Chemical/Chemistry Practical Jokes
Charles Heffner
Cheers.
I'm a big fan of practical jokes, and have seen nearly all the
practical joke lists on the net. Yeah, big deal. Anyways, I'm starting
up a home site dedicated to practical jokes which require some knowledge
of chemicals or chemistry. The idea is to combine fun (the prank) with
knowledge (teaching people about basic chemistryin an entertaining
manner).
$64,000 Question, if you can help: does anyone know any chemical based
practical jokes, or resources that I could look up to find them?
If you can help, thanks! I'll give you direct credit for your effort.
Peace
Chuck Heffner
Michael Mullen
On Mon, 05 Aug 1996 20:10:32 -0400, Charles Heffner <hef...@one.net>
wrote:
> $64,000 Question, if you can help: does anyone know any chemical based
>practical jokes, or resources that I could look up to find them?
AHH, you would want GENTIAN VIOLET, it's fairly harmless, used in
staining and mixed with Vasoline a treatment for pubic crabs.
The darn stuff is so fine that a little will get everywhere. Drop
some on a black lab counter and you'll come across the stuff for years.
Stuff makes for a great tag if someones not suppose to be in an area.
Might be kinda cruel for littles ones, sending them home purple
might cause a few phone calls.
------*
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Gaven Miller
Charles Heffner (hef...@one.net) wrote:
> $64,000 Question,
[snip]
> I'll give you direct credit for your effort.
You can direct credit my bank account number !")$%)"(&&" with $64000.
Thank you for your generosity.
--
Quote For The Month:
"Shazbot!"
Marc Guy DeCaire
In article <32068D...@one.net>, Charles Heffner <hef...@one.net> says:
>
>I'm starting
>up a home site dedicated to practical jokes which require some knowledge
>of chemicals or chemistry. The idea is to combine fun (the prank) with
>knowledge (teaching people about basic chemistryin an entertaining
>manner).
>practical jokes, or resources that I could look up to find them?
This isn't a practical joke but I found it funny in a way. I once read
about some professor in California.
He took a beaker filled with one molar HCl(hydrochloric acid) and another
beaker with one molar NaOH(sodium hydroxide) Next he dissolved something
in the acid to show that it was indeed a strong acid. Then he dissolved
something else in the NaOH to show that it was strong base. He made sure
that the moles of HCl and NaOH *exactly* balanced each other and *slowly*
mixed the contents of the two beakers(mix too fast & it explodes). He
poured the new mixture into a drinking glass and drank it before an entire
university class. For the chemically uninitiated, drinking HCl or NaOH
would seem very very stupid. But when combined in exact 1:1 molar ratio,
they make salt water which is not too harmful. He both showed the
principle of the mole and scared quite a few students to boot.
I don't know if he's still employed(or alive!).
P.S. I do not recommend anyone ever trying this 'joke'. Even someone
with chemical training can make an error and hurt himself.
William J. Evans
mmu...@3-cities.com (Michael Mullen) wrote:
: Little Johnny was a chimist, little Johnny is no more. For what he
:thought was H2O, was H2SO4.
"Chimist" is neither is a misspelling nor a typographical error. This
neologism is actually a quite clever play on words. "Chimer" (one who
plays chimes) evolved into "chimist" (pronounced correctly by
shortening the first i _very_slighty_), and refers to a chimer who
plays chimes not with the usual hammers or other standard apparatus,
but by any of a variety of Rube Golberg devices involving a chemical
reaction at least at one step along the way.
Hope this helps.
-- Captain Nitpick
Bill Evans P.O. Box 4829 Irvine, CA 92716 (714)551-2766 _ /| ACK!
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Michael Mullen
On 10 Aug 1996 07:45:44 GMT, mdec...@eagle.wbm.ca (Marc Guy DeCaire)
wrote:
> He
>poured the new mixture into a drinking glass and drank it before an entire
>university class.
Little Johnny was a chimist, little Johnny is no more. For what he
thought was H2O, was H2SO4.
Disclaimer:
Note thats the way I have known it, Barry Yarbrough might of heard it a tad
differently, and will insure all will know his version.
Kip Crosby
Charles Heffner <hef...@one.net> wrote:
> $64,000 Question, if you can help: does anyone know any chemical based
>practical jokes, or resources that I could look up to find them?
This wasn't strictly a practical joke but it must have been a great
sight....and it couldn't be done (legally) today.
My old chemistry prof got an increase in his materials budget (that's
how you know how long ago this happened) and decided to replace the
materials in his locker. Most of them he was able to dispose of
according to standard protocols, but....he had a great big lump of
sodium metal (he estimated later about 400g) sitting in light oil in a
paint can. Oh bother, he said, what am I going to do with this.
He put it in the trunk of his car and drove to the lake where his
outboard was docked, put the sodium carefully in the boat, and
grumbled out to mid-lake....unlocked the top of the can....lowered it
over the side and TOOK OFF.
About thirty seconds later he cut the motor and looked back. Straight
out of the middle of the lake rose a ten-foot conical violet flame....
Paul Intihar
>....he had a great big lump of
> grumbled out to mid-lake....unlocked the top of the can....lowered it
> over the side and TOOK OFF.
>
> About thirty seconds later he cut the motor and looked back. Straight
> out of the middle of the lake rose a ten-foot conical violet flame....
Must have been a lump of metalic potassium; sodium erupts in a yellow
flame, vis-a-vis the glow of a sodium vapor lamp. Now that the statute of
limitations has run out, I can admit to having done the sodium trick and
got a nice yellow explosion. Potassium explodes on contact with water
also, and, as I recall, gives a purple tinge in the Bunsen burner flame
test.
pli, SBA
"I must have been mis-informed." Rick, 'Casablanca'
Joachim Verhagen
eng...@chac.org (Kip Crosby) writes:
>Charles Heffner <hef...@one.net> wrote:
>> $64,000 Question, if you can help: does anyone know any chemical based
>>practical jokes, or resources that I could look up to find them?
You can check the pranks section of the science jokes collection, which I just
posted 2 days ago. Or look them up at
FTP: ftp://ftp.in.umist.ac.uk/pub/Text/scijokes.zip
FTP: ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/sciencejokes.tar.gz
WWW: http://www.fys.ruu.nl/~nienhuys/scijokes/
WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~pemayer/ScienceJokes.html
OBjoke:
From: Alan Meiss, ame...@gn.ecn.purdue.edu
Wherein the author relates the Tale of the Exploding Pen.
Everyone who's taken high school chemistry probably has some
entertaining stories of experiments not included in the syllabus, myself
included. A friend and I did a great deal of spontaneous research in our
class involving myriad flame tests and chemical combinations "Mother Nature
never intended." I recall one time when the teacher left the room, and my
friend dashed into the storeroom in the back to see what he could filch. He
returned with a heaping handful of silver nitrate powder, which isn't
exactly recommended handling procedure for this chemical. When rapid
discomfort made him dispose of this material, the rest of us observed to
our amazement that his entire hand had turned silver. By the end of the day
it had turned purple. But all this, of course, is peripheral to the Tale of
the Exploding Pen.
One day in Chemistry class we were using calcium metal, which reacts
with water to give off hydrogen gas and heat. This was definitely Nifty,
and I saved several pieces. It became a source of amusement to drop it in a
puddle of water and watch it bubble and sputter, then quickly hand it to
someone during a quiet class to provoke an alarmed bellow (the stuff got
pretty hot). By the afternoon I had one piece left, which I, based on
thought processes that now entirely elude me, stored, along with some
water, in my pen, one of those Bic Biros with the large white barrel and
detachable endcap. It soon slipped my mind that I'd done this, and I went
on my way to Biology class. Midway through class, we were wrapping up an
experiment, with the teacher giving a lecture and the class taking notes. I
was standing in the back of the room, writing down final data from our
petri dishes of E. Coli, when my pen exploded. It was very loud, louder
than a firecracker, and I looked up to see every face in the class staring
at me and the remnant of my pen with great alarm. The resulting silence was
finally broken when someone muttered "his pen exploded!" I tried to play it
cool, giving my pen as cursory an inspection as possible, as if this were a
frequent occurence of little concern, and returned to an extroadinarily
studious job of note-taking. The teacher just smiled and continued the
lecture in a bit; I guess he was used to this sort of thing.
We had some other interesting experiences in this biology course,
including the development of Live Chicken Bowling, and the concealment of
chickens in people's personal belongings. In one class I remember, one of
the kids wadded up paper towels into a foot-wide ball, and for reasons I
don't fathom arrived at the decision to set it on fire when the teacher
left the room. Too late it occcurred to him that a large ball of fire is
fairly conspicuous in a classroom setting, so he stuffed it into the lab
drawer beside his desk just before the teacher returned. The sudden earnest
interest in the lecture he tried to demonstrate was not enough to distract
from the smoke rising from his desk, however, and he got in a significant
amount of trouble.
But let me return once again to Chemistry class. In all, it was a
fairly boring class, and we even had to pursue non- flammable
entertainment. I programmed a Blackjack game on my pocket computer, and we
would pass it around the class for all to play. A lively betting pool would
sometimes start when the score got high. One day we managed to play a full
game of Risk in the back of the room during lecture. Some of us would spend
a half an hour at a stretch duplicating Muppet noises from Sesame Street
episodes: "Tiiiick Tooooock BrrrrrrrRING! Yupyupyupyup". Others would
interupt any rare quiet moments by yanking leg hairs from other guys
wearing shorts. None of this infantilism, however, can compare to the
mayhem related to me by one of my roommates that went on in his own high
school chemistry class.
He had a particularly anarchic chem class that seemed to involve an
impressive amount of pyrotechnics. On one occassion, someone threw a
fist-sized chunk of potassium metal in a sink full of water, which
destroyed it (both sink and water) with a great shower of sparks. Another
time his classmates covered an entire desktop with infamous nitrogren
tri-iodide, an unstable compound made from ammonia and iodine that explodes
when touched, leaving purple stains. They detonated it by throwing a paper
airplane, blowing the top off the desk. In an act of tremendous stupidity,
they filled an entire liter beaker with the gray incendiary material from
sparklers, and when some fool tossed in a match, the resulting column of
fire burned holes in both the table and ceiling. In an extra-curriculur
adventure, they piled a mound of thermite they'd prepared in class on a
particularly despised person's driveway. When ignited, it blasted a foot
wide hole through the concrete and down to the dirt. Their most notable
"achievement", however, was placing in someone's locker in a dish of water
a large chunk of some unknown material that gives off noxious odors when
moist. He said that the resulting nauseating stench spread through the
entire school. One girl barfed in mid-sprint to the bathroom, and the
school had to evacuate the building and cancel classes for the rest of the
day. In an entire semester of Chemistry class, his only remotely
educational experience was learning to make soap, and he had to repeat the
subject here at Purdue, minus the pyrotechnics.
--
Joachim Verhagen Email:J.C.D.V...@fys.ruu.nl
Department of molecular biofysics, University of Utrecht
Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Homepage: http://www.fys.ruu.nl/~verhagen (Science Jokes & SF)