Question: When dealing with the chemicals in your lab, have you had an experiment that went terribly wrong? Which chemicals were involved and what happened?
hmmmm, thats an interesting question @reggie13. Sounds like you’re interviewing me for a newspaper 😉
Well. I’ll tell you if you promise not to tell anyone else, or try it yourself.
I was doing a chemical reaction to turn one chemical into something similar (in chemistry language I was changing a nitrile into an amine). To do this I needed to use alcohol (not the type people drink) and a special metal called palladium. Theres a special rule when using these together that says you have to add the alcohol to the palladium and not the opposite way. If you do then you can start a fire. Soooooo… I was rushing around one day and I accidentally added them in the wrong order and ooops a big fire started in my work space which needed the fire extinguisher. Luckily we didn’t need the fire brigade. But I did ruin some of my other chemicals which took me a long time to make again.
Another, time was a little different. It was an experiment that went wrong, but it didn’t have the terrible result, in fact it was the opposite. I had a bottle of toxic waste that I was cleaning with electricity. Normally the electricity would flow in one direction and the bad chemicals break down into not so bad ones. This time I accidentally made the electricity flow in the other direction and instead of breaking everything down, it started building! I ended up making a new explosive chemical that no one had seen before.
reggie13
hmmmm, thats an interesting question @reggie13. Sounds like you’re interviewing me for a newspaper 😉
Well. I’ll tell you if you promise not to tell anyone else, or try it yourself.
I was doing a chemical reaction to turn one chemical into something similar (in chemistry language I was changing a nitrile into an amine). To do this I needed to use alcohol (not the type people drink) and a special metal called palladium. Theres a special rule when using these together that says you have to add the alcohol to the palladium and not the opposite way. If you do then you can start a fire. Soooooo… I was rushing around one day and I accidentally added them in the wrong order and ooops a big fire started in my work space which needed the fire extinguisher. Luckily we didn’t need the fire brigade. But I did ruin some of my other chemicals which took me a long time to make again.
Another, time was a little different. It was an experiment that went wrong, but it didn’t have the terrible result, in fact it was the opposite. I had a bottle of toxic waste that I was cleaning with electricity. Normally the electricity would flow in one direction and the bad chemicals break down into not so bad ones. This time I accidentally made the electricity flow in the other direction and instead of breaking everything down, it started building! I ended up making a new explosive chemical that no one had seen before.
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