Science for Boys

It was, first and foremost a test.

If you, as the proud recipient of a childrens' chemistry set, survived the experience of playing with it relatively unscathed then there was really nothing left in the world to cause you trouble for the rest of your growing years.

The reason for parents to put their offspring in harms way and at risk of injury to life and limb in such a way was perhaps to arouse an interest in science and that this may perhaps lead to a career path and livelihood.

Science in the 1970's when I was young was a new frontier. The Moon landings spawned many technologies which gradually filtered down as commercial products into everyday life. A computer in the home was still some way off unless you could spare a large room for the hardware suitably insulated against the heat generated by its operation and the noise from the cumbersome spinning drives and mechanical connections. The breakneck speed of computer development would soon mean that the best equipment in their day would soon be superceded by something as small and portable as a mobile phone.

A boxed chemistry set was a good introduction to all things scientific.

I got one for Christmas when I was about 10 years old. It came in a very large, rectangular but shallow box, wrapped in cellophane and with images of goggle-clad youngsters marvelling at the contents of a test tube.

The opening of the box lid revealed a wondrous sight. In vacuum formed polystyrene lay phials of crystals and powders. These were coarse granular or very fine in size and of a range of colours from the distinctive blue of copper sulphate to reddish manganese and back to bright white alum and chlorides.

In other smaller containers were pieces of magnesium ribbon, petrified wood and charcoal. Amongst the regular shapes was the contrasting bulbous glass burner with a rope wick projecting through the top. When filled with meths or white spirit (not included) and ignited it would spew forth a noxious black smoke and apparently with no actual production of meaningful heat.

A few tools were included consisting of spatulas, scoops, measuring spoons and wooden tapers. A plastic rack could be extracted from the packaging and be loaded up with sparkling test tubes. It was very tempting just to open up all the chemicals and expose them to a flame or other forms of stress and pressure but a condition of receiving the chemistry set was to sit patiently and read through, thoroughly and fully understand and appreciate the safety manual and instruction booklet. It was not fair. If I had been given a bike as a present instead I could have been riding about on it immediately, but no. The contents of the box demanded respect and caution. After all, some of the substances were poisonous or at best highly combustible.

After a few hours of tedious attention to guidelines and practice notes the only initiation into the wonderful world of chemistry now possible with my bedtime imminent was dipping a strip of litmus paper into my mug of drinking chocolate to see what PH level it recorded. The box was firmly closed by my parents and could not be opened until the next day.

That night I dreamed of explosions, toxic gas clouds and mayhem, all created by my sharp scientific mind and the cocktail of substances now at my disposal. In reality the range of experiments possible was quite tame.

Holding a strip of magnesium in Mother's best eyebrow tweezers I ignited it and marvelled at its intense white radiance. That image must have burned onto my retina as I continued to see the same light in everything for the remainder of the day. That did seem to be the most exciting thing out of the whole assembly.

In the proceeding days I misused all of the contents. Test tubes, pristine when new, became blackened with soot from being held with forceps in the pungent flame of the meths burner. The chemicals with the lowest melting points did just that - melted and solidified to such an extent that I had to throw away the spoiled test tube and residues. There was some interest in the fizzing expansion of bicarbonate of soda but to be honest I had seen a better reaction from a teaspoon of Andrew's Liver Salts stirred into orange squash.

I did try to grow some crystals in the recommended solution of Waterglass which my grandparents told me had been used in the war to preserve eggs. This entailed trying to find the stuff in the local shops. The tin of Waterglass that was eventually found in Liptons Stores in town  looked as though it had indeed sat at the back of a shelf since the early 1940's. The first step in crystal growing was making a concentrate with the blue copper sulphate and boiling it down until small crystalline shapes could be seen. The best ones were then meticulously tied up in a length of cotton and suspended in the Waterglass in a jam jar. Talk about watching paint dry. That would have been positively dynamic compared to the slow development of anything resembling a classic crystal shape in that jam jar.

It was not long before the inside of the chemistry set box resembled a complete mess of broken and stained glass , scattered or missing items,  It was a complete mess.

I lost any interest in a career in chemistry at that point.

A few of my fellow pupils persisted in their home experiments and a couple of them went on to much greater things.

It was not too much of an advance for one particularly bright lad to start to develop a line in hallucinogenic drugs which was never going to end well for him.

Another of my contemporaries used his Father's credit card to purchase large amounts of seemingly random ingredients which arrived by post and carrier on an almost daily basis to his house. When combined and refined in exact quantities in his garden shed they became a most potent explosive. His persistence in encouraging chemical reactions displayed itself in his frequent late arrival for classes with a pockmarked, scabby or freshly blooded face and minus his eyebrows as a consequence of the timber shed being blown apart with him in it. I am not sure what he eventually went on to do with his life, if indeed he actually survived his dangerous adolescent years at all.