memories this brings back:
One of my favorites was the ground to ground misiles I made from Estes rockets, a shotgun pirmer, and black powder (or was it the powder from the shell) with a nail through the nose cone to trigger it. My friend thourhg I was nuts, and I was a little worried about hte nail slipping durring launch. It went about 200' up and landed about that far away in the park with a large bang.
Used rocket motors full of black powder (I used potasiun clorate also) can obliterate a 5 gallon bucket full of water.
My brother got hold of a TV picture tube and set it in a trach can on its side at the end of the driveway. After his wrist rocket and steel shot cou;n't break it, I threw a hammer at it. We laughed ouselves silly after that trully impressive "implosion", and were truly humbles when we found a 4" jagged chunk of glass embedded in the wall, 10' behind us.
I am another physics graduate working as a test engineer. I tell my kids that my job is to try to break things.

Not really dangerous, but by far my most fun chemistry experiment was the stink bomb I made in the kitchen. It involved heat and a small piece of wax paper along with some real chemicals from the kit. I forced everyone out of the house for a few hours until we got things aired out. It was hilarious.

Anyone remember the small blue and yellow boxes you got in the mail called "Things of Science". My dad subscribed to the service a I really learned a lot, and feel it made me the better engineer I am today along with my "Erector" set!

Back in grade 8 I had a 'business' supply home made fireworks. Just a little saltpeter, sulfur from the train tracks, ground charcoal and various metal salts, bits of magnesium, whatever else I could improvise. I was a good kid but one of those 'troublemakers' I sold this to failed to understand the importance of launching in an up direction. They launched it horizontally along a large drainage canal. They then had the joy of learning that methane is highly flammable. A half mile of drainage canal banks was roasted but the fire department got it out before people's fences, sheds and houses ignited.

these forgotten stories delight my heart, remembering the times. once was when I was a child I had decided to destroy a red ant colony using a quart of gasoline poured directly into the hill and ignighting it and to my dismay half the back yard in flames. then there was the time that I had read how to generate hydrogen gas by either using aluminum foil and sodium hydroxide dissolved in water or using weak hydorchloric acid and foil. I decided to use the lye and drilled a very small hole in the lid of a plastic gallon bottle, putting the foil into the lye water mixture i had also decided to "enhance" the effect by adding some rubbing alcohol. in a few minutes it was generating liberal amounts of hydrogen and alcohol vapor which I ignited on the back patio....... made a very impressive jet of flame for about a minute then the whole bottle exploded and knocked me to the ground and i had to feel around to see if i lost anything besides my hearing. i truly must say we do learn from those things we do.

Well, there was the Calcium Carbide for teh carbide lamp, that was fun, and I would grind off the end of an empty C02 cartridge, and then fill it full of cutoff matcheads, and then light it, made a fine little rocket! And I would take a screwdrivver, and et a spark off of the rectifier in the flyback part of the TV Those were fun times!

(Sorry if this is appearing twice, with some variations. The first time I was left with a blank screen - it appears that the sending failed. Now retyping from scratch..)
----
AAhh, how nice is sharing these fond memories! And most of all, typing them with ten fingers, and reading them with full stereo vision!
I clearly remember my very first chemistry set, received as a gift by some blessed relative - it contained a couple of glass test tubes, a alcohol lamp, a few lesser plastic tools, a sort of wooden long-legged clothespin (to hold the test tubes over flame), and ten or so chemicals in plastic vials: alumen, borax, copper sulphate, iron filings, tartaric acid, ammonium chloride, calcium hydroxide..I must still have some of them somewhere! And I remember that the "bigger" sets also contained potassium permanganate, cobalt chloride, and other such beauties. All this certainly triggered my hunger for more! More chemicals, more tools, and more knowledge (ah, that bulky encyclopedia on the shelf, full of information..)
At that time, there was indeed some media coverage about accidents related to chemistry sets - mostly due to the alcohol lamp, that was mechanically unstable, and prone to tip over at the slightest bump and pour burning alcohol all over your working surface, i.e. the carpet..
On this side of the Ocean as well, chem sets as we remember them quietly disappeared from the market, to reappear only in recent years in the present emasculated fashion. Sad.
As for me, I soon started putting together my own "lab", essentially a messy assembly of glass labware and assorted chemicals that filled half a cabinet, to be taken out for my "experiments". The first one is the best remembered, especially by mom, after more than 35 years - The Distiller. Which had only a marginal design flaw: it was a completely closed system, no gas escape.
I learned gas laws the hard way, when the weaker part (rubber stopper, with axial glass
tube) failed with a _scaring_ noise and a jet of boiling water and steam up to the kitchen ceiling. I clearly recall the ceiling dripping..Stil today I shiver at thinking WHAT could have happened if just I were closer, or if the weakest part was the 1-liter glass flask instead..
And OK, I'll avoid talking about all the "high energy chemistry" that attracted my interests in following years..at least for a while. You all know what I am talking about..
Now I have a degree in Physics, work as an EE, and more than all, I have all my parts and hair intact, isn't it great??

Wow, brings back lots of memories, especially the electric shocks and blown fuses. (I'm an EE now.) Hollywood pretty successfully captured this spirit of science adventure in the movie "October Sky".

@melissa: here's a list to get you started:
1) pocket knife to take to school to play with during recess and keep on you at all times
2) dry cleaner's bag, but only if there's a two year old baby brother in the house
3) an open backed TV set (CRT) to make a homebrew oscilloscope
4) chemicals that only a university professor can sign for
5) any six items from the local fire dept's hazmat list, with each substance measuring at least in oz and not ppm
6) a gross of matches
7) "D" or "E" rocket motors and electric igniters, small incandescent lamps (ha! that's something an LED can't do....)
8) a dozen packs of firecrackers, six M80's, a dozen shotgun shells, and a center punch
9) access to an electrical outlet without a GFCI in the yard or basement
10) a hacksaw, hammer, screwdriver
11) magnifying glass
12) oil furnace igniter or neon transformer
13) any four items on the DHS list of stuff you can't carry on a plane
14) various materials in tubular form - cardboard, ABS, copper, iron (threaded) and fittings
15) train/slot car transformer
16) three or four gutter spikes
17) a pet rodent or field amphibian
18) assorted discarded lumber
19) a can of black powder
20) an ant nest
21) assorted compression and tension springs
22) coathangars
23) rubber bands
24) rat/mouse traps - not for use on pet rodent

These stories sure bring back memories. I was into smoke and explosions about mid-high school. The idea was to make as much smoke as possible and me and my friends were pretty successful at it. Imagine a tennis court surrounded by ivy-covered fences 12 ft high completely filled with smoke that didn't dissipate for hours on that windless day. The only worry was that someone who might object (i.e., a parent) would discover our masterpiece. The series of explosions escalated to the point where one day I mixed some phosphorus and potassium chlorate (2 gms worth?) in a glass tube and, holding it with my thumb and first finger while shaking it, headed for the backyard proving ground. It went off in my and leaving a mammoth blood blister on my thumb and small pieces of glass in my hand. The mother of the friend who was with me heard the blast and came to investigate. She was a Navy nurse at Pearl Harbor December 7th so nothing fazed her. She wrapped my hand and took me to a hospital and then told my parent what had happened when they and my sibs returned home. It was a good six months before I could strike a match without flinching. I still have all my fingers and the hand functions quite well, thank you.

Paul/commenters, what about putting together a list of components for a DIY science kit of things that we can buy off the shelf? That would be awesome!

@steve - you can get 70 years' worth of The Amateur Scientist (>1000 projects) on CD-ROM at Amazon - best 24 bucks you'll ever spend

@steve - you can get 70 years worth of The Amateur Scientist (>1000 projects) on CD at Amazon - best 24 bucks you'll ever spend

All these "experiments" are fantastic and we made it "ALIVE". There was sense of adventurism, discovery, just to see what would really happen generally under the radar of our parents. The good thing about it all is we did learn the art of discovery and what pioneering was all about. Today for sure there would be law suits and prison time, fire departments, homeland security, FBI, environmental agencies, CSI, and on and on..

I now understand why gilbert has a preference for limiting amplifiers

I tried experimenting with hot-air balloons made of dry-cleaner plastic bags and cotton balls soaked in sterno. Worked well until they crash landed in a tree, still lit. Nonplussed I decided to make a football shaped balloon for the high school pep rally. It was made of flameproof crepe paper and intended to be powered by the new burner design, FOUR cotton balls in an aluminum foil shroud. Problem was, by the time the air was heated to lift-off point, the fuel ran out. Remembering that real hot air balloons usually use external ground based heaters for inflation, I decided to go that route. Picture an empty paint can with a ring of rags inside the bottom, a hole drilled for an air fitting, a screen to hold the rags in place, a nearby air compressor... and of course the ubiquitous flammable substance... GASOLINE! I tested it beneath the roof or our carport (at least I had the good sense to do this outside, rather than the usual basement location...)
When lit, the flames gently lapped at the top of the can. Add the compressed air and OH MY GOD a FIREBALL reminiscent of the MANHATTAN PROJECT. with flames licking the ceiling twelve feet above. I dove for the power cord and terminated (and abandoned) the project. The only lasting trouble was a month later when my dad found the remains of the experiment (I'd neglected to cover my tracks) and said "what the hell is this thing for, kid ???" LOL. I'm still alive and I'm an engineer !

A quote from a 1958 juvenile fiction novel "Have Space Suit Will Travel" by Robert A. Heinlein:
"The barn was mine and I had a chem lab and a darkroom and an electronics bench and, for a while, a ham station. Mother was perturbed when I blew out the windows and set fire to the barn - just a small fire - but Dad was not. He simply suggested that I not manufacture explosives in a frame building."
That seemed to be the prevailing learning attitude of the day, before overly protective laws and salivating lawyers reared their ugly heads. Today all explosions are virtual - then one presses a reset button and starts over.
What a waste of budding engineering talent.

I meant perchlorate. How embarrassing. Still, the days of neon sign transformers and refrigerator compressors used as vacuum pumps were golden. My little brother and I watched some water in a jar that I was evacuating start to boil, and I remember how wild he thought it was when I explained that the water wasn't hotter, the pressure holding the water as a liquid was less.

Apparently some of us grow up a bit slower....
www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/03/atom-splitting-attempt-swedish-kitchen

I and a few buddies figured that sodium chlorate ought to work 'better' in homemade black powder than the nitrate. It was the oxidizer, and it had another oxygen. For 12 year old kids, it wasn't terrible chemical reasoning. It was pretty spectacular, and I had fun burning off my eyebrows and blowing up spent co2 cartridges. I managed to live through that and many other hazardous things and went on to get degrees in physics and chemistry. I certainly would not want anyone to get hurt, but how can that be less likely when there is no guidance rather than firm guidance that says 'we are doing something that could kill us. Therefore we will take precautions."

Here all along I was reading and thinking, "Mercury? Nitric acid at the drugstore? Vacuum tubes? Good lord these people are old, I cannot relate at all." Until I saw "Estes model rocket engines" and suddenly remembered that we science-experimented the living bejeezus out of the neighborhood with those puppies. Pre-teens + black powder in portable and convenient tube form = many many "science experiments" of extremely dubious nature.

I had a lot of fun experimenting as a kid. One time I pulled two carbon rods out of an old battery and tried welding on the back steps. I suceeded in melting the concrete and had the worst sunburn in the middle of December. Another experiment was a CO2 tube bomb. I ended up stuffing a whole bunch of match heads in this little cylinder and sticking in some wires from a Model T spark coil. Luckily I buried the beast in a 1 foot deep whole in the back yard. I ran the wire out and hide behind the corner of the house and connected the spark coil to the batteries. There was a hugh bang. A mushroom cloud went up 20 feet in the air, and where the CO2 cylinder was, was a 3 foot smoking crater. I'm still experimenting but a bit more controlled. I'm an engineer and work in RF microwave design.

I experimented a lot with gravity. My capes and parachutes (towels and pillow cases) never quite overcame the force even as I climbed ever higher to prove to myself that I had given them enough time to work.

YES YES YES!!! These were all the sort of things that made being a kid great!!! If you survived of course -- and obviously, everyone HERE did!
But some of these experiments are pretty elaborate. The spirit of scientific exploration can be had by just teaching a youngster how to make a kite out of sticks and newspaper, or a slingshot out of a scrap of wood and an old inner tube ("Don't aim that thing at your sister! But hey -- that was the whole POINT!).
I did enjoy this!

One of my personal favorites was the old “alchemists” trick of turning pennies into “dimes” courtesy of a little mercury(l) nitrate. After proper processing, each of the pennies took on the silver sheen of a freshly minted dime--convincing enough to fool your friends. The effect only lasted for a few days. Hmm, where did all the mercury go?

What about the "Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments", Robert Brent Golden Press which has been banned/removed from library shelves or the classic "The Boy Chemist"? I think my original copies are now gone, but in a fit of nostaglia, I found them online/torrent and re-read the material. Other than the wire gauze with asbestos center, it was still rather tame. Or the Gilbert's Chemistry sets in the 1960s which contained items like Sodium ferrocyanide (more than enough for an LD50 dose for a rat.) It used to be if you could find iodine crystals or potassium iodide (to make iodine crystals), they would ask if you were making ammonium triiodide. Now the iodine crystals are for water purification and the potassium iodide is stockpiled in case of nuclear accidents.

Of all the near death experiences I had as a child experimenter due to fire, chemicals, electricity and motorized equipment, I think that placing a 25" rare earth television CRT face-up in a garbage can and striking the front surface with the sharp spike of a 20lb pick-axe was the most rewarding. The fact that the spike bounced off screen from the first strike was amazing. The results of the second attempt, where no bouncing occurred, were as shocking as collecting the 1" thick pieces of glass from the roof of our 3 story home was humbling. I'm glad I swung that axe from around the corner of the house and didn't stand in front of the experiment. The wimp influence need not prevail. I taught my son to shoot fire arms and ride motorcycles when he was 12. Today he is 6'5", 185 lbs, a 4th degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do and a freshman at the University of Oregon studying business. I told him to forget engineering, it's over in the US as a good paying job. Celebrity businessman (eg. The Donald) is today's target opportunity.

There was a small mercury bottle at home. I did play a lot with it, trying to get a grip on the tiny silvery balls, but when it went really interresting is when I read that to "clean" mercury you just have to make it boil with a mixture of sulphuric and nitric acids... It worked almost, except that the diameter of the tube I used was too small and the vapor blew the boiling mercury all around the stove... I don't really know how I'm still there to tell you that !

At a panel on science education held at the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), held in San Jose that year, a panel of distinguished Nobel Laureates bemoaned the negative impact of too much caution and too many attorneys.
One panel member admitted, "All the best scientists I know are named 'Lefty'."

In Jr High school electric shop, I built a one tube radio (it had a 117VAC filament). I didn't have a clue as how to connect the spider web antenna I made for the radio. So I wound bare copper stranded wire to the outdoor water faucet pipe. I thought that would be a great antenna, since the pipe goes all over the house as well and underground "to help pick up radio stations" ----- joke!. I connected the other end of the bare copper wire to the spider web antenna mounted on the one tube set. One side of the 117VAC filament was connected directly to the metal chassis of the radio. I then proceeded to plug in the radio to the electrical wall plug (Murphy's Law took over). Talk about excitement. I didn't pick up any radio stations. Instead, the radio set spider web antenna went up in flames in a bang like sound, blowing out the one tube set. In addition, the lights went out in the house. I was in the basement where I had my "work shop" so the smoke didn't get into the house. No one else was at home either. When I went into the house the lights wouldn't come on (I blew a main fuse. In those days there were fuses, now circuit breakers). I remembered a kid in electric shop telling me if the lights go out in the house all you have to do is find some pennies (they were solid copper then) and take out the fuses and place one in each fuse socket (I couldn't tell then if a fuse had blown). Who needs fuses to protect your house from going up in smoke ----- Right?. I then forgot all about the pennies in the fuse box and four years later I joined the Air Force and was educated in electricity, electronics and radar. Boy did I have an awakening. When I came home on leave after all the schooling, I immediately went to the fuse box. All the pennies were still there. I found the blown fuse and replaced it plus removing all the other pennies. 55 years later I am still messing in electronics --- now power design engineering for the last 45. I know a few more beans now as compared to when I was a dumb ignorant kid back then. Now I can't use pennies since it is all circuit breakers ---- Darn!
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Having used many different "hand-me-down" chemistry sets when I was growing up in middle 1950s, I should have known better, but I once had the task of cleaning some stains off of a porcelain bathroom fixture. If bleach did so well, I thought to add ammonia to the mixture. I started to see a yellow-green mist being liberated (2(parts)NaOCl 2NH3 --> 2NaONH3 Cl2.) and quickly flushed it down.

Everybody knows that an acid and a base combined makes water and a salt. But what happens when you put a base (NaOH) with Bleach (a salt?). I tested that and found out that you cough for 1 hour (really) after the experiment... That's why they say "Never mix with anything else" on bleach container.

I have been judging science fairs for 25 years. It has been really troubling to watch the rules change as the fear of lawyers becomes the reason for rules. Contestants can no longer bring cups of dirt which hold their seedlings. Liquids of any form are not allowed. Need to use an oscilloscope? Nope it uses electicity and that's dangerous. Most recent was an effort regarding dry cells. Nice picture of a Lechanche cell with a carbon rod and a zinc shell. She also had some cells to look at and I knew that they had carbon outsides and zinc rods, the modern way to avoid leakage. "Did you take one of those apart?" - "No, they wouldn't let me. Chemicals inside." I sighed.

I don't remember the name of the chemistry set, but it came with a small vile of mercury. It also came with some other types of toxic and dangerous chemicals that I would just mix together to see what effect it had. I was all of 7 or 8 years old. My parents were awfully trusting (or oblivious).

All this reminiscing... making me tear up! Yes it was dangerous, stupid, etc but DAMN it was fun! Switch marks eventually fade, too.

Here’s one for you. At about 8 years old, my friend and I were trying to determine how much heat was needed to make things rise. We used her dad’s gas BBQ to do so. Rocks didn’t rise, so we went lighter. Sticks got hot, but did not rise. We knew we’d need something really light to make this experiment work. So we tried dried leaves next. I, eager to see what would happen, leaved over the BBQ with anticipation. The leave caught fire and up they went, right into my hair. Fortunately all I lost was my bangs, which really did not work for my face shape anyway. So no real loss.

When I was nine years old in Ohio I found the Boys Book of Atomic Energy in the bookmobile that summer. I also knew where my father kept his watch from the late 1940's that employed radium to make the watch's numbers to glow. I remember reading the Boys Book of Atomic Energy and one of the many things described was using a microscope to look at one of the numbers on the watch's face and observe the glowing flashes occurring as the radium decayed emitting an alpha particle which caused the phosphorus to glow. It was so really great to see this. I later also used the book's information to build a Wilson Cloud Chamber. This was all really great stuff to do.

Gee -- nobody mentioned "The Amateur Scientist", CL Stong if I recall... the school library had a copy. I'd be very surprised if one could find it in a library today.
solid fuel rockets made with zinc and sulfur were entertaining; I attempted the primitive NMR experiment, but my hand-wound electromagnet appeared as a dead short to the power supply in the school lab, and the magic smoke leaked out - Built the 0.5 MV Van de Graaff, then spent the last three years of hs trying to pull a vacuum on an electron tube made from a piece of Drainline. (Remember using refrigerator compressors as vacuum pumps? ) Worked out later it would have produced about 10 W of x-rays, if we'd succeeded. We actually got $100 from the PTA to fund this.

My best one was the crude acetylene generator (calcium carbide and water in a plastic gear oil bottle) used to run a lawnmower engine. We didn't know at the time that acetylene will spontaneously ignite at a certain pressure. We got lucky.

Having dismembered my pinball machine for parts, I used the transformer and relays to construct a crude decimal-to-binary calculator. I had no knowledge of even Ohm's law and yet I still made it work using 110VAC relays. Of course the day my curiosity led me to plug the "suicide cord" into the wall socket and then touch the bare copper ends together surely blew the fuses in the house. My father was very understanding because I quickly hid the evidence!
One rocket I attempted to launch in the back yard blew up with a resounding bang. It was loaded with about two ounces of flash powder I had extracted by dismembering about a gezillion fire crackers. Fortunately I and the rest of the neighborhood kids were safely in our bunker (the garage).

My transformer experiment forced moles from the yard, they jump out making funny noises. It also is an effective way to get earthworms for fishing bait. Believe me when I say "don't walk around barefooted on the morning dew" while retreiving the worms. I started a fire with a neon transformer being used for a Jacobs Ladder demonstration just to be like what you saw in the old horror movies. I wondered would it penetrate paper. It made the neatest tiny holes in it but it would ignite. Solder is not removeable from carpet, but paddling marks fade with time. The old style aluminum 35mm film cans filled with gunpowder will ruin Air Conditioners, did I mention that paddle marks fade with time.

Reminds me of my test if I can measure the 16A that come out of a wall outlet. Take a multimeter, set it to the right current range, and then shove the probes into the outlet. BANG! The circuit breaker tripped faster than I could read the meter. I am quite sure that the current was above 16A. Since then I have quite a high opinion of fuses and circuit breakers. They are there for a reason.

As a young lad I was given an old fluorescent lamp to play around with. The neon tube was broken (not broken in pieces, encountered that in school when throwing around an apple) and in my attempt to fix it I figured I twist the starter as I have seen my dad do it a few times. The difference was that he twisted it the right way, I didn't. Eventually the housing snapped off and shorted the capacitor, which still had quite some charge left in it.
Or the time when I tried to fix a TV. I did succeed by fixing cold solder joints, but there was this small black cable dangling off the side of the picture tube. I turned the set off and grabbed the plug just to get a massive jolt. It was the ground connection from the outside of the tube. Since it was not connected a good charge of high voltage built up. I assumed that the charge is now gone after going through my body, so I grabbed the plug a second time. My assumption was wrong. The third try succeeded with the help of insulated pliers. Those are the little lessons one has to go through when not knowing.
Or the not so dangerous antenna 'plug'. Take an old mains plug, connect the earth ground to a long enough wire that gets hooked up to the antenna input of the TV. This worked nicely as antenna replacement when having good faith that someone didn't screw up the wiring...which sometimes happens as I noticed the painful way when hooking up an electric stove once.

When I was in the sixth grade I made a carbon arc welder out of wood, the carbon sticks from two D size batteries attached to two pieces of curtain rods. My rheostat was a dish of salt water with two metal nuts attached to the AC line. My teacher let me set this up and demonstrate this to my class. I was happily melting a penny when my rheostat nuts touched and blew the fuse. If I got hurt, my parents would have totally blamed me, not the teacher, school district or anyone else, but you can imagine the lawsuits today. If parents took the time to teach their kids common sense and not expect everyone else to, they would put the blame where it belongs- at home.

One day, I refilled a metal bottomed cardboard tube with potassium permanganate and glycerin and stirred it up. I did this in my bedroom. The tube was around two inches in diameter and six inches long. When it started to smoke, I thought that whatever it was going to do, I didn't want it to do it in my bedroom so I put it out the window on the roof of the porch. The result was a roaring flame that looked like an inverted rocket engine that shot three feet up and out of the tube. I threw water on it so it didn't burn the roof, but had to explain the purple stains on the bulkhead below.

One of our favourites was to take a CO2 bulb for a soda-siphon, support it upright with the seal downwards using the wire cage from a sparkling wine bottle closure in a baking tray with 1/2 inch of petrol and some engine oil to make the flames more impressive. Once lit retire to a safe distance. When the lead seal got hot enough it would melt and the bulb would shoot off, preferably skywards, and the back-blast would make an impressive wall of flame like an explosion in a (scale model) oil refinery. We only ever once found a bulb afterwards in the lane that ran by the field where we used to do these kinds of things.

Back in high school, three friends and I built liquid fueled rocket engines. We triple distilled nitric acid from a local chemical supplier to make red fuming nitric acid and “borrowed” some aniline from the school chem lab. The two make a hypergolic propellent, no ignition source required. We static fired about 20 engines. Number 17 burned nicely for about three seconds, then BOOM! One friend and I were behind a stack of boxes looking at the test through a mirror. All we could see was smoke as the remaining 120 ml of fuel burned rapidly. I turned to my friend an said “they're dead”. Our other two friends on the outside looked at each other and one said “where are we going to bury the bodies.” We were all okay, but a neighborhood mom unhappy with the smoldering mess left in the alley. Part of the engine was found 150 feet away.

I'm saddened by the "boy in the bubble" parenting now a days. I'm equally disturbed by how many kids have no, 0, curiosity about the world around them or technology. I have a hard time wrapping my tiny mind around it.

I remember when I was in 6th Grade, looking at the Physics Science book there was this diagram of how a electro-magnet works. So without knowing what AC or DC was, i took out my horse shoe magnet, then took a bare wire wrapped few turns around it. then the 2 remaining bare terminals stuck it into a mains live and neutral wiht my bare hands wiht the switch ON ! OMG, sparks came flying out and a big boom which luckily tripped the whole house mains switch and luckily i used a small gauge bare wire. I was so stunend and still from shock and glad to be still alive and now i am a engineer in the R&D dept. Am lucky to survive with no injuries but with a bad shocking frightening experience. My parents were out and when they returned were shocked to see me in the state of shock, still alive, no injuries and the whole house electrical mains tripped which saved my life form electrocution. I waas too young and naive to know what electricity was. Now i educate my 9yr son the dangers of hig current and electricity and ensure he dont play with it.

In high school, a friend and I got real interested in chemistry. Concentrated Sulfuric acid and Fuming Nitric acid plus cotton equals guncotton, the stuff Jules Verne said would take us to the moon. As I recall, we bought the stuff at the local drugstore.

Spark-excited tesla coil: Got a neon transformer from a scrapped theater matinee sign. Wound the secondary on a PVC pipe, using mom's sewing machine end wheel to spin it. Primary was lamp cord on an oatmeal box. Spark gap was two bolts and a block of wood for insulation. Capacitor was 8 sheets of plate glass with foil, in a wood box with motor oil dumped in. It helped to have a family hardware store. Parents were worried when I would hole up in the garage and fire that thing up-rightly so. I wired the garage myself, using two old wires and staples, no grounding. Once i looked up and saw sparkles at each staple, as the wood was damp and the RF voltage was everywhere. I also tried the Xray tubes from light bulbs and foil, and induction coils (from automobiles). I played with chemistry too, making explosives, rockets, gosh this sounds familiar here. Now I am a RF engineer designing Megawatt power amplifiers for particle accelerators. Go figure.

Perfect Chemicals from the hobby shop, $1.25 a bottle. Magnesium strip from the same source (used for model planes), filed down and it worked great as flash powder with Strontium Nitrate. Most of my home chemistry was batteries, and making chlorine gas and "fuel cells" with my train transformer.

We were dullards.. In our 6th grade chemistry lab, we decided that the stuff used for sparklers would would great with wax and stick phosporus(sic)... It worked great on the ball field! The whole school loved it! A new girl in the class wanted me to go behind the backstop, that was another day... Then in the 11th grade, the question arose "did saltpeter really work?", an assignment was made to two kids to test it. It did not work...

Let's see, there was the calcium carbide "grease bucket shooter", the .45 cal 'cannon' made out a piece of 1" diam. axle, the 4-ft Van de Graf generator, the 'water cannon' using waterproofed PVC bombs of black powder ignited with fine wire hooked to the doorbell transformer, and the 3/4 inch copper pipe rockets using propellant made of match heads, cut-open shotgun shells, charcoal and ammonium nitrate fertilizer... Dad got me to take up amateur radio to keep the house (and the neighbors') intact... and neutered the dog, but that's another story.

Ah yes, the good old days when kids, mostly boys could conduct dangerous experiments. Those who managed to kill themselves are not around to join in this discussion. As a pre-teen I had no difficulty in buying rolls of asbestos sheet from the display tables at Fisher Scientific in lower Manhattan. The sales folks would only sell "the more dangerous" chemicals to children if they had a letter from a parent or teacher. My first dangerous experiments were conducted when I was a toldler. I was attempting to discover what the magic was in the two slits in the wall that required insertion of a lamp cord to make the table lamp light. I also was experimenting with the relationship between the lamp socket switch and the connected or disconnected state of that plug. Needeless to say at some point I began probing the outlet with bobby pins and anything else I could find. At one point I became unlucky and managed to short out the plug in the outlet. It left a black smudge from vaporized bobby pins and copper about a foot long on the white wall and I simultaneously got a nasty taste of 120 VAC up one arm and down the other. With painfully tingling arms I found myself rolled over to the other side of the room, still breathing but definitely surprised and a bit shocked. The circuit branch fuse that blew also knocked out power to my mom's radio and iron in the basement. So, naturally she came upstair to see what happened. I'm sure she felt a bit guilty about leaving her son unsupervised upstairs. When she saw me sitting very still and quiet opposite the wall with the big burn marks she let out a terrifying scream, figuring I might have been dead. That scared me and I began to cry. I never again stuck anything into outlets, but it did spark my lifelong interest in electricity and engineering.

When I was in 5th grade and becoming interested in electronics, I wound a few hookup-wire-around-nail electromagnets, which didn't perform energetically enough with the batteries I had available. Disappointed with my latest device's apparent lack of magnetic ability when hooked to my Lionel train transformer (AC), I plugged the wires directly into the extension cord. It made a large flash, a big bang and plunged half the house into darkness. I switched my electrical interest from Power to RF (crystal sets) after that.

One of my 8'th grade science classmates proudly decided to show that chlorine is contained in both powdered and liquid bleach so he decided to mix the two in a glass jar and tighten the lid. Once the teacher realized what he had done, she had a look of panic and grabbed the jar and ran to the restroom to open it before the jar exploded. She wasn't too happy from the resulting chemical burn on her hands, but it could have been much worse.

One other thought was that presently there seems to be a very high level of fear, which, when coupled with the news media's constant chattering, serves to inhibit any thinking about alternate ways of doing things. I wonder if other engineers have observed this happening. None of my experiments were about doing things the way that everybody else did them, and even today, I seldom utilize the standard approach, because if it was a poor compromise the first time, it will still be a poor compromise next time.

To quote Forest Gump, “Stupid is as stupid does.” Weren’t we all back in the day? Well, at least those of us old enough to have survived the perils of un-government regulated childhood will remember things we did that should only be spoken about in secret circles.
If necessity is the ‘mother of invention’, then surely boredom is the father of ‘OH MY GOD, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!’
In the mid 60’s, in a world dominated by black & white TV and a couple of rock and roll AM radio stations, a few of us played with amateur radio…but daylight conditions were often poor, forcing us to seek entertainment outdoors.
DID YOU KNOW… that a plastic paint drip cloth ~9ft x 12ft can be converted into a hot air balloon? Simply lay it on the ground, bring the long edges together in the center and seal them with a continuous length of Scotch Tape…making a deflated cylinder. Bundle one end together tightly with rubber bands to seal it. Wrap the other end around your mom’s car exhaust and start the engine. The bag will fill with warm air … Then remove and seal it with more rubber bands and release it and watch this awkward bubble float about.
BUT… DID YOU KNOW… that this balloon will rise much more rapidly and far higher, when filled with natural gas? We disconnected the main gas line to the home heating system, jury-rigged a garden hose to the outdoors… and presto… a balloon that is now aviation worthy. But hard to see as it rose out of sight.
BUT, DID YOU KNOW… that if you take your mom’s roll of tin foil ( yes, tin back then) and secured it to the tail of the balloon, that your could track it for a much greater distance?
BUT, DID YOU KNOW… that the radar at the Alameda Naval Air Station could detect a 20 foot long piece of tin foil floating above the Oakland Hills?
AND, DO YOU KNOW… how it feels to see two jets get scrambled from the Air Base to do a reconnaissance on your new created UFO?
Talk about positive feedback !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

and we wonder why our kids are addicted to video games? No other excitement in their lives.

I think the next question has to be who not only survived chemistry sets but also managed to survive lawn darts? And am I the only one who tried put Estes motors on them to get them up higher? When you think about it we all did things as one person said that today would have you behind bars. Here all you need was someone over 16 to sign for a box of dynamite from your friendly hardware store. So maybe things have changed just a little?

Consequences? Forethought? Worked at a gasoline filling station when I was 16. We got bored, so decided to fill a "half and half", more or less, mix of acetylene and oxygen from the garage's welding set in an 1L plastic pop bottle...then lit it, by hand, with a match. Neither of us got hit by plastic shrapnel, though my right ear still has hearing loss as a result of that explosion. And who hasn't built a Jacob's ladder using a pair of coat hangars and an igniter from an oil furnace?

I had my chemistry set setup in the basement on an old desk, the local hardware store and drug store supplemented everything not included in the set including sulfur and Potassium nitrate and various acids. I have all my fingers and eyes but my Dad's supply of iron pipe and end end caps was quickly depleted. Lucky for me we had lots of land and a Dad that worked the afternoon shift.

When I was in elementary school I signed out a libray book on electrical experements. One of them, which I built, was to take a piece of lamp cord, splice in two fishing sinkers, place them in a pan of salt water, splice in a light bult and plug it in to a 120V wall out let and vary the distance of the sinker to watch the light get brighter or dimmer, later I realized I could have been electrocuted, but I learned from it and I am now an electrical engineer!

One of our experiments was an attempt to build a pulsejet engine capable of driving a bicycle at roadway speeds. So it was not "small". Because we had no machining capabilities aside from files and drills, it did not pulse, but we did create an engine that ran kerosene through a copper tube soldered around the outside of the combustion chamber, since we knew that hot kerosene was a "whole lot more combustible" than cool kerosene. But the whole project ended when a hose blew off and doused one team member with a quart of the fuel, all in about 3 seconds. Fortunately he stumbled back, away from the engine, and did not ignite. And we all learned a lesson about providing adequate fuel line connection integrity. Now, I consider that if we had been able to build such an engine, where on a bike would you attach a fifteen pound engine that quickly would heat up to solder melting temperatures? By the way, I am the only one of the group that went on to be an engineer. The others went on to become quite wealthy in other aspect of business.

In the early '50s there was a TV show here in the US called Mr. Wizard. He was demonstrating how you can burn steel wool in pure oxygen. In those days they did not say "Don't try this at home !", so I did. My dad had a fabricating facility so I placed some steel wool in a vinegar bottle

What I find interesting is that almost all the interesting experiments listed can still be done today. Very few used any store bought kits. Most all were rigged up using equipment that can be purchased at many surplus stores or ordered on-line. The commercial dumming-down of science kits would not appear to be the cause of our progeny's whimpishness.

Well I routinely show my kids and their friends how to make Browns gas (H2 and O2 mixed) with a jam jar, some stainless rulers and a car battery charger.... very satisfying explosions! No matter how much 'elf and safety dumbs down education, kids still love stuff that smells, glows or blows up!

We made high voltage spark detonated explosive devices using silver acetylide which we made ourselves from the family spoons, along with a superb under water torpedo, underwater rocket powered with gunpowder, and with a silver acetylide "warhead". It cruised about 2 feet below the surface. We also made illegal radio transmitters. It was world war 2 -we were teenagers and trained he best we could in guerilla warfare, expecting a German invasion in 1941-42. Later on I worked on the real things - in defense during the cold war!

Take a 5 gallon glass water bottle half filled with salt water, put a glass jet tube though a rubber cork along with 2 wires to connect to 2 electrodes in the water. Attach to a 24VDC train transformer, let it run for an hour, then light a match to the jet to hopefully get a torch effect. No such luck, flame shot into the bottle and it exploded violently shooting glass shards into me, my brother, the wall, the beds, the rugs and ceiling, everything. No permanent damage. Lesson learned.

I remember getting hold of a neon transformer--and making a Jacobs Ladder like in the old Frankenstein movies--we would set all sorts of things on fire--all you needed was a little carbon in it/on it--all was well until one day i brushed one side of the ladder(while it was not arcing--otherwise I probably would not be writing this) with a pair of "insulated" electricians pliers--thank goodness I was standing on wood floor in shed--it only knocked me 5 feet out the door into the yard--and did not even trip the breaker!

My 'fun with high voltage' experiments occurred the summer I turned 16, back in the early 70's. I had rescued a neon sign transformer from the county dump. It had a 33KV output and weighed about 10 pounds. It didn't take long to make a Jacob's ladder fashioned from a pair of sanded coat hangers. They were plastic coated and failed the first attempt. I soon had it up and running with the infamous rising spark. My first secondary observation was when i went into the house and noticed the TV set had a buzzing and static picture that increased until it suddenly stopped, over and over. It was coincidentally at the same rate the spark on my Jacob's ladder ran. I latter discovered that the neighbors for several blocks in all directions were treated to this 'side effect'. I latter called this my first CW transmitter. My second fun filled experiment was to put different things into the spark between the cloths hanger rods. A sheet of paper would have pin sized burn holes running across it where the spark traveled though it. After many different things were tried, I decided to test it with a freshly pick dandelion. I remember the sudden sensation of voltage and then woke up ten minutes later with my good friend standing over me white as a sheet. He thought I was dead. When I discovered that my right arm didn't work any more and I was 8 feet from where I was sitting I decided that it was time to stop. I recovered in a couple of hours and the pain in my arm finally went away a couple of days later. The best part was when I connected the input power to a huge knife switch and demonstrated it to my Mother. Little did I know that she was terrified as a child when she first saw "Frankenstein" and I instantly brought back the nightmares that took years to go away. My Father later explained to me that I should first show him anything I was working on and not to 'bother' Mom.

I had a great time in Grade 7 with my carbon arc setup on the basement floor. Two big carbon electrodes from old alkaline batteries fed from the wall socket through a "liquid resistor". This was constructed with two nails with copper wire wrapped around them in the bottom of a Noxzema jar filled with concentrated salt solution. If the panel fuse popped when you touched the carbon electrodes together, you needed to separate the nails a bit more. The wooden frame was a bit tricky to keep healthy as the electrodes glowed red until the arc started in earnest. We had the brightest basement in the neighborhood.

My dad's 1950's era chemestry set had a "scintillation chamber"... it was dead by the time I got it. I did have a "real" chemestry set, as well a both a microscope

My dad worked for the phone company. He had a small (4 oz volume), but heavy bottle of mercury
for restoring noisy relay contacts.
We would occasionally play with the mercury, but one day I had an even better idea. I thought I would like to see it boil. My dad would have known better, but he was at work.
My mom was all in favor of me doing science, but she said I should wait until after dinner.
Thank god for the short attention spans of ten year olds. I could have easily wiped out the whole family.

My junior-high science teacher showed us electrolysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen... so I, thinking bigger was betteer, made a similar, larger setup operating from a car battery. I obtained about a quart jar of oxygen and proportionally more of hydrogen, and thought it might be interesting to see the two turn back into water so I mixed them together. Becoming bored with the process, I read that oxygen would cause a glowing ember on a stick of wood to burst into flame, so I shoved a smoldering stick into the hydrogen-oxygen mixture. I only have two permanent scars.

Wow! Morgan Allen's experience was great! My own were less exciting - using sugar and saltpeter as a fuel for bigger and bigger rocket motors. Loud and very cool.
My cousin (the chemical engineer)was much more the experimenter - he managed to blow off a few fingers and both eardrums.

I built a screw driver tip magnetizer from a magazine when I was in 7th or 8th grade. I wound a solid wire around a suitable core (pvc pipe) 20 turns or so. Then the wire ends get connected to two nails and the whole thing attached to a piece of wood. Another nail (terminal) is added then the wiring begins. An AC cord is stripped and one side attached to one side of the coil, the other side to the above mentioned terminal. A piece of aluminum foil was twisted on to the remaining 2 nails effectively forming a fuse in series with the AC line and the coil. Put your screwdriver tip inside the coil, plug the cord into the wall and voila! The foil burns up and your screwdriver tip is magnetized (it also shoots out into the garage as well)!

The Atomic Energy Lab has been sold off and on, on Ebay. Last time I bid on one, it sold for $5000.00 probably to the wrong people! Who else whould have that much money. But the A.C. Gilbert Chemistry Sets do appear reasonably priced, from time to time. And very harmless in comparison.

I never made it into EE. As an undergradute at the University of Florida in the late 60's I selected an easier (and lesser) field. My father was a successful EE and my son is now an ME with a large American company, hired just out of school.
However, I did my fair share of risky procedures. On a positive note I was very good with analog and built all of my own audio equipment for a number of years.
I agree the current climate of "mom-safe" is just another impediment keeping many young people out of STEM fields, at a time when the USA badly needs it.

I had a head start in this department in that my dad was a science teacher. He *loved* to make things change color, blow up, or otherwise react, and I loved to help in the lab. My own efforts to experiment were much tamer, but I did ruin a few household items and I learned some things: a kitchen fan won't chop up pasta, but pasta will degrade a kitchen fan; stale Jell-O bounces beautifully, but cleaning Jell-O off the ceiling isn't fun; nitric acid turns skin permanently yellow; wads of tissue floating on water will indeed burn. OK, I lit the bathroom on fire with that last one, but it was only a small fire. Another thing I learned: never assume your mom won't notice small burn marks! Moms notice EVERYTHING.

Long story short, my friend and I nearly blew ourselves up with one experiment gone wrong (my friend took 9 stitches). A few decades later while attending another friend's parent's 50th anniversary the father introduced me to someone as "The kid that nearly blew himself up."

A consequence of this can be seen at many school science fairs, where chemistry, electronics, rocketry and physics projects have become rare. The hand holders who never did any real experimenting or science when they were young are in now charge. www.forrestmims.org

Paul,
You can still find good stuff, just not at Toys R Us. For example, do a web search on
"CK01 Standard/Honors Home School Chemistry Laboratory Kit"
Lots of nitrates, cyanides, permanganates, all the stuff I had in my Gilbert sets as a kid. I hit the trailing edge of good chemistry sets, picking most up at yard sales for almost no money. In fact, I had a make your own solar cell kit that I wish I had the patience to work through at the time, I would have been much further along in my career.
And kit building is alive and well and better than ever. Just taught my 7 year old daughter to solder building a completely awesome "Bulbdial" clock kit... every 7 year old needs to know how to work with molten toxic metal.

Worse than the fact that you can't buy a real chemistry set these days, and even the electronic "experiments" are limited to battery power, is the laws that can give a boy a criminal record for doing the kinds of stuff all us nerdy kids did in grade school.
The friendly druggist would sell us potentially poisonous chemicals for our chemistry experiments. The feed store would sell us ingredients for our home-made gun powder, with stern advice to "be careful". I once modified a "distillation of wood" experiment so it emitted hydrogen sulphide, and dumped pretty much everything into an electrochemistry experiment so that it bubbled over and ate a hole in the floor tile. In both case, they aired out the school, sent me home, and called my parents. Today, they'd have a full haz-mat response, lawsuits, and of course my father and I would both end up with an FBI file as potential terrorists. Two friends would bring their home-made gunpowder experiments to school and we'd try them out behind the old church during recess. What's the penalty for bringing explosives to school these days? Of course we also all had pocket knives, which we used among other things to sharpen the sticks we threw at each other during recess.
Nowadays, when the word "chemicals" in the media is always preceded by "toxic", "hazardous", "drug-making", or "bomb-making", and even a TV or radio comes with a dire warning not to attempt to disassemble it, we wonder why the US is no longer leading the world in scientific innovation. The answer is simple. We're afraid of science to the point where we've essentially made hobby science illegal.

Ah... Kendall.... As old Will once said: "If Meccano be the food of love, play on. Give me excess of it, that the appetite may sicken and thus die". Now that I really do have an excess of it - the equivalent of more than a couple of dozen Number 10 sets - yet the passion has not dissipated. Oh, how starved are modern kids; how poor their diet, and how shallow their delight.

In the early 1960s my elementary school had those old boy-experimenter books with Ford spark coils driving x-ray tubes, black powder mixes and other stuff that would have DHS strafing your house today. One of the easy ones was making wood gas, where you filled a typewriter ribbon can (a small metal can for the Gen-Y types) with sawdust, poked a hole in the top with a nail and heated it to give off a gas you could ignite. Destructive distillation, yeah buddy! It worked great so I enthusiastically scaled it to near-industrial size with an ancient pressure-cooker loaded with scoops of plentiful sawdust from my dad's workshop. Placing this on a gas stove burner conveniently out of sight in the basement and letting it cook off, I couldn't ignite the gas streaming from the pressure relief port in the lid due to it's velocity no matter how much I tried. Then.........I was on the floor, consciousness was slowly returning and the sound of my mother screaming in terror penetrating the fog. Yup, once it reached the lower explosive limit the basement windows blew out and my mother said it felt like the floor jumped up. I lost some hair but my dad took it amazingly well and wisely decided electronics would be safer. We spent many Saturdays together playing with radios and that probably saved a few lives. And it definitely launched an engineering career I can retire from in one piece. And I still have my hair.

As I noted in my own Filter Wizard post from a while back (search for "one giant squeak for mankind"), I too made the transition "...from the worlds of Meccano and of chemistry experiments (sorry about the burn marks and the smell, Mum) to a world of soldering irons and electricity (er, sorry about the burn marks and the smell, Dad)"