This looks pretty fun though I’m not sure where you can buy uranium nitrate these days.

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Fun with Black Light for Home Chemists

By RAYMOND B. WAILES

CHEMICALS that glow with magic colors in the dark, under invisible illumination with “black light,” have been applied to theatrical costumes and decorations with spectacular effect. Your own home laboratory can be the stage for equally striking experiments with these substances, which possess the curious property known as fluorescence. Also, you can prepare other substances that shine in the dark through the phenomenon called phosphorescence—which is distinguished from fluorescence by the fact that phosphorescent chemicals continue to glow for some time after removal from the light that excites them.
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How Evaporation Steals Heat

EVERY time a liquid evaporates into a gas, it snatches a definite amount of heat from its container and surrounding air, cooling both below their original temperatures. This law of physical chemistry has long been useful to the human race as a means of cooling foods or drinks. Primitive man found that water placed in unglazed earthenware vessels would seep through the pores, evaporate, and cool the water remaining inside. Campers and country dwellers still cool water in this way.

Today, all our mechanical refrigerators, electric and gas alike, harness the cooling effect of evaporation. Alternately compressed into a liquid and allowed to expand into a gas, the refrigerant absorbs heat during each evaporation cycle.
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Home Science Stunts with Soap

by Prof. Victor Lewitus

Make a strong soap solution by mixing shaving soap and water. After taking a puff on a cigarette, blow the smoke through a bubble pipe to make a soap bubble. The inside of the bubble then will contain the white smoke, and when it breaks, it does so with a puff, furnishing a very striking experiment. A clay or corncob pipe will be more suitable than the briar variety, inasmuch as the soap mixture probably will make the pipe unsuited for further smoking.
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Three Magic Metals

Producing Cold With Electricity and A “Quicksilver Heart” That Beats Are Only Two of the Amazing Tests You Can Perform Easily With Simple Substances

By Raymond B. Wailes

YOU are accustomed to seeing an electric element in a toaster or radiant heater grow red-hot when current passes through it—but did you know that when electricity flows through joints of certain metals, it produces a cooling effect? Have you ever made a drop of murcury behave as if it were alive or prepared a pair of magical alloys that are solids when separate, and a liquid when mixed?

These are a few of the fascinating experiments that you can perform with metals, using three in particular that you may not have employed before in your home laboratory—mercury, antimony, and bismuth.
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Girl Chemist

Jackie Bates works harder, has lonelier life than most of her ex-classmates, but makes more money, likes her profession

Chemistry, once strictly a man’s profession, has become increasingly hospitable to women. The expansion of industrial chemistry has helped. Women are particularly in demand for delicate laboratory work that requires small hands, finger dexterity and painstaking attention to detail. With job opportunities opening in the field, more college girls than ever before have been preparing for careers in chemistry.
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NEW FEATS OF Chemical Wizards REMAKE THE WORLD WE LIVE IN

By ALDEN P. ARMAGNAC

IMAGINE a ball of fiber, weighing only one pound, of so fine a texture that if unrolled it would reach from the Atlantic to the Pacific! This marvel of chemistry, exhibited when American chemists recently assembled at Kansas City, Mo., to compare their achievements, is the latest kind of rayon, or artificial silk. A garment made from it can be hidden in the palm of the hand. To produce it, laboratory workers have gone the silkworm one better—for it measures one third thinner than natural silk. Improvements in methods of purifying the wood pulp that serves as its raw material, and in the chemical solutions and machinery used in its manufacture, have combined to make its production possible.
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Common Chemicals that Misbehave

by KEN MURRAY

FOLLOWING textbook instructions in performing chemical experiments at home may be conducive to safety, but the real thrills of research come from those experiments which you work out for yourself.

Certain chemicals just do not get along well together, and can misbehave in a manner which may cause acute embarrassment—and pain. To avoid accidents, keep the following list of chemical tricksters in mind whenever you venture into free-lance experimenting. IODINE mixed with ammonia water forms a brown sludge at the bottom of a test tube. This is nitrogen iodide; when a piece the size of a pin head is dried on paper, it will explode with a very loud bang at the slightest jar. Larger quantities explode of their own weight before becoming powerful enough to do damage. Never add volatile oils to crystals of iodine—they will fulminate, and explode.
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UPDATE: As reader carmarks points out in the comments below, these experiments can be extremely dangerous and you should not actually try to perform any of them. Hydrofluoric Acid can kill you so, be warned.

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Thrilling Stunts with a Glass-Eating Chemical

Etching your laboratory glassware is only one of the many possibilities offered by compounds of the active element fluorine

By RAYMOND B. WAILES

NOT long ago, a noted chemist told of a solvent powerful enough to dissolve nearly every known material. If the water on the earth were replaced with a liquid called selenium oxychloride, he said, we should have to carry umbrellas made of glass, platinum, or tungsten whenever it rained, for those are about the only substances that the fluid does not attack. There is a more familiar chemical, however, so corrosive that it could even eat its way through a glass umbrella. Its name is hydrofluoric acid, and it is one of the interesting compounds of the highly active element fluorine with which you will enjoy experimenting in your home laboratory.
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FIFTY YEARS OF Aluminum

The Strange Story OF THE Magic Metal

By Edwin Teale

JUST half a century ago, the commonest metal in the earth’s crust was as scarce as silver. Prof. Frank F. Jewett, of Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, was pointing out this curious paradox to his chemistry class in the spring of 1883.

“If any of you can extract aluminum in commercial quantities,” he concluded with a smile, “you are sure of a fortune.” A slender student in one of the front rows nudged his neighbor. “I’m going after that metal!” he whispered.

That was the beginning of one of the most dramatic achievements in chemical research. The student was Charles Martin Hall. Hardly three years later, in a wood-shed workshop, using makeshift apparatus and homemade batteries, he achieved the goal which the greatest scientists in the world had failed to attain. On February 23, 1886, Hall rushed into Jewett’s laboratory with a few small buttons of silvery metal in his hand. Read the rest of this entry »

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Fun with Explosive Gases
Hydrocarbons Are a Subject for Many Spectacular Experiments in the Amateur’s Chemical Laboratory

By RAYMOND B. WAILES

WOULD you like to get gas from coal without heating the coal? To make an inflammable gas that will dissolve in certain liquids as easily as sugar does in coffee ? To produce a gas that burns with a flame you can hardly perceive? Or to create fiery bubbles of gas, jumping about like grasshoppers, from simple everyday chemicals? These are some of the curious and interesting experiments with hydrocarbon gases that any amateur chemist can easily perform.

Hydrocarbon gases are compounds of carbon and hydrogen. A large proportion of all natural gases, including methane, ethane, propane, and butane, belong to this group. Manufactured illuminating gas—both coal gas and water gas—contains hydrocarbon gases, together with non-hydrocarbons such as hydrogen, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen.
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Surprising Tests WITH Household AMMONIA

Simple Experiments and Home-made Apparatus Extend Your Knowledge and Speed the Work You Can Accomplish in Your Own Laboratory

by Raymond B. Wailes

IT IS surprising what the amateur chemist can do with a fifteen-cent bottle of ordinary household ammonia.

Being a mixture of ammonia dissolved in water, this pungent-smelling liquid offers an ever-ready supply of ammonia gas for the home laboratory. Even at room temperature, the gas is released from the liquid. By heating it, the experimenter can obtain the gas in larger quantities.

Strictly speaking, household ammonia is not ammonia at all, but ammonia water or ammonium hydroxide. Although ammonia can be liquefied, it is a colorless gas at normal temperatures. The fact that it dissolves readily in water makes the manufacture of ammonia water possible.
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Home Tests show Strange Nature of Chlorine

How to Make Metals Flame and Why Red Flowers Turn White is Explained Here
By RAYMOND B. WAILES

UNTIL you experiment with chlorine, you have missed some of the biggest thrills your home laboratory can give you. Among other things, you can make metals burst mysteriously into flame, remove the color from dyed cloth, and turn a red flower or a scrap of red paper white.

Chlorine, a heavy greenish-yellow gas, is exceedingly active. Few substances can remain uncombined in its presence. Even silver and gold yield to its action under certain conditions. With many elements, it combines with such suddenness and violence that intense heat and a brilliant flash of light accompany the reaction.
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