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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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CHEMISTRY: An Exciting and Profitable Hobby

How to Set Up Your Laboratory

By RAYMOND B. WAILES

WITH simple equipment requiring surprisingly little financial outlay, you can build in your home a small chemical laboratory that will provide a fascinating hobby. Here you may amaze your friends with seemingly magical chemical tricks, as by the manufacture of paint that shines in the dark or of writing inks that disappear unless the secret of bringing them back is known. You can manufacture useful things for the home, as soap or liquid court plaster. You can test gold rings and ivory piano keys to see whether they are genuine. If you wish, you can investigate the chemical processes used in industry, with the ever-present possibility of an important discovery. To the real dyed-in-the-wool experimenter, chemicals in themselves are intriguing, and a beautifully colored precipitate or a startling formation of crystals is its own reward for the trouble of preparation.
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Giant Explosions REPRODUCED IN MINIATURE by Home Chemists

How Blasts of Grain Dust or of Gasoline Vapor Are Caused in Your Laboratory—Tests With Which to Prove a Burning Candle Is a Gas Plant

By RAYMOND B. WAILES

HARMLESS, miniature explosions make experimenting with combustibles a thrilling, yet safe, amusement for the amateur chemist. With inexpensive homemade apparatus, he can duplicate the explosions in a gasoline motor and amuse his friends by burning air. When we say a substance burns, we imply that it combines with oxygen to produce heat and sometimes light. Hydrogen and carbon, as well as many other substances containing these two elements, display this property. A candle, for instance, is made of paraffin, a combination of carbon and hydrogen. When the wick is lighted, the paraffin melts and produces hydro-carbon gases, which decompose to form other inflammable gases and carbon.
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Experiments, Instruction Manuals, Chemical Magic, Bryan Chemical Illustrators, Glass Blowing, Chemcraft Chemistry Charts, “The Story of Chemistry” booklet and other popular, exclusive features are included in the larger Chemcraft outfits as usual. No other chemistry outfits give you such a broad assortment of high-grade chemicals, in such large quantities. Ask for it by name.

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Magnesium the BANTAMWEIGHT METAL

How Chemists Have Put It to Work as a Jack-of-All-Trades.

By KENNETH M. SWEZEY

DURING the war magnesium was extensively used as a lightweight structural metal for aircraft parts and as pyrotechnic material for star shells, signal flares, tracer bullets, and flash and incendiary bombs. Strong, silvery white, and only two thirds as heavy as aluminum, it is the lightest of all construction metals. In the form of powder, thin sheets, or wire, it burns with a dazzling flame that water or even carbon dioxide will not put out. Never found alone in nature, magnesium is made on a tremendous scale by the electrolysis of its compounds. These compounds are among the most plentiful substances in the crust of the earth. Whole mountain ranges consist of dolomite, a double carbonate of magnesium and calcium. Asbestos, talc, and meerschaum are magnesium silicates. Epsom salts, named after the springs at Epsom, England, where they were first isolated in 1695, are magnesium sulphate. In the form of its chloride, there are nearly 6,000,000 tons of magnesium in every cubic mile of-the sea, a vast storehouse of supply.
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