School Story:
I cannot help but telling a bit of my chemistry stories. I took the summer school biology class after my freshman year. This was at Rosati Kain High School and was an extra credit course. I wasn't all that into biology, but the fallout was a great interest in chemistry. During the second half of the summer, I read every chemistry book that the local library had. When the fall semester started, I spoke with Bro Yasho letting him know I was very interested in chemistry. He gave me the standardized test that students normally take after the chemistry course in their junior year. I scored well enough that he thought I could study on my own. He gave me a key to the chemistry lab on the third floor to work unsupervised. Big mistake!
Story 1: Randy Reitz and I were (and still are) great friends. He was big time into electronics. I learned a lot of electronics from him and vice versa with chemistry. One day we decided to make gun powder. We made 100 grams and took about five grams of white phosphorus. White phosphorus burns spontaneously in air and must be kept under water. So we took our gunpowder and phosphorus on the city bus and went to Randy's home. We packed the gun powder into a tobacco tin and dropped the white phosphorus into it. Nothing happened immediately, but after a minute or so flames about 10 feet tall shot out of the can. No explosion, but great fireworks. Fortunately it was on a concrete form with no damage.
Story 2: The chemistry labs featured so-called "microchemistry" with tiny little test tubes that only allowed miniature reactions. I wanted to do something more. I looked up acids in the yellow pages and found a shop midtown St. Louis. They sold me full quarts of fully concentrated sulfuric, nitric and hydrochloric acids which I took home in a brown paper bag on the city bus. The standard way of making hydrogen gas was to put hydrochloric acid on a piece of metal like zinc, which would release hydrogen gas and zinc chloride. We decided to try an alternate method which was sodium hydroxide on aluminum, which results in sodium aluminate and hydrogen gas. Everything work well, almost. Not having a drying tube, the hydrogen was mixed with water vapor. When we lit the hydrogen, the whole assembly blew up shattering all the glassware. This was in the basement of my home. My mother asked what that bang was. "Oh nothing."
Story 3: One November evening, Randy and I decided to experiment with some of the fancy glassware in the chem lab. We wondered if we could get swirling flames to come out of the condensing tubes. We hooked them up to the gas jets, lit the gas coming out. Pretty spectacular! We turned out the lights to see the flames a little better. Unbeknownst to us, the C-team football team being coached by Bro. Yasho was practicing in the park next to McBride, and they noticed flames in the darkened chem lab. Soon the entire football team followed by Bro. Yasho came clambering up the steps in their cleats to put out the fire. That was not the last straw.
Story 4: I had read about nitroglycerin, but could never find a formula for making it. A closely related substance is nitrobenzine. I decided one morning before classes that I would try to make some nitrobenzine. The general formula was benzine, sulfuric acid, and nitric acid, but I didn't know the proportions. So I mixed these things together in a test tube. But nothing seemed to be happening. So I decided to add a little heat from a bunson burner. The benzine almost instantly boiled over spilling the acids and burning benzine on my hand and the countertop. Bro Yasho was not happy with me and that was the last straw. I guess McBride was lucky to have survived me.
