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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More about the Bevatron.
Can Huge New Atom Guns Shoot Out Biggest Secrets?
Gigantic ring-shaped machines, with 10-billion-electron-volt wallop, may transform energy into matter.
By Alden P. Armagnac
Drawings by Ray Pioch
SUPPOSE that a bullet could be fired 150,-000 miles, six times the distance around the world. Suppose that it could be given a shove to speed it up every 150 yards. Suppose, too, that it could be so aimed and guided throughout this long, fast flight that it would hit a target no bigger than a mans hat. Now suppose, furthermore, that this bullet were something that no one had ever seen or ever could see.
The experimental physicists have quit supposing such things can be done. They know they can perform the very feat that you have just been asked to imagine. They are as sure of it as you are that two and two make four. They have the blueprints for guns that will impart such tremendous energy to such particles—and they expect to have at least one of the mammoth machines operating in about three years.
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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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A quirky article that tries to explain gravity and relativity.
Do you Weigh More in Denver or New York?
by JAY EARLE MILLER
Maybe you think you weigh the same in Denver as you do in New York, but that’s because you don’t know your Einstein or your relativity. You really weigh more in New York, Why? Read this article and find out—we defy you to begin Mr. Miller’s story and lay it down without finishing it.
A FEW weeks ago a British Air Force cup racing plane, piloted by Lieut. G. H. Stainforth, took off from the waters of the Solent, that protected arm of the sea lying inside the Isle of Wight, and flashed eastward over a measured course at more than 415 miles an hour—just under 7 miles a minute.
The trim little racer weighed something more than two tons just before the start. Roaring down the eastward course all out, she weighed something less than that. Coming back, westbound, she weighed a bit more than before she took off.
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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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Wanted: Science Talent
Scholarships await promising students who hurdle series of brain-busting tests.
By David O. Woodbury
MARINA PRAJMOVSKY came to this country from Finland when she was four. Her father was a Russian-born machinist, her mother a seamstress. While in high school at Farmingdale, N. Y., in 1942 she entered the first Science Talent Search, a competition held by the Science Clubs of America. Out of some 15,000 entrants Marina tied for first place.
The Search’s $2,400 scholarship got her started at Radcliffe. She graduated as the only sum ma cum laude in biology in the history of the college. In four years more she had a medical doctorate from Yale and now at 27 is doing research on eye diseases at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. Along the way she did highly secret work for the Navy and carried out outstanding research on DDT.
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THE FLIGHT OF ATOMS PHOTOGRAPHED
By W. D. HARKINS
Professor of Physical Chemistry, University of Chicago
An atom is 2,000 times too small to be seen through a microscope and it is apt to stagger the imagination of most people to hear about photographing atoms in flight. Not so long ago an atom was spoken of as the smallest particle of matter, but now it is believed to represent a grouping of electrons around a nucleus, much in the manner that the planets arranged around the sun constitute the solar system.
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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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How does one rob a radio wave of it’s “vital properties”?
Scientist Finds Stratosphere Hot
A STRATOSPHERE of 1,000 degrees Centigrade 150 miles from the earth is reported by Prof. E. V. Appleton, British radio authority, who bases his theory on the reactions of radio waves sent 150 miles straight up. The waves were undoubtedly affected by an intense heat which robbed them of their vital properties, he reported.
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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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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