Kids had a huge LiPo battery from a broken power bank. They were shorting it out with a bit of wire and using it to burn stuff on the bus One kid burnt his tie off Lucky it didn't blow up! ...I'm weirdly kind of proud
Bill
Not your usual scrote then :-)
My sister used to teach in a private girls' school in London. A veritable "Malory Towers".
The story goes that there was some renovation being done to one of the classrooms and a small sealed-off room was found that no-one could remember. It had obviously been a store room for a lab and among the things found there was a kilogramme or so of a soft metallic substance not quite covered in oil. Fortunately someone there realised how dangerous the find was, and it was delt with accordingly.
Can you guess what it was yet?
Yes I'm surprised they did not set fire to the buss. I recall an incident many years back with a bag of shopping some wire wool and a lantern battery at a bus stop, It made the papers back in the 1960s, so that was just ordinary dry batteries causing things to catch fire. Brian
Sodium Wonderful stuff, nearly blew off a teachers eyebrows. Brian
Guessed either sodium or phosphorous but couldn't remember which.
Owain
As Brian Cox demonstrated on one of his programs.
A cousin used to let off all the fireworks using wire wool, long lead and a battery, while keeping a much safer distance from the blue touch-paper.
The prof at one of the London Teaching hospitals was always moaning that his dictaphone? was eating batteries, so the chief technician bought some Nicads and a charger.
One day, on his trip home on the Metropolitan line, a couple of these batteries, loose in his briefcase, shorted out and almost started a fire.
Must have been a private school my schools stock of sodium could be kept in a marmite jar and then locked in the safe.
1kg of soduim is about £300 worth in todays money, think it was more expensive in the past. But our school did have quite a bit of mercury two jam jars at least.Thought sodium was the most likely.
I'd be interested to see of Francium would react. But at $1 billion per gram I might have to wait a while
We did this at school in a much larger container and it just cruised around at first.
When the experiment was repeated with potassium it was much more exciting!
I remember our Irish chemistry master doing an experiment with phosphorous - may have been on the same day.
He got the stick out of the jar of oil, put his hand in his pocketr for his penknife and used it to cut a few bits off, folded the knife up and put it back in his pocket!
The phosphorous was then dissolved in a dish of carbon bisulphide (I think) which was then poured over a filter paper which was clipped onto a stand at the end of his desk and he carried on with the lesson ...
... until a sudden loud Whoonphf! attracted our attention!
In this modern day and age I don't think an Irish teaxher showing a class in a Catholic school how to make an elementary incendiary device would go down very well!
Our (non-religious) school taught us how to make tear gas, gunpowder and Nitrogen tri-Iodide (a very sensitive contact explosive).
Our teacher was newly qualified and had previously attended our school - where in sixth form he'd painted the NI3 along the tops of the radiators in the biology labs (the teacher shouting was enough to set it off); on the bottom of the (flexible) plastic seats used in classrooms; and on the cleaners' brushes ... he was a far better teacher than than the one he replaced for a year and our marks shot up!
SteveW
Or potassium.
I remember our chemistry teacher demonstrating sodium and potassium in a flask of water.
"Would you like to see sodium reacting with hydrochloric acid?" he asked.
"Oh yes", we all replied enthusiastically.
"Then you're all idiots!" was his response.
I remember a television program showing the various reactions of alkali metals in water. A small lump of caesium, I think, caused a reaction so violent it blew the flask apart.
Now the idiots can get out their phones and watch youtube
I was a little disappointed it didn't finish off with a pop, this is more like it ...
I think it was Blue Peter years ago showed how to put metal milk bottle tops, remember those?,into a mixture of soda washing crystals and hot water. The bubbles on the surface could be set off with a satisfactory pop. Hydrogen ?
Caustic soda works a lot better. ;-)
Tim
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