view additional pages

Hints for Beginners in Amateur Chemistry

Join in the Fun of Experimenting at Home! This Article Tells How Easy It Is to Start

By RAYMOND B. WAILES

IF YOU have been following this series of articles for some time, you probably have already set up a more or less complete chemical workshop in which to carry on your experiments. However, there is always a new crop of beginners coming along—newcomers who would like to join the fun and who need some simple advice on equipment and working methods. Old-timers surely won’t begrudge this space to help others get started in the fascinating pastime of amateur chemistry—and perhaps their own memories will be refreshed with a pointer or two.
Read the rest of this entry »

view additional pages

How TO CONVERT OLD ELECTRIC LIGHT BULBS INTO CHEMICAL GLASSWARE

By Earl D Hay

EXPERIMENTS in an amateur chemical laboratory are much more interesting when they are made with the same kind of apparatus as that used in professional laboratories. As a rule, however, the home chemist experiences a great – shortage of flasks and endeavors to use various kinds of bottles as makeshifts, little realizing that he may make from burned-out electric light bulbs a great variety of useful flasks like those sold by chemical supply houses at from 20 to 75 cents each. The lamps used in the average home vary in size from 25 to 200 watts and are suitable for small Florence or boiling flasks. Larger flasks are made from 300-, 500-, and 1,000-watt lamps, which can be obtained from the janitors of stores and linemen of the city lighting companies.
Read the rest of this entry »

view additional pages

Dry Ice-Capades

Dry ice is very interesting stuff! Get yourself a chunk (handling it with gloves) and perform the simple experiments illustrated here.

DRY ice is solid carbon dioxide. It’s very interesting stuff. For one thing, it sublimes at room temperature; that is, although a solid, it evaporates to form a gas without passing through the liquid state. The mist you see formed by dry ice is water “squeezed” out of the air because it has been chilled below the dewpoint.
Read the rest of this entry »

view additional pages

Glass Making Easy for Home Chemist

By Raymond B. Wailes

BECAUSE of its importance in glass making and other industries, silicon opens a particularly interesting experimental field to the home chemist. In nature, silicon is almost as plentiful as oxygen. Yet, it hides itself well in its compounds. It never is found free and uncom-bined and can be separated from its associates only through clever chemical thievery in the laboratory.

Industrially, silicon is obtained by heating sand—a compound of silicon and oxygen—and coke to a high temperature in an electric furnace. The white-hot coke steals the oxygen from the sand to form carbon monoxide and frees the silicon. Although the amateur chemist will have no electric furnace in which to duplicate this process, he can obtain a similar result by heating sand and powdered magnesium over his ordinary laboratory gas burner.
Read the rest of this entry »

view additional pages

Scientific Experiments with Toys

By Raymond B. Wailes

Many Novelty, Toy and “Jokers” Supply Stores sell small glass “meters” or “thermometers.” as they are called, attached to a card supposed to represent the quantity of intoxicating liquor the individual can consume, a state of health, denote a fortune, etc. The items are designed to provoke mirth and hilarity, but they operate on a scientific principle and can be used admirably for demonstrating some physical laws. What to do and how to conduct the experiments are details covered in the accompanying text.
Read the rest of this entry »

view additional pages

Weird Stunts with Aluminum in the Home Laboratory

Electrical Experiments You Can Perform with This Most Useful Metal—An Easy Way to Purify Water Containing Sediment

By Raymond B. Wailes

OUTWARDLY aluminum is one of the least spectacular elements of the earth. Yet in the home laboratory, weird stunts reveal the strange properties that make it one of the world’s most useful metals.

Although at one time worth its weight in silver, chemistry has made aluminum one of our commonest metals. According to leading scientists, its uses will continue to grow. Even now railroads, steamships, and airplanes make use of its physical qualities for lightness combined with strength.

Most important of its chemical properties is its unquenchable thirst for oxygen. Pure aluminum left in the air soon becomes coated with an oxide. It is this characteristic that makes its impossible to obtain the metal in its free state and also forms the basis of thermit welding (P.S.M., Aug. ‘33, p. 50) and many other modern processes in industry.

To the home chemist, this fast-forming oxide of aluminum offers the means of performing two novel electrical experiments. For the first, immerse two sheets of aluminum foil in a small jar or beaker containing a solution of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate). Connect one sheet directly to one side of the house lighting circuit and the other sheet through a series-connected lamp to the other side.
Read the rest of this entry »

view additional pages

Crime-Detection Tests FOR THE Home Chemist

How Hidden Fingerprints May Be Found by Using Iodine Vapor — Forgeries Also Are Revealed by This Remarkable Element

By Raymond B. Wailes

NEW thrills await the home chemist who experiments with iodine. Besides its queer properties and varied uses, it serves as the gateway to a new branch of chemistry—the mysterious and interesting art of scientific crime detection.

With iodine, the amateur experimenter can transform his home laboratory into a miniature crime bureau. In a few hours, he can master some of the chemical tricks that aid the modern sleuth in his search for hidden fingerprints, clever check alterations, and forgeries.

First, however, the amateur must learn how to obtain this active element in its free state. For years, it was recovered commercially from a giant type of seaweed called kelp. Now it is obtained from the solutions left behind when Chile saltpeter is crystallized in large quantities.
Read the rest of this entry »

view additional pages

Magic in Chemistry, Chemistry in Magic

Prove you’re a man to be reckoned with—and the only man who can make the gal in the photo (Fig. 1) blush. Prepare her for the test by painting her cheeks with phenolphthalein solution (from the drug store), and be sure the cheeks are slightly moist when you perform the trick. Ordinarily this solution is colorless, but when a finger (yours) moistened with household ammonia is brought near it, the reaction of the fumes with the solution causes it to turn pink. When the ammonia evaporates, the cheeks lose their color.
Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things I really like about these old articles is that they assume a certain level of competence, and if you don’t have it, well that’s your fault. Nowadays if you posted this article you’d have to find out if you are libel for some moron drinking hydrochloric acid through the rubber tube because he thought it was a straw.

view additional pages

Generating SMOKE and STEAM for Amateur Theatricals

By Kenneth Malcolm

CURLING wisps of smoke rising in a fireplace, great smoke-gusts bursting in from an offstage forest fire, steam issuing from grotesque modernistic machinery or even from the spout of a humble teakettle—all the realistic steam and smoke effects which so often add to the interest of professional dramatic productions can be easily duplicated, at least on a moderate scale, by the amateur.

The apparatus to be described is a simplified version of that used in the professional theater, and costs not more than a dollar or two. The smoke—produced chemically by uniting ammonia gas with chlorine—is harmless and may be generated instantly wherever desired.
Read the rest of this entry »

view additional pages

Safe Stunts with Fire FOR THE HOME CHEMIST

By Raymond B. Wailes

OF ALL home chemistry experiments, tests with combustibles offer the most in spectacular fun and harmless excitement. For even after some 60,000 years of use, fire still holds a mysterious fascination.

Although we are accustomed to kindling a fire with a match or some other small flame, a spark or a flame are by no means necessary to start some substances burning. Many materials ignite spontaneously when subjected to nothing more than a slight rise in temperature. Carbon disul-phide, a liquid often used as an ant exterminator, is one of these substances and for this reason presents a serious fire hazard if not handled carefully.
Read the rest of this entry »

Better not let the TSA see this or they’ll ban corn from all flights.

Dynamite Made from Corn
Production of a highly explosive dynamite from corn is one of the latest developments of the chemical laboratory. It is the result of the recent discovery at the University of Iowa of an inexpensive method of extracting inositol, a sugarlike substance, from corn. Inositol is a non-explosive form of alcohol but when nitrated becomes a powerful solid explosive. It can be produced from the waste by-products of the manufacture of cornstarch.

view additional pages

HOW CHEMISTRY CREATES A PHOTOGRAPH

What goes on in the emulsion that coats film is shown by simple test-tube experiments.

By TRACY DIERS

THE film in your camera is thinly coated with one of the most unstable chemicals known to man. Silver bromide is its name, and from the moment of its birth it is kept in a cradle of darkness until in your camera a swift shaft of light seeks it out. The intricate and far-reaching changes brought to silver bromide by that flash of light are in part still secrets of nature. Much of what happens in your camera and in the darkroom is known, however, and can be shown at home with a few chemicals in a test tube.
Read the rest of this entry »