Sciencemadness Discussion Board - What is the most ignorant thing you have ever done while conducting an experiment?

What is the most ignorant thing you have ever done while conducting an experiment?

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DrP - 14-6-2007 at 07:48

Quote:

Originally posted by Phosphor-ing
You very nearly got The Darwin Award!

My thoughts entirely!!!

Protactinium - 22-7-2007 at 04:24

Once (actually twice) I made diethyl ether from mixing ethanol and conc H2SO4 with only this information on how it's prepared, I used erlenmyer flasks, one for the mixture and the other (smaller) to catch the ether connected to each other via glass tubing. The first time was inside, at my neighbor's house who said I can do knowing what I was doing (mainly to piss his roommate off), anyways the reaction wasn't starting "to my satisfaction" so I begin to warm it up on the stove somewhere around medium and it took it off, the temperature shot from 60 C to 130 C before I knew it stopper popped off of the flask and the entire house filled with ether vapor. The roommate left and got help while I stood there until the reaction at least subseded (it wasn't all that bad) but the house had to be evacuated for a good 2 hours with the aid of exhaust fans from the fire department close by. Surprisingly the stove never corroded from what was noticed anyways. The second time was the same setup but outside using the same glassware which was not damaged before, the same setup was used but with a hotplate but this time when the stopper flew off there was flame with it and nothing was reusable. Luckily bith times I never got anything on me just breathed in alot of ether. That was sometime in the 11th grade.
Have any of you compared with your chemistry teacher the tastes of the different acids? Or their incresed bite with higher concentration? In my senior year I was in control of handling chemicals for different shows we did for schools, well once I was working with a solution of white phosphorus in Carbon Disulfide, I made the solution just before use in the CS2 bottle and shook it up to dissolve the phosphorus and some of the liquid had dripped down the side of the bottle. Of course I had to tell the teacher of the mishap, and the only he could think of was "did you taste it?", I of course happily replied with my observation because he always wanted to know. Whenever we "tasted" something it was a drop or two or to make sure you rinsed all of the acid off when you know you got some on you.

Zinc - 23-7-2007 at 03:37

A few days ago me and my friend were trying to cast a small bronze cannon. For the core we wanted to use a test tube filled with plaster. When the palster solidified we hated te test tube with a popane/butane torch to dry the plaster inside. A few seconds after we started heating it I thought: "Can the water escape?" and then the test tube exploded and we were hit by flying glas. We didn't wear goggles but fortunatley we still have our eyes. I could fell as the glass pieces hit me but they were so small that they didnt' penetrate the skin. After I found only one small piece of the test tube. Al the other parts were too small to find. Sometimes I am very stupid. Always think before doing something.

[Edited on 23-7-2007 by Zinc]

Furch - 2-10-2007 at 13:26

The most ignorant thing I've done? Oh... I remember this one time I got a yield less than 95%. Worst experience of my life. Never happened again after that!

Nah, I'm lying...

I guess that has to be when I was very young and wanted to evaporate acetone over an open flame. Also melting acetone peroxide in a metal spoon, over an open flame... Painful for the ears, let me tell you.

Other than that: drying HMTA-dinitrate at high temp in a distillation setup, a wide variety of suck backs when using the water aspirator... That sort of thing.

Antwain - 2-10-2007 at 16:14

When I was in high school I tried to make an incidery bomb by adding powdered sparklers and stuff into a container. Then I added some glycerine to get red of the air and make it gel. Then I decided that I should add some oxidising agent to make sure that the glycerine burned too, so I added some permanganate.......

Fortunately I felt the thing start to become hot in my hand, and realised that something wasn't right.

Unfortunately, this was done in my bedroom.

Suffice it to say that it cought fire and burned every bit as well as I hoped it would. It was only ~5cc but it glowed bright orange and turned into a rock which burned its way 1cm into my desk and churned out poisonous fumes.

Actually there was one more depressing twist to this where I told a 'friend' I never should have about it, and he thought he would try it out...... in a near new BMW (I wasn't there I or would have physically stopped this kind of dumbness, there are limits). He didn't to my knoweledge ever get caught, but did destroy a very nice car

[Edited on 3-10-2007 by Antwain]

Amy Winehouse - 11-12-2011 at 14:19

I was trying to dry some EtBr I had just made with CaCl2, and I used way too much, but poured all the dregs down the drain. I also poured the K2SO4 and the rest of the H2SO4(500ml or so) down the drain, and it got a clog from hell.

Then I learned that Rooto 100% lye does "get the clog out!". It also, upon making contact with tons of conenctrated H2SO4, launches a giant volcano up to my ceiling and all over me and everything.

Lambda-Eyde - 12-12-2011 at 03:13

I have a few ones...

Back in my pyro days, me and a friend experimented with KNO3/sugar smoke mixtures. I must have been about 13 at that time. We had prepared a 100 g smoke "bomb" from a cardboard tube and sealed it up pretty well with duct tape, but we forgot to insert a fuse. So we (I can't remember whether it was his or my idea) heated a tweezer with an alcohol burner and used it to pierce a hole for the fuse in the cardboard tube. Somehow we reasoned that the mix wouldn't ignite unless a flame was present. Oh, and did I mention we were doing this inside his living room? And both his parents were present?

Of course it ignited in our hands, fortunately the reaction is slow in the beginning so we could put it in a beaker filled with water. We ended up filling the living room with smoke and covering our workbench with the remains.

For some reason his parents didn't forbid him playing with chemistry/pyrotechnics even after that. That happened when we filled a coffee pot with half a kilo of the mixture and firing it up in their driveway. The resulting 3-4 meter jet flame and impressive display of smoke..... The look on his mother's face, just casually enjoying a cigarette on the porch and watching her kid and a friend exploring science... PRICELESS. Of course, we deemed the experiment to be an unprecedented success.

That was those days... A little over a year ago, I was making ~25 mL bromine at school. I decided to make two ampoules containing 2-3 mL of the element; one for my element collection, and another for a friend. After sealing up one of the ampoules, I wanted to check if the seal was good enough (I believe those were the first ampoules I made), so I tilted the newly sealed tube to see if the bromine would pour out or not. Luckily it wasn't sealed so the bromine, vigourosly boiling from the contact with the still-hot glass could shoot out of the ampoule and into the fume hood. I ended up getting a sizeable amount of liquid bromine on my finger, fortunately a jam jar of sodium thiosulfate wasn't far away and my hand could fit nicely into it. Although it didn't hurt at all, my finger was yellowish and crispy for a while after that. Not to mention the smell...

When I made benzoic acid from sodium benzoate, I made three retarded mistakes. Not bad for one synthesis, and a simple one at that.

After filtering off the precipitate (which was quite voluminous), I put it on the hot plate to dry it off while I took a shower (this was right before school). I figured that neither benzoic acid nor sodium chloride would evaporate, so I cranked it up so it would be fairly dry before I had to leave for school. In fact, I don't think I even considered the possibility of the acid evaporating. You know, white crystals dont evaporate, right? Turns out they do. When I got out of the shower and went down to check on it, I was met by a haze of benzoic acid in the lab. My eyes and lungs hurt. So I ran in, turned the fan on and the hotplate off. Damning myself, I left it like that and barely caught the school bus. When I came home, I was about to survey the damage when I noticed the fan wasn't on. Just before I went up to shout at my mom for turning off the fan (I told her not to turn it off), I noticed a humming sound and saw that the fan switch was indeed on. The benzoic acid had crystallized in the fan and jammed it, the motor was hot enough to boil water and smelled really bad. That could have been a nasty fire...

This is what the fan blade looked like.

After that I proceeded to add acetone (any sensible person would have used water). I popped in my largest stirbar and put it on the magnetic stirrer. I put a large crystallizing dish (I used a smaller one for the acid) on top of it to keep the acetone from evaporating and left it overnight. Next morning the solution had splashed all over the place and damaged my magnetic stirrer, of course made from all ABS. Luckily the damage was purely cosmetic.

After filtering off the salt, I had to remove the acetone from the solution. A rotary evaporator would have made this a lot easier. Using water would have eliminated the problem altogether. I set up a distillation rig with a 500 mL round bottom flask. I, like many others, have a habit of forgetting to add boiling stones. After heating a bit and watching grass grow, I remembered the boiling stone. So I popped in a small stir bar through the thermometer port. WHOOOSH! The acetone promptly boiled and deposited benzoic acid everywhere.
No wonder my yield was so pathetic from that simple reaction...

[Edited on 12-12-2011 by Lambda-Eyde]

[Edited on 12-12-2011 by Lambda-Eyde]

Adas - 12-12-2011 at 07:37

Then I was younger, I was often playing with candles and wax. So stupid. I was doing all the smoky and smelly experiments in my room. Once I put aluminium foil ball into molten wax and lighted it up on a stick. however, the hell-hot ball have fallen off the stick on my fit-ball and made some damage on it, but luckily, it didn't melt through lol. I had lots of those small accidents, but my biggest mistake was doing it all in my room.

And few months ago, I was going to show burning TATP to my parents for the first time, but it was not completely dry = there were some "balls" of TATP, which confined it. When I lit it up on my hand, it exploded! It was nicely open, so I didn't feel anything on my hand, but my ears were ringing as hell. Since then, I always cover my ears.

While performing this kind of experiments, you must be especially careful. You never know - innocent experiment can turn out to be a disaster, lol.

Arthur Dent - 12-12-2011 at 10:09

Here's an ignorant thing I did a few years ago.

I was attempting to keep some expensive camera equipment away from moisture, so I had bought some transparent plastic cases to store them, and I didn't have any little silica gel packs handy, so i decided to make a dessicant bag. My error was the chemical I used.

I saw at the dollar store these inexpensive moisture traps filled with anhydrous Calcium Chloride, so I figured these should do the trick. I filled a ziploc bag with the prills and poked a few holes with a needle, and dropped the bag in the camera box. Done!

I started using these little traps in my basement and after a few weeks, noticed that the bottom of the plastic containers were filled with water...

It clicked in my mind and I went ... "Oh Shit!"

What I did not anticipate initially is that Calcium Chloride is quite hygroscopic and dissolves in thee water it pulls out of the atmosphere (didn't now it then) and as I ran upstairs to get my plastic case with my Nikon camera and my telephoto lenses, I saw that 1 cm of liquid had accumulated in the bottom of the camera case!!!

AAAARGH! Camera and telephoto lens were ruined since the liquid was a supersaturated solution of Calcium Chloride that crystallized partially and corroded everything in contact with it.

Dum dum dum...

Robert

MrTechGuy1995 - 12-12-2011 at 10:52

Where do I even start?

Wizzard - 12-12-2011 at 12:06

I can't even count the number of times I've burned off my arm hair / eyebrows playing with Butane as a child

But no serious harm, aside from spilling bleach on the rug... Putting a carpet over it just doesn't work.

zoombafu - 12-12-2011 at 12:27

Once I was heating up a flask making some nutrient agar for some petri dishes. I didn't have a glass rod to prevent bumping, so suddenly the entire mixture boiled over. It got on the hot plate and started burning, and then the flask cracked spilling even more liquid everywhere. The nutrient agar that I was making had malt extract as a nutrient, and it smelled horrible from the burning. for days in that room.

Panache - 6-1-2012 at 04:38

After buying some very expensive anarobic adhesive, $40.00 for five ml, that was to be refrigerated, i thought i could do better than that and as well as refrigerating it i'll blanket the headspace in the bottle with argon.

Pulverulescent - 6-1-2012 at 04:54

Switching on an NST to see the arc heat the ends of the electrodes into melting, glowing globules of metal, blowing on them to cool them down and then forgetting to switch the damn thing off before putting my little pinkie on one to see if it had cooled to near RT!
Such fun?

Bot0nist - 6-1-2012 at 05:52

Used to dip the back of matches into MEKP and touch fire to them while holding them. They would pop like crazy and me and my brother got a kick out of it. One day we decided to dip four matches in and hold them in a bunch and try it. Something very different happened when the flame was applied that resulted in ringing ears, bad hand bruises, and the lose of my desire ever make MEKP again.

Sedit - 6-1-2012 at 06:37

Not taking a leak before a complicated and needed to be watched reaction involving Lithium.... This story does not end well....

Perhaps its a story for the worst lab accidents thread

[Edited on 6-1-2012 by Sedit]

Lambda-Eyde - 6-1-2012 at 06:54

Sedit: That's what you have those 1000 mL graduated cylinders for...!

Sedit - 6-1-2012 at 07:47

LOL, I was to worried about the Lithium coated in Ether catching aflame so I was trying to get it setup as quickly and completely as possible so that it could run on its own. I had an NH3 generator picking up steam and lithium coated in Ether being cut up on a tray... walking away from it was not exactly on the menu but once your body tells you there's no fucking way your going to hold it any longer you gotta just run and handle your business.

Learn from others mistakes, Priorities now when setting up are safety, making sure all materials are there and accounted for and last but definitely not least .... go take a piss.... Only after all of this shall the alchemy proceed.

Hexavalent - 7-1-2012 at 14:09

I once had a massive hot water bath for distilling trichloromethane break and leak water all over my new hotplate . . . the bucket I used was made of metal but I soon noticed a hissing noise and a rather large amount of water flowing over the controls!

neptunium - 7-1-2012 at 14:43

i remember putting some mercury in my mouth just to see what it would taste like....
or lighting up a fire cracker inside liquid chlorine..

sometimes i have to admit that we are all very lucky and should all be thanksfull we are still here to talk about the dumb sh@# we did

Hexavalent - 7-1-2012 at 14:51

What does mercury taste like?

Hexavalent - 7-1-2012 at 14:54

Excuse my childishness, but everytime I have my hotplate going I *have* to squirt the occasional drop or two of water on it to 'observe the leidenfrost effect' from my wash bottle . . .I learnt my lesson though when I nearly cracked my new 2-liter 3-neck 24/40 flask!!

neptunium - 8-1-2012 at 00:40

nothing! it just rolls on your tongur without any taste at all disapointing i know!

Pulverulescent - 8-1-2012 at 02:15

Quote: Originally posted by Hexavalent

What does mercury taste like?

What? You've never bitten a themometer bulb?

P

Hexavalent - 8-1-2012 at 08:41

No, but I wonder what would happen if you let a load of alcoholics loose in a dyed-alcohol thermometer factory . . .

Pulverulescent - 8-1-2012 at 08:53

Or a mercury thermometer breaking while being used as a 'stirrer' during an ethanol nitration???
And someone was on about preparing ethyl nitrate recently . . .

P

Sedit - 10-1-2012 at 21:41

Weeee.....

I just had a fun one, I was heating a test tube of EtOH and HNO3 with an open flame and when it took off during the oxidation it ignited and turned into a flame thrower. That was fucking awesome!!!!

Pulverulescent - 11-1-2012 at 02:49

Many moons ago, I had a runaway distilling methyl nitrate from 70% HNO3 ─ 2litre RBF ~half full . . .
The NO2 was like some crazy, fucking live thing, writhing, and uncoiling itself out the flask!
I mean, this stuff looked like it was solid!!!

P

White Yeti - 26-1-2012 at 11:04

Perhaps the most ignorant thing I have done was when I made rust (for thermite) using iron nails, saltwater, and outlet power. I combined 3 things that should never be combined and I didn't wear any protective gloves or goggles. Somehow (and thank God) nothing went wrong.

It all ended when I left unregulated, unrectified 120V AC power flowing through a pair of iron nails suspended over a small jam jar filled with salt water and left the set up unattended. I came back half an hour later to find that half the water (500mL!) was boiled away due to ohmic heating.

I never actually had the guts to try explosives. I found thermite much more interesting because thermite can be used to create rather than destroy.

The only time I tried making explosives was when I learned about unconfined vapour cloud explosions. I never actually got them to work; I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Adas - 26-1-2012 at 11:41

Quote: Originally posted by White Yeti

I combined 3 things that should never be combined

Why shouldn't those 3 things be combined?

White Yeti - 26-1-2012 at 11:51

Quote: Originally posted by Adas

Why shouldn't those 3 things be combined?

Exposed metal terminals (the iron nails) and unrectified outlet power combined with a jar of saltwater is quite dangerous for obvious reasons, I thought it was self evident.

GreenD - 26-1-2012 at 13:22

Pouring things through a opened stop cock is my worst.

I've done some stupid things with extractions, I mean - real stupid. I remember hanging my head in shame after doing them. For the life of me I can't remember the details. I'm not very good at them for some reason, or perhaps the reactions I've used are very difficult. I always end up with a brown sludge in the middle, no matter how many extractions or washes I do!

Come to think of it can anyone help me with that? I would often dissolve some type of terephthalate in ethyl acetate or benzene, wash with water and brine, etc. but I would ALWAYS end up with a nasty sludge. Semi-solid brown layer in the middle. It would form these small vesicles too that would stick to the sides of the sep. funnel.

No matter how many brine washes, DI water washes, or filters I would do - I would always end up with more. Perhaps it was just decomposing in h2o?

I've done quite a few benzene / toluene refluxes in a closed room

perhaps this explains the prior occurences

AirCowPeaCock - 26-1-2012 at 16:32

Not closing my stopcock before pouring in the liquid...fail

and apparently I'm not alone!

[Edited on 1-27-2012 by AirCowPeaCock]

entropy51 - 26-1-2012 at 18:29

Quote: Originally posted by AirCowPeaCock

Not closing my stopcock before pouring in the liquid...fail

and apparently I'm not alone!

[Edited on 1-27-2012 by AirCowPeaCock]

No you aren't. There has never been a shortage of turkeys in the lab. Most of them worked for me. Briefly.

AirCowPeaCock - 26-1-2012 at 18:34

Quote: Originally posted by entropy51

Quote: Originally posted by AirCowPeaCock

Not closing my stopcock before pouring in the liquid...fail

and apparently I'm not alone!

[Edited on 1-27-2012 by AirCowPeaCock]

No you aren't. There has never been a shortage of turkeys in the lab. Most of them worked for me. Briefly.

Haha, I have to admit I liked that

UnintentionalChaos - 26-1-2012 at 19:34

Oh geez. I left a stopcock open recently while running my grignard. Fortunately everything went better than expected and it didn't cause any problems. Had the addition been immediately and intensely exothermic (or on a much larger scale), it could have been very bad.

GreenD - 27-1-2012 at 07:35

I remember - I once ran an NMR sample with DMSO (undeuterated).

It took me about 2 days to prepare the sample and I used I believe, all the sample left in that analysis.

Took me a minute to figure it out. I was pissed.

I've left rotovaps running over an entire weekend.

[Edited on 27-1-2012 by GreenD]

Panache - 28-1-2012 at 17:05

Quote: Originally posted by GreenD

I've left rotovaps running over an entire weekend.

[Edited on 27-1-2012 by GreenD]

Ha! At least you were sure that all solvent was removed.

White Yeti - 29-1-2012 at 09:02

I don't do much organic chem, but would it be a good idea to put a big neon sticker on stopcocks with the word "CLOSE!" so that these mistakes don't happen again?

Mirage - 5-2-2012 at 00:26

Well today, I did some stupid stuff. I wasn't thinking, don't know why. Just got some ground glass, and I had made some conc nitric the night before, and I was planning on making some AgNO3. So in my stupidity I thought it would be fun to use my new 100ml rbf instead of just a plain old beaker. So I added the silver, and began by heating just a little bit until it began to fume. I knew as soon as it began to fume, I would need to take it outside, so the door was unlocked and ready to go. I had put the rbf into what I thought was a locked 3 finger clamp. It wasn't. As I picked up my small ring stand, and got up to go to the door next to me, the rbf slipped of the stand, broke on the floor with hot conc hno3 going everywhere, and NOx everywhere. I didn't move my feet at all untill I made sure I wasn't going to step on any glass. Thank god for my shoes and eye glasses!

On a slightly duller note, my brand new vacuum inlet adapter broke on the same day my rbf broke. Exactly 1 day old...

Chemically yours
Mirage

garage chemist - 5-2-2012 at 07:02

A few weeks ago, I left a distillation setup assembled overnight after the distillation was finished. I switched off the cooling water pump but didn't empty the water jacket of the liebig condenser.
In the unheated lab, it froze overnight and I came back the next morning to see that the liebig condenser had turned into a pile of glass shards because of the expanding ice. This was a complete NS 29/32 one-piece distillation setup with claisen and vacuum adapter, one of my best pieces of glassware, and will cost over EUR 80 to replace.

497 - 5-2-2012 at 09:56

GC I did that exact thing a while ago... I even had glycol in the coolant, but failed to remember that I had diluted it with a bunch of ice earlier, so it froze anyway. I hadn't been that angry in a long time!

I'll try to remember some other stuff I've screwed up. Of course I've left the stopcock open a few times. Broke my best sep funnel by failing to remember how much faster teflon expands as it warms up.

[Edited on 5-2-2012 by 497]

GreenD - 6-2-2012 at 07:25

I ordered an illegal chemical from sigma aldrich yesterday

Pulverulescent - 6-2-2012 at 07:32

There are several degrees of separation between ordering and getting! (

)
What was it, BTW?

P

GreenD - 6-2-2012 at 07:51

Quote: Originally posted by Pulverulescent

There are several degrees of separation between ordering and getting! (

)
What was it, BTW?

P

and that is what I have learned. They slapped me on the wrist and I have gone on my way. I had to do it - I feared it so much, so I just tried it. I doubt anything bad will become of it.

I won't tell you what it was, hehe.

Pulverulescent - 6-2-2012 at 07:58

Ac2O is too obvious, I guess . . . (

)

P

GreenD - 6-2-2012 at 08:28

Quote: Originally posted by Pulverulescent

Ac2O is too obvious, I guess . . . (

)

P

I don't know what AcO2 is used for (really)! I've only seen it in one work up, and I asked on here why they had used it. I received equal confusion. Apparently they used it for drying, but I don't know why they didn't use a conventional one.

Why is AcO2 watched?

OH. Heroin.

[Edited on 6-2-2012 by GreenD]

smaerd - 12-2-2012 at 10:00

Congratulations you are now on a list somewhere. There are other places that will sell this in small quantities to a hobbyist, if you would have taken the time to look. How could you not know what acetic anhydride is for, but yet you tried to order it from a chemical supply house that is KNOWN not to ship to amateurs? Better yet why order something you know nothing about, or the safety involved? That is a few levels of ignorance, by definition.

Anyway to contribute to the thread. I once ran concentrated H2SO4(drain-cleaner) through plain-jane filter paper. That was pretty dang ignorant, at least the second the paper got eaten up I knew why.

reckless explosive - 13-2-2012 at 06:54

i think my most ignorant mistake ever was lighting a stoppered 250 ml flask with hydrogen in it from making zinc chloride when i was a foot away from it...glass and zinc chloride all down the front of me and i cant hear very good out of my right ear now.

GreenD - 14-2-2012 at 07:32

Smaerd-
The chemical came in the mail. I won't explain the process, but yes - it came in the mail.

And I never said I ordered acetic anhydride.

[Edited on 14-2-2012 by GreenD]

AirCowPeaCock - 14-2-2012 at 07:55

I don't think I want to know what you bought, GreenD

Quote: Originally posted by reckless explosive

i think my most ignorant mistake ever was lighting a stoppered 250 ml flask with hydrogen in it from making zinc chloride when i was a foot away from it...glass and zinc chloride all down the front of me and i cant hear very good out of my right ear now.

your name suits you.

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