Hey! I have just uploaded another spicy Patreon-Exclusive Chempilation. One of the stories involves somebody smoking with brake cleaner... You can check it out here: www.patreon.com/thatchemist
You might as well warn as a free public safety message what happens when someone smokes with brake cleaner. I take it that this is something like tobacco or marijuana smoking in the presence of the fumes. Those working with automotive equipment and chemicals should know better because of flammables and toxicity, but sometimes they can be as dumb as a rock.
Weird. I use that same baby dragon egg analogy. Except I use baby Hitler. Odd how I always talk about Hitler laying eggs? Well. Not if you know hitler like I know hitler.
Question ! I'm new to the channel, do you have video compilations about what laboratories or industrt do when there's a spill or anything residue related? Based on guidelines or standards, or even improvised solutions that could work on an emergency...
When I was a student at the University of Illinois, lo these many decades ago, the head of the chemistry department was Professor Gilbert P. Haight. Prof. Haight was quite a character and everybody adored him. The highlight of the school year was his annual Christmas Lecture. Chemistry majors and, I believe, students from the University High School were given preferential admission, although anyone could attend. It was standing room only and many people got turned away at the door. One year I managed to get in, even though I was just one of those weird Math/Computer Science guys. Gil gave his lecture and was in full swing, doing things like igniting soap bubbles filled with hydrogen (foomp!) or a stoichiometric mixture of hydrogen and oxygen (BANG!!). At one point he held up a lump of dry ice and asked, "What would dry ice taste like?" He explained the chemistry and decided that it would be sour, due to the formation of carbonic acid. He then proceeded to pop the dry ice into his mouth, swish it around, and spit it out. He then said, "Yep, it's sour. Never do that, by the way."
I taught at a science camp this summer, and we used dry ice to turn apple juice into sparkling apple juice, by dropping a few chunks into a half-full bottle and letting the CO2 dissolve into the drink. It didn’t really improve the taste lol
Used to deal with dry ice in decently large freezer-pallet things. The air inside always reminded me of accidentally getting pool water up the nose, very much _NOT_ the sort of thing that encourages an appreciation.
I'm not even a chemist and I always read "unionised" as "un-ionised" instead of "union-ised". Which means I'm almost always wrong, since I rarely read about ionisation. Only chemistry experiment going wrong I experienced was in high school, where the teacher decided to show us the reaction of sodium and water. Got a big glass bowl of water, eye-balled a big chunk of sodium, with the comment that it was a bit big but should be alright and put it in the water. It started moving around rapidly, which he explained was because it released a gas. He then got a... thing to stop it from moving so he could catch the gas. Seconds later, the whole thing exploded, with glass shards and the now slightly caustic water spraying on the students in the first three rows. Nobody was actually hurt, but man... he could have at least raised the shield in front of the students that is there for exactly these kinds of accidents...
I've heard so many sodium+water stories like that… Probably the most common educational lab incident since it's easy to pull off and usually harmless but impressive. Which causes people to underestimate it and create major bangs.
The pool story reminds me of a friend who had a moose fall into the outdoor swimming pool of his summer cottage in autumn (the ice must have been too thin to support the weight but hidden the fact that there was a pool below). When he returned in spring he found a transparent moose in his pool...
A week ago we again had another NO2 accident. Our teacher was showing us some HNO3 and metal reactions to demonstrate passivation. Copper reacted like copper, aluminium and iron didn't react, but magnesium reacted so violently, the NO2 didn't just pour out the test tube like with Cu, but it was shooting up to the ceiling (4-5m!). I hope after this, we won't do any HNO3 experiments again, but if we do, I will have a respirator in my bag.
Can confirm the poo in the pool story. I worked at the poll house of a YMCA one summer that had swim lessons for kids. Some of the kids that didn't want to take swim lessons figured out that if they pooped the pool it would be shut down the rest of the day while the life guards cleaned and shocked it, canceling swim lessons. This left the pool extra chlorinated for the next day. Bleached swim suits, hair, etc. And if the parents brought the pool pooper kid back for another round of swim lessons, the pool would be pooped in again. That is also where I learned to always hold your breath when opening a chlorine container. The fumes are strong and rise up to your face quick. Granular calcium hypochlorite is no joke.
Yo, here's a compilation of mini stories from my chemistry courses in my B.Sc. in biochem: - a classmate accidentally created significant amounts of H2S just bubbling out of her beaker. She carried it across the whole lab to a supervisor and asked what she was supposed to do with it. Being told to immediately put it in a fume hood, she casually walked back across the whole lab to her own fume hood, leaking H2S all over the place. - Same classmate put a carbonate sample into a test tube with conc. HCl, plugged it and shook it. Bang, HCl all over the place. - During the ion lottery (qualitative analysis of unknown salt mixtures) someone went to their supervisor and complained that despite all their tests they only found chloride and maybe sodium? The supervisor dipped his finger in their sample, licked it and said "Yeah, tastes about right" (NaCl). Apparently they pulled this prank every year, but what the hell, other students had chromates, arsenic compounds and cyanides in their samples. One mix up and the consequences would have been bad. - Once our entire lab was evacuated because some gas that smelled like phosgene came out of a sink siphon after people (illegally) dumped some chemicals. I never found out if it actually was phosgene because it was right at the end of the course. - Someone attached their bunsen burner to the water outlet instead of the gas outlet and was astonished when they created a pretty water fountain instead of a flame. - During my bachelor thesis my supervisor asked me to do a "quick side experiment" for her in which I had to prepare rather large quantities of high concentration Paraquat (very toxic) in DMSO (very good at transporting toxic chemicals through your skin). I was so scared I wore all the PPE I found and triple gloved. So far, no cancer or parkinsons that I'm aware of, yay! - Maybe a little lame, but a cautionary tale about lab safety: Later in my studies I did GC analysis of VOC that I dissolved from the collection columns using DCM. For the GC analysis, the sample is placed in a sampling vial which is a tiny glass vial with a conical insert that is spring loaded against the teflon septum in the lid. During loading, the lid slipped out of my fingers and the spring somehow shot the insert with DCM out under the fume hood window, underneath my goggles, underneath my glasses and right into my eye. Freak accidents happen and despite wearing full PPE, always be prepared to find the eyewash station while blinded!
If Cody’s Lab is scared of something you should be too. You will see him in the metal refining series get out of there quick when the NO₂ starts being generated
In my high school AP chemistry we had to do a demonstration of our choice. I decided on making a small amount of nitrogen triiodide and detonating it. I did the reaction before the demonstration day so i knew how to make the compound. I tested detonating it in the back lab room and everything went fine, fun plume of purple smoke. However i totally forgot to put on my eye protection before doing so, when i walked out of the back lab room the teacher looked like he wanted to kill me for forgetting to wear them
I've had a fairly large amount of nitrogen triiodide randomly explode once, luckily I was not in the room when it happened, but little pieces of it were scattered throughout the room. It was fun finding where all of it was, as I could just pat anything in the room and it would give a snap.
yeah my teacher did also release a bunch of NO2 and say it’s not that dangerous too, but at least it didn’t fill the classroom and the classroom was well ventillated this… is insane
Considering superglue was originally designed/intended for sealing wounds in the Vietnam war, I really wonder about its toxicity. I heard heating it a lot releases cyanide gas, and (tested) when dried, heating the bond moderately (~70 C) turns it so brittle the bond made with it just fall apart.
@Purple Burglaralarm A few years ago I found some medical grade cyanoacrylate wound bandage in the safety supply section of Home Depot to cover a frying pan edge scorch wound on my forearm. It worked fine, but the scorch left a pale scar that is still there. Years and years back, Band-Aid used to sell a swab-catalyzed version of this stuff, then for inexplicable reasons discontinued it. The newer stuff is liquid and hardens slowly. Maybe it was the heat factor.
@@SeekingTheLoveThatGodMeans7648 The «may contain» is not that some brand may contain contaminants. It was to mean that a batch may contain some contaminant. This tube is only glue, but, that other one just next to it contains some tiny glass shards.
Here’s a tip on how to eat organic sulfuric compounds. 1. Don’t be a vampire 2. Make sure it is a safe organism 3. Analyze the bulb 4. If it is not not a member of Narcissus, you’re good to go. 5. Worse case scenario, weaken with heat. In other words. תאכל/י שום
I just watched this with my husband who is an organic chemist and he says fluorine chemists are known for having less than 10 fingers! I'm a toxicologist and love your channel! lol
Back in High School, during a chem lab, we were working with concentrated H2SO4, and I had a small (open) vial full of about 10mL of the acid. Well, I got up to go grab something and then when I came back, the vial was gone. Turns out, the vial somehow fell off the bench, into my backpack which was hanging off a hook below, and later that day I opened up my backpack and the acid had eaten a hole clean through the backpack and turned most of my homework into a mushy sludge.
Earlier today we were doing Grignard reactions, using diethyl ether as a solvent. We had to hand warm the test tubes and the person next to me wasn’t using their fume hood, which filled the room with diethyl ether fumes. I took the brunt of it and had to leave the room. I still feel drunk as I’m writing this.
In a welding class I asked the instructor why he was holding the acetylene torch not by the torch body, but by the hoses coming into the torch. His answer: 'this way when the torch explodes I'll only lose my hand"... "when", not "if", and "only"?!? You gain a lot of respect and caution for a process hearing things like that. (He retired after a long career of teaching students how to weld safely, and still had both his hands).
When it comes to poison gases, I think NO2 gets a bit overlooked. There are a lot of incidents with it in inorganic chem labs. Even I whiffed the stuff a time or two, but always made it in the outdoors.
I'm an undergrad and during my organic lab, we were working with DCM. I had spilled a couple drops on my gloves throughout the course of one of the experiments. I noticed it felt particularly cool and thought it was probably because of the heat of vaporization and it's volatility. Unfortunately, my TA failed to inform me (or anyone else probably) that nitrile gloves don't protect from DCM and definitely came in contact with my skin. Fortunately it was only a small amount, and as a paramedic I know changing gloves often is a good safety practice so the contact time was pretty minimal. The only reason I realized something was off was because towards the end of the lab I noticed the gloves I was wearing had splotches where I'd spilt the DCM. Thankful I didn't get any burns or apparent damage to my skin. Always follow good safety practice because there's always more hazards than you're aware of.
My superglue story is less dramatic, but in the moment was still somewhat intense. I woke up unusually early one day, and decided I'd go to work (early in, early out--get to do something fun in the afternoon). After getting some things started, I took a moment to fix a broken pair of sunglasses. The frame had cracked, so a little bit of CA glue was all I needed. Long story short, I glued my hand to my desk. No one else would be in for another two hours. And I suddenly, simultaneously, *urgently* had to poop. Fortunately, most of the skin of my palm stayed where it's supposed to be.
There's some climate protesters in a porche showroom that glued themselves to the floor complaining porche didn't give them a bowl to poop into. Hilariously they do bring them food (but they aren't allowed to order themselves, no vegan soy lattes) but made no attempt to remove them. I think they're still there now as of this message.
Our 1980's UK gas blender company shared a restroom with a filthy metal working company .... when their BIG HEFTY guys went in after a night on the curry and beer ... ( with a tiny pipe ) , we filled the restroom with OZONE ! ! ( cleared the smell + the guys ! ! ) ...........QED ..........
There are some truly insane “large amounts of chemicals” stories from the shipping industry (I’m talking about the one with actual ships, not the generic transportation industry). I’ve never been involved with any, but because the quantities are measured in thousands of tons, sometimes the reactions get really, really big. Like, “the ship exploded” big.
The second I heard caesium my eyes were like dinner plates. I may only have a hs chem education, but my chemistry teacher instilled a hefty fear of that group.
"A large amount of radioactive monkey fecal matter of unknown origin" sounds like something you should definitely not be able to mail to someone period
8:20 The terrifying thing about acetylene cylinders is once they heat up past a certain temperature that can start a reaction inside the cylinder that spontaneously generates even more heat, until the thing cooks off and explodes.
i learned the spooky way that you shouldn't mess around with lithium. this happened 15-20 minutes ago. I opened a button-cell battery to extract the lithium, i had prepared a container of parafin oil to store it under. My bf likes when i demonstrate chemical reactions for him so i called him on facetime to show him the reaction between lithium metal and water. I took the metal and dropped it into a glass of water and it fizzed a bit and then it was over, while i was cleaning up however, i breathed in, it felt like inhaling finely ground-up pop-rocks. i rushed out of the room and started coughing and my boyfriend was freaking out so i asked him to calm down while i called poison control. nothing ended up happening other than me feeling like a total idiot for not having propper ventilation or PPE
Not my story, but my Chem teacher in high school told us a story about one of the main reasons why you’re not supposed to eat or chew gum in the lab. Basically, some guy was working, alone, in a lab, and was chewing gum. There was some white powder on the table, which he was 99.9999% sure was sucrose, so he dipped his gum in it, and bit down. However, it wasn’t sugar: it was something else, something explosive (I believe it was white phosphorus or something), and the other explosion BLEW OFF HIS ENTIRE LOWER JAW and killed him instantly. The homicide detective who investigated the death said that in all his years, that is the most gruesome thing he’d ever seen. Pretty messed up.
Oh and personally, I have some Fluoroantimonic acid, and while working with it, it burned through my KEVLAR GLOVE and ate through the skin on the back of my right hand. It’s since been more or less healed, but that HURT. Plus it’s super volatile, so the sensation of getting burned by what was almost a vapor was somewhat strange.
My dad was an oil refinery technician so he worked with some rather interesting chemicals throughout his career. One of the worst accidents (for the rest of the family) was the time he was sprayed with propane odorant. This odorant is extremely strong. If you have ever smelled a propane leak you know what it smells like. The odorant is extremely strong. Just 1 pint (1/8 of a gallon) is added to a railcar of propane. A railcar holds about 34000 gallons. That is a ratio of 1 part odorant to 272000 parts of propane! Dad trued everything to get the smell out of his skin but the only thing that helped was time. It was eyewatering to be close to him for a week and noticeable for about 3 weeks. His clothes, mom didn't even try to clean them. She just burned them, and it wasn't easy as his work uniform was, of course, fire resistant. In another story, one of the bosses at the refinery was very unpopular. Someone took a cap full of this odorant and put it in brand new pick-up truck and closed the door. The truck, parked in the sun, got hot enough to vaporize the entire cap full. It rendered the truck undrivable, even after the interior was gutted and sand blasted inside. In the end, this brand new truck (less than 1000 miles on it) with nothing else wrong with it had to be scrapped because the smell had gotten into the metal and could not be removed.
Was at work we found a bottle we thought was drain cleaner, but the labels were melted so we couldn’t tell. Being smart, we tried to use gloves to move it to a bucket where we could be sure it wouldn’t leak, instead it reacted with the nitrile gloves which made them heat up rapidly to a very uncomfortable temperature. I stripped off the gloves fast enough but a tiny amount hit my legs. Despite immediate decontamination, I ended up with a bunch of tiny burns and missing patches of hair that healed fully within a few weeks. We still didn’t have any idea what was in the bottle, but we labelled it “this eats skin, do not touch”.
I am the opposite of proud of this, buuut... My biggest chemistry whoopsie involves both pharmacology and physical chemistry. It happened many years ago. At the time, I had recently been put on a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor for anxiety and depression. Because my nervous system was adjusting to the medication, I was slightly hypomanic: excessive energy, overconfidence, and a sense of invincibility. This led directly to a shockingly unwise experiment that very nearly ended with me blind or dead: I decided that I would attempt to make supercritical carbon dioxide. In my kitchen. In a glass vessel. That glass vessel being a soy-sauce bottle which I had emptied and secured the plastic lid of with a hose clamp, after charging with dry ice. I don't know what pressure the bottle reached, but it was high enough for the CO2 to liquefy, so it was several bar, at least. I was saved initially by a steady leak from the cap. When I tightened the hose clamp to secure that leak, my common sense (very, very belatedly) started kicking in, and I realized that I had a glass bottle whose pressure was rapidly increasing, and which I realized I should not have been anywhere near. Realizing the enormity and stupidity of my mistake, I placed the highly pressurized glass bottle in the kitchen sink and started filling the sink with water to cushion any possible explosion. To make matters worse, though, in my panic, I turned on the hot water rather than the cold water, which no doubt made the pressure rise even faster. Of course, the bottle exploded. I couldn't hear anything but ringing for about thirty seconds, and the whole kitchen was sprayed with water and broken glass, and blanketed in fog. The explosion was intense enough that glass shrapnel scratched the stainless-steel sink and left deep scratches in the cabinet and ceiling above the sink. If I'd been leaning over that sink, or if the bottle had suddenly exploded any other time (which was entirely possible), I would've been blasted with glass shrapnel. The *best-case* scenario would've been serious glass-shrapnel injuries and probably blindness, but that shrapnel could easily have punctured something important.
When I was a kid in Dayton, July 16, 1981 a company started filling an apparently dirty tanker truck with nitric acid and ammonium bifloride and it vented nitrogen dioxide, forcing an evacuation of the surrounding area. Luckily, no one was injured, but it damaged the paint job on a bunch of cars.
I remember trying to preform electrolysis on a nail using salt as an electrolyte. While the reaction was going, the water turned a hazy teal and, in my infinite wisdom, I got a bunch of it on my unshielded hands while cleaning. From what I can deduce, none of it was stainless steel, so the risk of Hexavalent Chromium is low, but the water had a very very faint yellow tinge which could either be iron oxides in the water or incredibly dilute chromate compounds. It still haunts me to this day whether or not I gave myself skin cancer on my hands.
The color its likely due to chlorine gas generated in the electrolysis of the NaCl and a mix of iron oxides/hydroxide and iron chloride, YOU WILL BE FINE. I have done the reaction many many times usually to obtain low quality hydrogen (it contains lots of Cl2 and O2), and the conditions always destroy any Fe containing electrodes even stainless steel (platinum works quite well though, but is really expensive). I have never found significant amount of chromium in solution.
I can add another "school horror story" involving gas releases here. So, I went to a school with a single fume hood we used for any demos involving gasses or stuff like that. This was supposed to be a top of the line hood that was really new since the school had just moved buildings and bought a ton of fancy new toys for their classrooms (including a plastic vacuum former and a literal industrial bandsaw for the Craft, Design, Technology classroom to put this into perspective). Now the teacher for this class was showing us metal reactions and decided to demonstrate with an Aluminium Iodine reaction. This involved placing a LARGE pile of powdered aluminium in the fume hood and adding several pipettes of iodine solution to it (after the first one didn't immediately react, so he added more I guess). Needless to say, the reaction starts off and we get to watch the sunlight from the window behind the fume hood shine through this lovely reddish purple iodine gas. Then... One of us looked up. Turns out the fume hood was running at max and yet the purple smoke was starting to flow out of the top vents nontheless. Myself and the others who knew that "spooky purple smoke is probably bad" booked it out of the room followed closely by the teacher who shoved a towel under the door to stop it from leaking into the rest of the school. The rest of us were treated to the sight through the door's small window of a purple haze in the science lab. Needless to say, we weren't allowed back into that classroom for a couple of weeks. And when we were, any exposed wood like shelves or the sides of books was stained with purplish black from the iodine reactions. He never did that demo again.
The story at 9:50, I had something similar happen, but on a smaller scale thankfully, the main issue ended up that the relays that controlled the pumps on the pool chemical system had failed closed (mechanical relays can and will fail, many times in the closed position) and it dumped all 15 gallons of chlorine into the pool... replaced the relays with solid state relays and it's been working great since.
When my brother was in his first year of the Swedish equivalent to high-school (technical/engineering program) he had a welding and lathing course that was held in the industrial machining halls, maybe half a kilometre away from the main school grounds. One day his welding/lathing teacher asked him if he could carry an ancient looking vial with chemicals back to the main school premises and give it to the chemistry teacher for identification and disposal. He said "sure" and asked his teacher what the vial supposedly contained. His teacher said "nitroglycerin", like it was no big deal, gave my brother the vial and then walked away. My brother was obviously terrified and walked the couple of hundred meters back to the school handling the vial as carefully as possible. When my brother finally made it to the chemistry lab to give the vial to his chemistry teacher and explain to him what he was supposed to do with the vial, his chemistry teacher laughed so hard! He told my brother that the welding/lathing teacher used to pull this prank on unexpecting students whenever he needed old chemicals disposed of (which needed to be done in the chemistry lab). My brother was not amused 😂 I don't remember exactly what the chemical in the vial actually was, but I think it was some kind of acid.
In high school chem we did a lab where you burned some salts over a gas burner, admired the colors, and determined whether the cations or anions where what determined the color of the flame. The lab itself went smoothly, things got bad overnight. I don’t think my class was the one to make the mistake, but some group who did the lab at some point forgot to turn off the gas valve. When my teacher came in the next day the room was flooded with gas and had to be aired out. The classroom is in the middle of the school too, so if it had ignited it wouldn’t have been good. Thankfully nothing happened, we just got a stern talk about lab safety.
I used to work back in my early 20s servicing swimming pools and yeah liquid chlorine and frighteningly some places still use chlorine gas to treat their swimming pools and it’s absolutely terrifying if your not really careful. I remember one service customer who was a Eastman Kodak chemical engineer bought 400 lbs of calcium hypochlorite stored it inside a tool shed that contained a 300gal diesel fuel tank and a 55 gallon drum of hydrochloric acid. I immediately warned them that’s a very dangerous location you’re storing these chemicals in and in engineering assholery fashion I was told that I know what I’m doing. Three weeks later massive fire and explosion that took out the shed and half the house when he used diesel gas to try to kill termites around the building. Luckily no one was hurt.
I have some stories from my school. The teacher told us about radioactive materials that the school has or had. One day they decided that radioactivity is too dangerous and threw away the key to the closet with all of the stuff in it. Noone knows what happened to all of that afterwards. One day we did some experiments with acids. In one we put seashells and powdered marble into HCl. We measured the time it takes for it to dissolve and compared the times. The first experiment went normal. Then we switched to a higher concentration of HCl (the teacher put multiple bottles of it with different concentrations on a table for us to try). It reacted violently and HCl splashed all over the table. It only happened to my group and not to the others. Nobody was hit but it was a bit scary.
In uni chem class my lab partner, an absolute idiot, did a reaction outside the fumehood and filled the room with NO2. This guy also frequently used his own finger as a stir rod.
Last year me and my (frankly awful) high school class were doing some simple chemistry. I dont know what grade it translates to where you live, but we're 9th grade here in australia. This was a general science class, not elective, so everyone has to do it including the people that dont want to and definitely shouldn't. anyways, we were doing a simple mixture of Sodium Hydroxide and Hydrochloric Acid and measuring pH. In groups of course. Surely nothing could go wrong, but the class moron (in my group of course) pours Sodium Hydroxide all over the bench. Pours, not spills. He then grabs a permanent marker and writes 'ACID' on the table with a big arrow pointing to the giant puddle of not acid. He then proceeds to spread the sodium hydroxide with his bear hands, giving him awful chemical burns and I didn't see him for weeks. I have no idea how he was allowed to touch the chemicals, let alone do all of this. I just wanted to neutralize some acid.
As an emergency department physician, I often used to see kids who had drunk household cleaners. Their parents used to rush in, panicked, with a child under one arm and a bottle in the other hand. We had access to a large database of common products and what to do for people who ingested them, but one day a child came in who had drunk some kitchen cleaner that wasn't listed and didn't have a list of ingredients on the bottle either. The label suggested that I contact the supermarket helpline for further information, so I opened an excruciatingly slow 'web-chat' to ask them what was in it. After what seemed like an age the reply came: 'We don't know what the ingredients of the product are, but if you take the child to ED they will know what to do.' Then they signed off. It's true that we thought we knew what to do and the child was fine, but it would have been nice to know for certain. It was quite common for people to attend ED after being exposed to unknown substances. One patient had spilled a rust remover over his arm. Fearing HF acid burns I searched for the material data safety sheet online, and found that I had to Email the manufacturer to access it. They replied with the pdf attached - over a week later. Anyway, my top tip is not to keep superglue vials or vape refills in the bathroom on the same shelf as your eyedrops.
Not my story, but my dad’s! He used to go to school in Oregon and apparently his highschool had to stop all lab work in the bio/chemistry building (about the size of three motel rooms) because when a student went in the back to find something, they also found enough sodium to “make a parking lot of half the school” sitting around and air tarnishing. I’m pretty sure he meant there was enough sodium to react with the whole storage closet if it went off, but for the longest time I envisioned a lump of the stuff bigger than my head.
As a “hobby level” welder, I’ve worked with acetylene for many years. My first “experience” with it was in a 6th grade shop class. During an after hours demonstration, the teacher filled a black garbage bag with acetylene and oxygen. It was set off by a candle on a stick (luckily outside). After we all picked ourselves off the ground, i developed the greatest respect for energetic mixtures.
I remember once, I think I was 17, when I was searching my parents' garage for ethanol to clean something. We had a bunch of cleaners from the same brand all in the same place, both old and new. I clearly remember picking up a bottle that I thought was ethanol, but wasn't sure. My dad told me it wasn't ethanol, buuut I wanted to make sure. So what did I do? I stuck my nose really close to the bottle and took a big whiff. I quickly realised that it wasn't ethanol, but a pretty concentrated ammoniumhydroxide solution (NH₃). I almost passed out, and I lost most of the hair in my nose. I remember not being able to breathe through my nose without pain for about a week and not being able to smell for about a month. Luckily, I didn't get any long-lasting damage.
Finally, A post I feel early enough to share a story from my highschool days: My freshman year of high school, we had a teacher who was a great guy, loved doing fun experiments, as it was a few years back i dont remember the exact concentration of the acids, but he was teaching us how to use them safely, proper ppe and how to use the emergency shower etc. When he decided to pick up the acids, you could already see how dry the skin on the back of his hands was from earlier, then proceeded to use pipettes to drip dilute HCl and dilute Sulfuric acid onto the back of his hand, while in an attempt to show us what would happen if we got splashed without gloves or on bare skin, he was fine. Fun experiments were had later on but i never took off my gloves or lab coat when doing labs with acids especially since i have dry skin naturally
one time in my hs chem class we were doing some basic stuff revolving around burning alkali metals. apparently, one of the lights in the room had shorted at one point and nobody noticed, and it was spewing a mixture of O3, O2 and H2. Needless to say, one of the flames hit the uh-oh cloud on the ceiling and detonated it. Nobody in the room could hear for a few minutes, and the local police were able to hear it from a mile away. The school's windows were/are bulletproof, so no windows shattered thankfully.
Re kids eating "pool noodles". I hadn't heard that term before and had a mounting sense of dread and horror that it was a euphemism. After looking it up I am very relieved.
In middle school my teacher allowed to play a little with things in the lab since I had very good grades and I won a chemistry competition that year. So I saw powdered sulfur, and powdered iron. I just wanna say, I knew exactly what would happen, I did it anyway, I don't why. So I put maybe a tablespoon of each in a glass plate (can't remember the name of it), mixed them and put them on a bunsen burner. It changed color which was cool and unexpected, but eventually it caught on fire. And again, I knew what would happen but I did it anyway for some reason, I poured water on it. I evacuated the lab and half my school smelled like farts for a while. No one ever realized what happened. And yes, I know that was dangerous but I think I was possesed by a demon so oopsie.
Isaac Asimov used that one in an old book, I don't remember the title. I think the chapter was "To Tell a Chemist". The questions to tell a chemist were (from memory so not a quote): - Pronounce "unionized". - What is a mole? Some Google searching reveals the title to be "Asimov on Chemistry". Apparently there is also a chapter "Death in the Laboratory" which has a lot about Fluorine.
When I was at high school we were cracking long chain hydrocarbons to make lighter ones. This was being done with some decent glassware (pyrex i think), but we were using bunsen burners (this was a UK high school in 2008, there wasn't a hotplate in the building). As you can imagine, producing highly flammable liquids and gasses from long chain _tar_ very quickly lead to most of the lab benches having fires, test tubes cracking due to the high heat & even an explosion which set the bench on fire. That teacher wasn't allowed to do chemistry labs anymore after that.
I remember the USCSB has an investigation report on a time when a tanker was improperly unloaded and ended up mixing something chlorine containing and I think sulfuric acid which reacted to form a dense cloud of chlorine gas which prevented the truck operator from stopping the transfer and leading to several injuries.
The fluorine lab story sounds familiar. "The Alchemists’ Guild is opposite the Gamblers’ Guild. Usually. Sometimes it’s above it, or below it, or falling in bits around it. The gamblers are occasionally asked why they continue to maintain an establishment opposite a Guild which accidentally blows up its Guild Hall every few months, and they say: ‘Did you read the sign on the door when you came in?’"
Acetylene is dreadful stuff. Most people who used to use it, myself included, have replaced it with propane for cutting steel. It works just as well, it's a lot cheaper and much safer to handle. The only time you specifically need it is if you're doing old-timey artisan welding. Propane and similar can't be used for this because they leave hydrogen in the welds, making them brittle.
I have a story: in university freshman gen chem lab, we were trying to light our Bunsen burners. Being the tiny freshies that we were, we were having a bit of trouble. We didn't know if the gas was coming out or not, we didn't know which ways to turn the handle things, etc. Apparently the gas WAS on because I got several lungfuls of it. I got very lightheaded and stepped outside the room to get fresh air and water. For a couple hours after, I was fine... Until I started getting EXTREMELY tired and I felt kinda sick, and would kinda, idk, stop for a few seconds randomly? I didn't fall asleep, it was like I just. Blanked. I didn't fall over, I'd just be walking and I'd stop. At least I think that's what happened, I don't remember anything from when I blanked though. I don't know if I could see, or if everything went black, or if I just saw nothingness. I don't remember. I usually knew when it happened, but I didn't know what happened during the blanks. And I think I had about 15-20ish of them in a 30 minute span? Not sure. So yeah. Bunsen burner gas poisoning. That wasn't fun.
I've seen a couple chloramine stories and I wanted to share my own, although it's admittedly much more mild. One night, I got a bee in my brain about making a little soft corner in my bedroom in the basement between the bed and the wall. Somewhere I could read, play my Wii U, etc. while being able to sit up and such, my bed wasn't a great spot. The plan was to sanitize the corner, and then lay down some garbage bags to prevent condensation from causing more problems, as the room was only half-finished, then lay down blankets and pillows. I got everything out of the corner only to notice that my cats had urinated in the corner at some point. No matter, I figured, I was gonna mop there anyway. So I mopped up the mostly dry cat pee with some hot water, and then returned to the laundry room sink to put some bleach in the basin. I gave it a few treatments just to make sure there was nothing left, rinsing the mop each time. I was 15, and hadn't slept properly that weekend. It didn't really occur to me that urine contained ammonia, perhaps enough to cause some problems, until after I went to rinse the mop for the last time and started coughing my throat raw. Was probably exposed to low levels of tri/chloramine for about an hour or so. I promptly drained the sink, rinsed everything thoroughly, and went outside for some fresh air. The next day I was no worse for wear, and the cozy corner turned out great. Definitely learned to consider what's being cleaned, along with what you're cleaning with, when dealing with biological contaminants.
Remind me of org chem lab in my 1st year college. One friend sniffed brownish gas and ended up with nose bleed for hours. Some reaction in warm water bath without film hood.
Well I work at a semiconductor manf plant. There are huge tanks (50000 gallons) of unstabilized 35pcnt h2o2, giant drums of dry HCl gas, flourine in all its forms, arsine phosphine Germane nat gas IPA etc. I work around them all day in the subfab and fab and have never seen an accident. I myself am always professional with ppe and procedures. Which is what makes me wonder why I seem to be so stupid when at home: i wanted to distill some drain cleaner 96pcnt sulfuric acid to be pure in my backyard, got the whole setup running and went inside. Half an hour later someone at home noticed white fog outside... Yeah i had boiled off about 500ml of sulfuric, that cloud was epic. Etched everything metal, the tree lost some leaves. Got no complaints from neighbors though (they weren't home) and i won't be that stupid or reckless again, felt really bad. So weird: safe at work but not at home..
I feel compelled to put on gloves if I'm working with even the most benign things at work (Dusty boxes? Let me get my gloves!) But I just free pour the worst things at home.
A teacher of ours demonstrated acetylene by getting a big paper roll (the ones they use in paper mills to roll the paper onto), hammering a large wood plug into one end and drilling an ignition hole into it close to the wood plug. He then stuffed a towel into the other end of the tube, filled the tube with acetylene, put it onto his shoulder like a bazooka, pointed it at the door and gave fire. At exactly this moment, the door opened and the principal came in. BOOOOOM! The towel flew through the air and hit the principal in the face. We were in stitches and the teacher just stood there with the smoking tube on his shoulder. The towel slid off a very upset principal's face and he said: "Mr. Soandso, I need to talk to you!". Turned around on his heels with the sheepishly looking teacher in tow and we heard him yell in the hallway. The teacher is now the principal of this school...:)
It's surprisingly easy to fill a room with NO2. Once in the lab I was filtering chloroform for some polymer testing in a glass sintered filter, cleaned everything and put the bottle and filter away. Three days later I needed filtered nitric acid to clean the testing glassware, so I took a glass filter (we had 3 of the same filter, I thought I picked a different one than the previous one) and I set up and started the filtration. As I turned around I heard some bubbling behind me and I saw a red cloud exiting the filter and the beaker. That was 500 ml of 68% nitric acid decomposing in my fumehood. Closed the window and evacuated the lab for 3 hours.
I have an better grasp of chemistry than your average john doe, so I greatly enjoy this content despite the deep technical being greek to me. One thing I recalled thinking from the toxic chemicals tier list is about how different our perspectives are due to situational experience with particular chemicals. For example, ammonia was rated as rather tame compared to some of the more nasty contenders. This is certainly true on the face of it, but in my experience working in heavy industry, it can be those more mundane chemicals that are the most sinister. Ammonia in particular is common in large tonnages for a variety of refinery applications. I worked for a time in a phosphate refinery which utilized large tonnages of anhydrous ammonia, as well as sulfuric acid and some derivatives thereof(sulfur dioxide and hydrogen di-sulfide). While not innocuous by any means, many people work comfortably surrounded by tons of these materials in industrial environments. Anhydrous ammonia is a particularly scary case, as without dilution it will scorch the receptors in your nose before you can smells it, making it undetectable until you’ve taken a extremely dangerous dose. Not to take away from the supervillain levels of danger presented by things like phosgene, HF, and other comparable chemicals. I find it interesting how the perspective of what is “dangerous” is completey dependent on how you are most likely to come into contact with it. Carefully in a lab vs. casually on a maintenance contract.
Solution: Delete fluorine lab, LOL. I am not a chemist, but my Dad was a pharmaceutical chemist for 42 years. I know some basics. Honestly, just the concept of nitrogen dioxide just scares the hell out of me. I am very interested in precious metals refining but I am completely unwilling to have nitric acid around without top level PPE & fume hood, way beyond any sort of home setup. It will never happen.
A little story from my youth. I was 7 or 8, and at that age I was one of those kids who just has to touch and interact with anything new. My father happened to break a thermometer and for some reason decided to pour the mercury into a one of the ashtrays of his car. It was funny seeing the little blob of metal vibrate and bounce around with the car's movement. Yes, I did poke at it. Yes, fortunately that's all I did with it. Even today I wonder how that didn't result in some disaster.
Cyanoacrylate needs water to cure/react. Very possible that the drop of super glue became encapsulated on contact, with a cured shell surrounding the liquid glue.
I can't remember how many times i've somehow got superglue stuck to my tongue in stupid ways lol. Usually it's something like gluing up a large assembly, leaning over, a workbench stretching and somehow brushing my lip or tongue something like that on an earlier glue joint, or working with 'three hands' and holding a part, tool, light, or cordage in my teeth with spilled glue on it.
First NO2 story: They shouldn't be working with nitric acid in a poorly ventilated room and no fume hood at all, let alone reacting it so that it releases large quantities of NO2.
Hey! I have just uploaded another spicy Patreon-Exclusive Chempilation. One of the stories involves somebody smoking with brake cleaner...
You can check it out here: www.patreon.com/thatchemist
Muskrats are a big furry creature that looks like a cross between a rat and a beaver. Except it’s the size of a raccoon
You might as well warn as a free public safety message what happens when someone smokes with brake cleaner. I take it that this is something like tobacco or marijuana smoking in the presence of the fumes. Those working with automotive equipment and chemicals should know better because of flammables and toxicity, but sometimes they can be as dumb as a rock.
Weird. I use that same baby dragon egg analogy. Except I use baby Hitler. Odd how I always talk about Hitler laying eggs? Well. Not if you know hitler like I know hitler.
Question ! I'm new to the channel, do you have video compilations about what laboratories or industrt do when there's a spill or anything residue related? Based on guidelines or standards, or even improvised solutions that could work on an emergency...
no source attribution? wtf?
Me, reading the title: "Well, that doesn't sound like a very good idea."
Hahahaha
Definitely for sure
SPICY AIR
Deadly Vulcan laughing gas ⛽️.
Yeah it wasn't pleasant
When I was a student at the University of Illinois, lo these many decades ago, the head of the chemistry department was Professor Gilbert P. Haight. Prof. Haight was quite a character and everybody adored him.
The highlight of the school year was his annual Christmas Lecture. Chemistry majors and, I believe, students from the University High School were given preferential admission, although anyone could attend. It was standing room only and many people got turned away at the door.
One year I managed to get in, even though I was just one of those weird Math/Computer Science guys. Gil gave his lecture and was in full swing, doing things like igniting soap bubbles filled with hydrogen (foomp!) or a stoichiometric mixture of hydrogen and oxygen (BANG!!).
At one point he held up a lump of dry ice and asked, "What would dry ice taste like?" He explained the chemistry and decided that it would be sour, due to the formation of carbonic acid. He then proceeded to pop the dry ice into his mouth, swish it around, and spit it out. He then said, "Yep, it's sour. Never do that, by the way."
😂In my high school AP Chemistry class we all got the chance to taste dry ice, it tastes absolutely disgusting though, but surely it’s sour.
I taught at a science camp this summer, and we used dry ice to turn apple juice into sparkling apple juice, by dropping a few chunks into a half-full bottle and letting the CO2 dissolve into the drink. It didn’t really improve the taste lol
Used to deal with dry ice in decently large freezer-pallet things. The air inside always reminded me of accidentally getting pool water up the nose, very much _NOT_ the sort of thing that encourages an appreciation.
Taking my lab practical tomorrow for UIUC orgo lab, fun comment to find
@@kevindelgado3396 Greetings, fellow Illini! Good luck on your practical.
I'm not even a chemist and I always read "unionised" as "un-ionised" instead of "union-ised". Which means I'm almost always wrong, since I rarely read about ionisation.
Only chemistry experiment going wrong I experienced was in high school, where the teacher decided to show us the reaction of sodium and water. Got a big glass bowl of water, eye-balled a big chunk of sodium, with the comment that it was a bit big but should be alright and put it in the water.
It started moving around rapidly, which he explained was because it released a gas. He then got a... thing to stop it from moving so he could catch the gas. Seconds later, the whole thing exploded, with glass shards and the now slightly caustic water spraying on the students in the first three rows.
Nobody was actually hurt, but man... he could have at least raised the shield in front of the students that is there for exactly these kinds of accidents...
I've heard so many sodium+water stories like that… Probably the most common educational lab incident since it's easy to pull off and usually harmless but impressive. Which causes people to underestimate it and create major bangs.
The fluorine/cesium chemist has a different definition of “safe distance” than I do.
The pool story reminds me of a friend who had a moose fall into the outdoor swimming pool of his summer cottage in autumn (the ice must have been too thin to support the weight but hidden the fact that there was a pool below). When he returned in spring he found a transparent moose in his pool...
You mean the moose trap? It's supposed to do that.
A week ago we again had another NO2 accident. Our teacher was showing us some HNO3 and metal reactions to demonstrate passivation. Copper reacted like copper, aluminium and iron didn't react, but magnesium reacted so violently, the NO2 didn't just pour out the test tube like with Cu, but it was shooting up to the ceiling (4-5m!). I hope after this, we won't do any HNO3 experiments again, but if we do, I will have a respirator in my bag.
And that ACTUALLY looked like the thumbnail. Orange gas everywhere
Can confirm the poo in the pool story. I worked at the poll house of a YMCA one summer that had swim lessons for kids. Some of the kids that didn't want to take swim lessons figured out that if they pooped the pool it would be shut down the rest of the day while the life guards cleaned and shocked it, canceling swim lessons. This left the pool extra chlorinated for the next day. Bleached swim suits, hair, etc. And if the parents brought the pool pooper kid back for another round of swim lessons, the pool would be pooped in again.
That is also where I learned to always hold your breath when opening a chlorine container. The fumes are strong and rise up to your face quick. Granular calcium hypochlorite is no joke.
Seriously people who go to the bathroom in pools piss me off. Like seriously who wants to swim in a giant sewer?
The worst thing that happened in my school was just a room burning down, because somehow chemical waste got into the paper bin.
@@kingflockthewarrior202 the trash bin for paper...
There are nitrogen chemists and then there are chemists with fingers.
Yo, here's a compilation of mini stories from my chemistry courses in my B.Sc. in biochem:
- a classmate accidentally created significant amounts of H2S just bubbling out of her beaker. She carried it across the whole lab to a supervisor and asked what she was supposed to do with it. Being told to immediately put it in a fume hood, she casually walked back across the whole lab to her own fume hood, leaking H2S all over the place.
- Same classmate put a carbonate sample into a test tube with conc. HCl, plugged it and shook it. Bang, HCl all over the place.
- During the ion lottery (qualitative analysis of unknown salt mixtures) someone went to their supervisor and complained that despite all their tests they only found chloride and maybe sodium? The supervisor dipped his finger in their sample, licked it and said "Yeah, tastes about right" (NaCl). Apparently they pulled this prank every year, but what the hell, other students had chromates, arsenic compounds and cyanides in their samples. One mix up and the consequences would have been bad.
- Once our entire lab was evacuated because some gas that smelled like phosgene came out of a sink siphon after people (illegally) dumped some chemicals. I never found out if it actually was phosgene because it was right at the end of the course.
- Someone attached their bunsen burner to the water outlet instead of the gas outlet and was astonished when they created a pretty water fountain instead of a flame.
- During my bachelor thesis my supervisor asked me to do a "quick side experiment" for her in which I had to prepare rather large quantities of high concentration Paraquat (very toxic) in DMSO (very good at transporting toxic chemicals through your skin). I was so scared I wore all the PPE I found and triple gloved. So far, no cancer or parkinsons that I'm aware of, yay!
- Maybe a little lame, but a cautionary tale about lab safety: Later in my studies I did GC analysis of VOC that I dissolved from the collection columns using DCM. For the GC analysis, the sample is placed in a sampling vial which is a tiny glass vial with a conical insert that is spring loaded against the teflon septum in the lid. During loading, the lid slipped out of my fingers and the spring somehow shot the insert with DCM out under the fume hood window, underneath my goggles, underneath my glasses and right into my eye. Freak accidents happen and despite wearing full PPE, always be prepared to find the eyewash station while blinded!
If Cody’s Lab is scared of something you should be too. You will see him in the metal refining series get out of there quick when the NO₂ starts being generated
In my high school AP chemistry we had to do a demonstration of our choice. I decided on making a small amount of nitrogen triiodide and detonating it. I did the reaction before the demonstration day so i knew how to make the compound. I tested detonating it in the back lab room and everything went fine, fun plume of purple smoke. However i totally forgot to put on my eye protection before doing so, when i walked out of the back lab room the teacher looked like he wanted to kill me for forgetting to wear them
I've had a fairly large amount of nitrogen triiodide randomly explode once, luckily I was not in the room when it happened, but little pieces of it were scattered throughout the room. It was fun finding where all of it was, as I could just pat anything in the room and it would give a snap.
For the "we can just leave the concentrated sulphuric in that pool, right"
Just have to call eating the concrete "delayed in situ neutralization"
yeah my teacher did also release a bunch of NO2 and say it’s not that dangerous too, but at least it didn’t fill the classroom and the classroom was well ventillated
this… is insane
Considering superglue was originally designed/intended for sealing wounds in the Vietnam war, I really wonder about its toxicity. I heard heating it a lot releases cyanide gas, and (tested) when dried, heating the bond moderately (~70 C) turns it so brittle the bond made with it just fall apart.
The surgical stuff is slightly different from the industrial stuff, I don't recall the specifics though.
@@jimsvideos7201 For a starter : The common use version may contain small glass shards or other contaminants.
@Purple Burglaralarm A few years ago I found some medical grade cyanoacrylate wound bandage in the safety supply section of Home Depot to cover a frying pan edge scorch wound on my forearm. It worked fine, but the scorch left a pale scar that is still there.
Years and years back, Band-Aid used to sell a swab-catalyzed version of this stuff, then for inexplicable reasons discontinued it. The newer stuff is liquid and hardens slowly. Maybe it was the heat factor.
@@Kualinar I'd hope for other reasons that it would have no fillers unless marked as such, for I want a very thin glue line.
@@SeekingTheLoveThatGodMeans7648 The «may contain» is not that some brand may contain contaminants. It was to mean that a batch may contain some contaminant. This tube is only glue, but, that other one just next to it contains some tiny glass shards.
I'm very glad the only 'spicy water' I handle is soup with jalapenos in it
that's a speecy spicy water
Here’s a tip on how to eat organic sulfuric compounds.
1. Don’t be a vampire
2. Make sure it is a safe organism
3. Analyze the bulb
4. If it is not not a member of Narcissus, you’re good to go.
5. Worse case scenario, weaken with heat.
In other words.
תאכל/י שום
Old, bold, but not both applies in a LOT of communities. Pilots, race drivers, photographers, etc.
Bikers too. At least not without very busy guardian angels.
photographers???
@@firebird9001 Sometimes. Galen Rowell is a good example.
@@mausball ah alright, thank you
@@firebird9001 silver nitrate is explosive
I remember seeing a truck mishap like that on the USCSBs YT channel. But that was with different chemicals.
Yes, I've seen that one too. In that case, they mixed sulfuric acid and sodium hypochlorite, causing a large release of chlorine gas.
I read that at first as nitrous oxide and that sounds like an amazing time
I just watched this with my husband who is an organic chemist and he says fluorine chemists are known for having less than 10 fingers! I'm a toxicologist and love your channel! lol
Thanks for sharing! The most well known, oldest fluorine chemist is Darryl DesMarteau, who only has one hand, and one hook!
@@That_Chemist I must know more about this Darryl guy
Mandela effect, here I was JUST referring to some lawyers as "radioactive poop-flinging monkeys".
Back in High School, during a chem lab, we were working with concentrated H2SO4, and I had a small (open) vial full of about 10mL of the acid. Well, I got up to go grab something and then when I came back, the vial was gone. Turns out, the vial somehow fell off the bench, into my backpack which was hanging off a hook below, and later that day I opened up my backpack and the acid had eaten a hole clean through the backpack and turned most of my homework into a mushy sludge.
Earlier today we were doing Grignard reactions, using diethyl ether as a solvent. We had to hand warm the test tubes and the person next to me wasn’t using their fume hood, which filled the room with diethyl ether fumes. I took the brunt of it and had to leave the room. I still feel drunk as I’m writing this.
In a welding class I asked the instructor why he was holding the acetylene torch not by the torch body, but by the hoses coming into the torch. His answer: 'this way when the torch explodes I'll only lose my hand"... "when", not "if", and "only"?!? You gain a lot of respect and caution for a process hearing things like that. (He retired after a long career of teaching students how to weld safely, and still had both his hands).
When it comes to poison gases, I think NO2 gets a bit overlooked. There are a lot of incidents with it in inorganic chem labs. Even I whiffed the stuff a time or two, but always made it in the outdoors.
I'm an undergrad and during my organic lab, we were working with DCM. I had spilled a couple drops on my gloves throughout the course of one of the experiments. I noticed it felt particularly cool and thought it was probably because of the heat of vaporization and it's volatility. Unfortunately, my TA failed to inform me (or anyone else probably) that nitrile gloves don't protect from DCM and definitely came in contact with my skin. Fortunately it was only a small amount, and as a paramedic I know changing gloves often is a good safety practice so the contact time was pretty minimal. The only reason I realized something was off was because towards the end of the lab I noticed the gloves I was wearing had splotches where I'd spilt the DCM. Thankful I didn't get any burns or apparent damage to my skin. Always follow good safety practice because there's always more hazards than you're aware of.
sweet summer child
My superglue story is less dramatic, but in the moment was still somewhat intense. I woke up unusually early one day, and decided I'd go to work (early in, early out--get to do something fun in the afternoon). After getting some things started, I took a moment to fix a broken pair of sunglasses. The frame had cracked, so a little bit of CA glue was all I needed. Long story short, I glued my hand to my desk. No one else would be in for another two hours. And I suddenly, simultaneously, *urgently* had to poop. Fortunately, most of the skin of my palm stayed where it's supposed to be.
There's some climate protesters in a porche showroom that glued themselves to the floor complaining porche didn't give them a bowl to poop into. Hilariously they do bring them food (but they aren't allowed to order themselves, no vegan soy lattes) but made no attempt to remove them. I think they're still there now as of this message.
ceasium and flourine
fucking hell
Disposing of waste nitric acid into a sink with a waste disposal produced a modest plume of brown gas.
Our 1980's UK gas blender company shared a restroom with a filthy metal working company .... when their BIG HEFTY guys went in after a night on the curry and beer ... ( with a tiny pipe ) , we filled the restroom with OZONE ! ! ( cleared the smell + the guys ! ! ) ...........QED ..........
What if you needed some filthy metal?
The muskrat thing is probably some strange situation that led to a lawsuit or fear of a lawsuit so they decided to put a stupid warning on it.
There are some truly insane “large amounts of chemicals” stories from the shipping industry (I’m talking about the one with actual ships, not the generic transportation industry). I’ve never been involved with any, but because the quantities are measured in thousands of tons, sometimes the reactions get really, really big. Like, “the ship exploded” big.
The second I heard caesium my eyes were like dinner plates. I may only have a hs chem education, but my chemistry teacher instilled a hefty fear of that group.
"A large amount of radioactive monkey fecal matter of unknown origin" sounds like something you should definitely not be able to mail to someone period
8:20 The terrifying thing about acetylene cylinders is once they heat up past a certain temperature that can start a reaction inside the cylinder that spontaneously generates even more heat, until the thing cooks off and explodes.
i learned the spooky way that you shouldn't mess around with lithium. this happened 15-20 minutes ago. I opened a button-cell battery to extract the lithium, i had prepared a container of parafin oil to store it under. My bf likes when i demonstrate chemical reactions for him so i called him on facetime to show him the reaction between lithium metal and water. I took the metal and dropped it into a glass of water and it fizzed a bit and then it was over, while i was cleaning up however, i breathed in, it felt like inhaling finely ground-up pop-rocks. i rushed out of the room and started coughing and my boyfriend was freaking out so i asked him to calm down while i called poison control. nothing ended up happening other than me feeling like a total idiot for not having propper ventilation or PPE
what caused it? I'd have thought that'd make hydrogen. though I guess it could make a fine mist of lithium hydroxide
@@tsm688 i think that's what happened
Not my story, but my Chem teacher in high school told us a story about one of the main reasons why you’re not supposed to eat or chew gum in the lab. Basically, some guy was working, alone, in a lab, and was chewing gum. There was some white powder on the table, which he was 99.9999% sure was sucrose, so he dipped his gum in it, and bit down. However, it wasn’t sugar: it was something else, something explosive (I believe it was white phosphorus or something), and the other explosion BLEW OFF HIS ENTIRE LOWER JAW and killed him instantly. The homicide detective who investigated the death said that in all his years, that is the most gruesome thing he’d ever seen. Pretty messed up.
Oh and personally, I have some Fluoroantimonic acid, and while working with it, it burned through my KEVLAR GLOVE and ate through the skin on the back of my right hand. It’s since been more or less healed, but that HURT. Plus it’s super volatile, so the sensation of getting burned by what was almost a vapor was somewhat strange.
@@jaje9004 jeesus, I'd be more worried about the hydrogen fluoride than the corrosivity of that
My dad was an oil refinery technician so he worked with some rather interesting chemicals throughout his career.
One of the worst accidents (for the rest of the family) was the time he was sprayed with propane odorant. This odorant is extremely strong. If you have ever smelled a propane leak you know what it smells like.
The odorant is extremely strong. Just 1 pint (1/8 of a gallon) is added to a railcar of propane. A railcar holds about 34000 gallons. That is a ratio of 1 part odorant to 272000 parts of propane!
Dad trued everything to get the smell out of his skin but the only thing that helped was time.
It was eyewatering to be close to him for a week and noticeable for about 3 weeks. His clothes, mom didn't even try to clean them. She just burned them, and it wasn't easy as his work uniform was, of course, fire resistant.
In another story, one of the bosses at the refinery was very unpopular. Someone took a cap full of this odorant and put it in brand new pick-up truck and closed the door. The truck, parked in the sun, got hot enough to vaporize the entire cap full.
It rendered the truck undrivable, even after the interior was gutted and sand blasted inside. In the end, this brand new truck (less than 1000 miles on it) with nothing else wrong with it had to be scrapped because the smell had gotten into the metal and could not be removed.
jeezus strong odorants seem closer to chemical area denial weapons than just a mere annoyance
This video makes me say, "ONO"
Was at work we found a bottle we thought was drain cleaner, but the labels were melted so we couldn’t tell. Being smart, we tried to use gloves to move it to a bucket where we could be sure it wouldn’t leak, instead it reacted with the nitrile gloves which made them heat up rapidly to a very uncomfortable temperature. I stripped off the gloves fast enough but a tiny amount hit my legs. Despite immediate decontamination, I ended up with a bunch of tiny burns and missing patches of hair that healed fully within a few weeks. We still didn’t have any idea what was in the bottle, but we labelled it “this eats skin, do not touch”.
Wtf
You're pretty screwed when its own label has melted off. I could do with some of that for my drains...
I am the opposite of proud of this, buuut...
My biggest chemistry whoopsie involves both pharmacology and physical chemistry. It happened many years ago. At the time, I had recently been put on a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor for anxiety and depression. Because my nervous system was adjusting to the medication, I was slightly hypomanic: excessive energy, overconfidence, and a sense of invincibility. This led directly to a shockingly unwise experiment that very nearly ended with me blind or dead: I decided that I would attempt to make supercritical carbon dioxide. In my kitchen. In a glass vessel. That glass vessel being a soy-sauce bottle which I had emptied and secured the plastic lid of with a hose clamp, after charging with dry ice. I don't know what pressure the bottle reached, but it was high enough for the CO2 to liquefy, so it was several bar, at least. I was saved initially by a steady leak from the cap. When I tightened the hose clamp to secure that leak, my common sense (very, very belatedly) started kicking in, and I realized that I had a glass bottle whose pressure was rapidly increasing, and which I realized I should not have been anywhere near. Realizing the enormity and stupidity of my mistake, I placed the highly pressurized glass bottle in the kitchen sink and started filling the sink with water to cushion any possible explosion. To make matters worse, though, in my panic, I turned on the hot water rather than the cold water, which no doubt made the pressure rise even faster.
Of course, the bottle exploded. I couldn't hear anything but ringing for about thirty seconds, and the whole kitchen was sprayed with water and broken glass, and blanketed in fog. The explosion was intense enough that glass shrapnel scratched the stainless-steel sink and left deep scratches in the cabinet and ceiling above the sink. If I'd been leaning over that sink, or if the bottle had suddenly exploded any other time (which was entirely possible), I would've been blasted with glass shrapnel. The *best-case* scenario would've been serious glass-shrapnel injuries and probably blindness, but that shrapnel could easily have punctured something important.
11:07 If I had to guess, I would say that the muskrats would chew the inflatable.
When I was a kid in Dayton, July 16, 1981 a company started filling an apparently dirty tanker truck with nitric acid and ammonium bifloride and it vented nitrogen dioxide, forcing an evacuation of the surrounding area. Luckily, no one was injured, but it damaged the paint job on a bunch of cars.
I remember trying to preform electrolysis on a nail using salt as an electrolyte. While the reaction was going, the water turned a hazy teal and, in my infinite wisdom, I got a bunch of it on my unshielded hands while cleaning. From what I can deduce, none of it was stainless steel, so the risk of Hexavalent Chromium is low, but the water had a very very faint yellow tinge which could either be iron oxides in the water or incredibly dilute chromate compounds. It still haunts me to this day whether or not I gave myself skin cancer on my hands.
The color its likely due to chlorine gas generated in the electrolysis of the NaCl and a mix of iron oxides/hydroxide and iron chloride, YOU WILL BE FINE. I have done the reaction many many times usually to obtain low quality hydrogen (it contains lots of Cl2 and O2), and the conditions always destroy any Fe containing electrodes even stainless steel (platinum works quite well though, but is really expensive). I have never found significant amount of chromium in solution.
I can add another "school horror story" involving gas releases here. So, I went to a school with a single fume hood we used for any demos involving gasses or stuff like that. This was supposed to be a top of the line hood that was really new since the school had just moved buildings and bought a ton of fancy new toys for their classrooms (including a plastic vacuum former and a literal industrial bandsaw for the Craft, Design, Technology classroom to put this into perspective).
Now the teacher for this class was showing us metal reactions and decided to demonstrate with an Aluminium Iodine reaction. This involved placing a LARGE pile of powdered aluminium in the fume hood and adding several pipettes of iodine solution to it (after the first one didn't immediately react, so he added more I guess). Needless to say, the reaction starts off and we get to watch the sunlight from the window behind the fume hood shine through this lovely reddish purple iodine gas. Then... One of us looked up. Turns out the fume hood was running at max and yet the purple smoke was starting to flow out of the top vents nontheless.
Myself and the others who knew that "spooky purple smoke is probably bad" booked it out of the room followed closely by the teacher who shoved a towel under the door to stop it from leaking into the rest of the school. The rest of us were treated to the sight through the door's small window of a purple haze in the science lab.
Needless to say, we weren't allowed back into that classroom for a couple of weeks. And when we were, any exposed wood like shelves or the sides of books was stained with purplish black from the iodine reactions.
He never did that demo again.
The story at 9:50, I had something similar happen, but on a smaller scale thankfully, the main issue ended up that the relays that controlled the pumps on the pool chemical system had failed closed (mechanical relays can and will fail, many times in the closed position) and it dumped all 15 gallons of chlorine into the pool... replaced the relays with solid state relays and it's been working great since.
Me seeing thumbnail pic : THIS IS GOING TO BE GOOD!!!!!
When my brother was in his first year of the Swedish equivalent to high-school (technical/engineering program) he had a welding and lathing course that was held in the industrial machining halls, maybe half a kilometre away from the main school grounds. One day his welding/lathing teacher asked him if he could carry an ancient looking vial with chemicals back to the main school premises and give it to the chemistry teacher for identification and disposal. He said "sure" and asked his teacher what the vial supposedly contained. His teacher said "nitroglycerin", like it was no big deal, gave my brother the vial and then walked away. My brother was obviously terrified and walked the couple of hundred meters back to the school handling the vial as carefully as possible. When my brother finally made it to the chemistry lab to give the vial to his chemistry teacher and explain to him what he was supposed to do with the vial, his chemistry teacher laughed so hard! He told my brother that the welding/lathing teacher used to pull this prank on unexpecting students whenever he needed old chemicals disposed of (which needed to be done in the chemistry lab). My brother was not amused 😂 I don't remember exactly what the chemical in the vial actually was, but I think it was some kind of acid.
In high school chem we did a lab where you burned some salts over a gas burner, admired the colors, and determined whether the cations or anions where what determined the color of the flame. The lab itself went smoothly, things got bad overnight. I don’t think my class was the one to make the mistake, but some group who did the lab at some point forgot to turn off the gas valve. When my teacher came in the next day the room was flooded with gas and had to be aired out. The classroom is in the middle of the school too, so if it had ignited it wouldn’t have been good. Thankfully nothing happened, we just got a stern talk about lab safety.
I used to work back in my early 20s servicing swimming pools and yeah liquid chlorine and frighteningly some places still use chlorine gas to treat their swimming pools and it’s absolutely terrifying if your not really careful.
I remember one service customer who was a Eastman Kodak chemical engineer bought 400 lbs of calcium hypochlorite stored it inside a tool shed that contained a 300gal diesel fuel tank and a 55 gallon drum of hydrochloric acid. I immediately warned them that’s a very dangerous location you’re storing these chemicals in and in engineering assholery fashion I was told that I know what I’m doing. Three weeks later massive fire and explosion that took out the shed and half the house when he used diesel gas to try to kill termites around the building. Luckily no one was hurt.
A corrosively toxic gas in the classroom! 😋
I have some stories from my school.
The teacher told us about radioactive materials that the school has or had. One day they decided that radioactivity is too dangerous and threw away the key to the closet with all of the stuff in it. Noone knows what happened to all of that afterwards.
One day we did some experiments with acids. In one we put seashells and powdered marble into HCl. We measured the time it takes for it to dissolve and compared the times. The first experiment went normal. Then we switched to a higher concentration of HCl (the teacher put multiple bottles of it with different concentrations on a table for us to try). It reacted violently and HCl splashed all over the table. It only happened to my group and not to the others. Nobody was hit but it was a bit scary.
In uni chem class my lab partner, an absolute idiot, did a reaction outside the fumehood and filled the room with NO2.
This guy also frequently used his own finger as a stir rod.
Last year me and my (frankly awful) high school class were doing some simple chemistry. I dont know what grade it translates to where you live, but we're 9th grade here in australia. This was a general science class, not elective, so everyone has to do it including the people that dont want to and definitely shouldn't. anyways, we were doing a simple mixture of Sodium Hydroxide and Hydrochloric Acid and measuring pH. In groups of course. Surely nothing could go wrong, but the class moron (in my group of course) pours Sodium Hydroxide all over the bench. Pours, not spills. He then grabs a permanent marker and writes 'ACID' on the table with a big arrow pointing to the giant puddle of not acid. He then proceeds to spread the sodium hydroxide with his bear hands, giving him awful chemical burns and I didn't see him for weeks. I have no idea how he was allowed to touch the chemicals, let alone do all of this. I just wanted to neutralize some acid.
we have a similar saying in the fire service. “there are old firefighters and bold firefighters, but no old bold firefighters”
As an emergency department physician, I often used to see kids who had drunk household cleaners. Their parents used to rush in, panicked, with a child under one arm and a bottle in the other hand. We had access to a large database of common products and what to do for people who ingested them, but one day a child came in who had drunk some kitchen cleaner that wasn't listed and didn't have a list of ingredients on the bottle either. The label suggested that I contact the supermarket helpline for further information, so I opened an excruciatingly slow 'web-chat' to ask them what was in it. After what seemed like an age the reply came: 'We don't know what the ingredients of the product are, but if you take the child to ED they will know what to do.' Then they signed off. It's true that we thought we knew what to do and the child was fine, but it would have been nice to know for certain.
It was quite common for people to attend ED after being exposed to unknown substances. One patient had spilled a rust remover over his arm. Fearing HF acid burns I searched for the material data safety sheet online, and found that I had to Email the manufacturer to access it. They replied with the pdf attached - over a week later.
Anyway, my top tip is not to keep superglue vials or vape refills in the bathroom on the same shelf as your eyedrops.
you'd be hard pressed to find a pool noodle that DIDNT have a bite taken out of it. I have absolutely no idea why
Not my story, but my dad’s! He used to go to school in Oregon and apparently his highschool had to stop all lab work in the bio/chemistry building (about the size of three motel rooms) because when a student went in the back to find something, they also found enough sodium to “make a parking lot of half the school” sitting around and air tarnishing. I’m pretty sure he meant there was enough sodium to react with the whole storage closet if it went off, but for the longest time I envisioned a lump of the stuff bigger than my head.
3:49 we use dry ice in acetone when we do vacuum distillations, but we don't do it on pure chemicals, except validating with reagent hexadecane
For the cold trap*
As a “hobby level” welder, I’ve worked with acetylene for many years. My first “experience” with it was in a 6th grade shop class. During an after hours demonstration, the teacher filled a black garbage bag with acetylene and oxygen. It was set off by a candle on a stick (luckily outside). After we all picked ourselves off the ground, i developed the greatest respect for energetic mixtures.
I remember once, I think I was 17, when I was searching my parents' garage for ethanol to clean something. We had a bunch of cleaners from the same brand all in the same place, both old and new. I clearly remember picking up a bottle that I thought was ethanol, but wasn't sure. My dad told me it wasn't ethanol, buuut I wanted to make sure. So what did I do? I stuck my nose really close to the bottle and took a big whiff. I quickly realised that it wasn't ethanol, but a pretty concentrated ammoniumhydroxide solution (NH₃). I almost passed out, and I lost most of the hair in my nose. I remember not being able to breathe through my nose without pain for about a week and not being able to smell for about a month. Luckily, I didn't get any long-lasting damage.
Finally, A post I feel early enough to share a story from my highschool days: My freshman year of high school, we had a teacher who was a great guy, loved doing fun experiments, as it was a few years back i dont remember the exact concentration of the acids, but he was teaching us how to use them safely, proper ppe and how to use the emergency shower etc. When he decided to pick up the acids, you could already see how dry the skin on the back of his hands was from earlier, then proceeded to use pipettes to drip dilute HCl and dilute Sulfuric acid onto the back of his hand, while in an attempt to show us what would happen if we got splashed without gloves or on bare skin, he was fine. Fun experiments were had later on but i never took off my gloves or lab coat when doing labs with acids especially since i have dry skin naturally
Burnt steak and rotten tomatoes sound like they're smelling their own nose falling apart
If I see a leak in an acid vat I'm calling OSHA
one time in my hs chem class we were doing some basic stuff revolving around burning alkali metals. apparently, one of the lights in the room had shorted at one point and nobody noticed, and it was spewing a mixture of O3, O2 and H2. Needless to say, one of the flames hit the uh-oh cloud on the ceiling and detonated it. Nobody in the room could hear for a few minutes, and the local police were able to hear it from a mile away. The school's windows were/are bulletproof, so no windows shattered thankfully.
Congratulations you re-addicted me to learning.
Happy to hear that!
@@That_Chemist can you include PETN in a video?
Fluorine is a scary, horrible thing. Chlorine is bad enough, but fluorine is next level.
Re kids eating "pool noodles". I hadn't heard that term before and had a mounting sense of dread and horror that it was a euphemism. After looking it up I am very relieved.
This makes my 50ml HCl spill tame
That chemist hates dragons D:
In middle school my teacher allowed to play a little with things in the lab since I had very good grades and I won a chemistry competition that year. So I saw powdered sulfur, and powdered iron. I just wanna say, I knew exactly what would happen, I did it anyway, I don't why. So I put maybe a tablespoon of each in a glass plate (can't remember the name of it), mixed them and put them on a bunsen burner. It changed color which was cool and unexpected, but eventually it caught on fire. And again, I knew what would happen but I did it anyway for some reason, I poured water on it. I evacuated the lab and half my school smelled like farts for a while. No one ever realized what happened. And yes, I know that was dangerous but I think I was possesed by a demon so oopsie.
The last one "unionized" got me!!
Isaac Asimov used that one in an old book, I don't remember the title. I think the chapter was "To Tell a Chemist". The questions to tell a chemist were (from memory so not a quote):
- Pronounce "unionized".
- What is a mole?
Some Google searching reveals the title to be "Asimov on Chemistry". Apparently there is also a chapter "Death in the Laboratory" which has a lot about Fluorine.
When I was at high school we were cracking long chain hydrocarbons to make lighter ones. This was being done with some decent glassware (pyrex i think), but we were using bunsen burners (this was a UK high school in 2008, there wasn't a hotplate in the building). As you can imagine, producing highly flammable liquids and gasses from long chain _tar_ very quickly lead to most of the lab benches having fires, test tubes cracking due to the high heat & even an explosion which set the bench on fire.
That teacher wasn't allowed to do chemistry labs anymore after that.
I remember the USCSB has an investigation report on a time when a tanker was improperly unloaded and ended up mixing something chlorine containing and I think sulfuric acid which reacted to form a dense cloud of chlorine gas which prevented the truck operator from stopping the transfer and leading to several injuries.
The fluorine lab story sounds familiar. "The Alchemists’ Guild is opposite the Gamblers’ Guild. Usually. Sometimes it’s above it, or below it, or falling in bits around it. The gamblers are occasionally asked why they continue to maintain an establishment opposite a Guild which accidentally blows up its Guild Hall every few months, and they say: ‘Did you read the sign on the door when you came in?’"
Acetylene is dreadful stuff. Most people who used to use it, myself included, have replaced it with propane for cutting steel. It works just as well, it's a lot cheaper and much safer to handle. The only time you specifically need it is if you're doing old-timey artisan welding. Propane and similar can't be used for this because they leave hydrogen in the welds, making them brittle.
I have a story: in university freshman gen chem lab, we were trying to light our Bunsen burners. Being the tiny freshies that we were, we were having a bit of trouble. We didn't know if the gas was coming out or not, we didn't know which ways to turn the handle things, etc. Apparently the gas WAS on because I got several lungfuls of it. I got very lightheaded and stepped outside the room to get fresh air and water. For a couple hours after, I was fine... Until I started getting EXTREMELY tired and I felt kinda sick, and would kinda, idk, stop for a few seconds randomly? I didn't fall asleep, it was like I just. Blanked. I didn't fall over, I'd just be walking and I'd stop. At least I think that's what happened, I don't remember anything from when I blanked though. I don't know if I could see, or if everything went black, or if I just saw nothingness. I don't remember. I usually knew when it happened, but I didn't know what happened during the blanks. And I think I had about 15-20ish of them in a 30 minute span? Not sure. So yeah. Bunsen burner gas poisoning. That wasn't fun.
When even the formula of a chemical goes NO2
I've seen a couple chloramine stories and I wanted to share my own, although it's admittedly much more mild.
One night, I got a bee in my brain about making a little soft corner in my bedroom in the basement between the bed and the wall. Somewhere I could read, play my Wii U, etc. while being able to sit up and such, my bed wasn't a great spot.
The plan was to sanitize the corner, and then lay down some garbage bags to prevent condensation from causing more problems, as the room was only half-finished, then lay down blankets and pillows. I got everything out of the corner only to notice that my cats had urinated in the corner at some point. No matter, I figured, I was gonna mop there anyway. So I mopped up the mostly dry cat pee with some hot water, and then returned to the laundry room sink to put some bleach in the basin. I gave it a few treatments just to make sure there was nothing left, rinsing the mop each time.
I was 15, and hadn't slept properly that weekend. It didn't really occur to me that urine contained ammonia, perhaps enough to cause some problems, until after I went to rinse the mop for the last time and started coughing my throat raw. Was probably exposed to low levels of tri/chloramine for about an hour or so.
I promptly drained the sink, rinsed everything thoroughly, and went outside for some fresh air. The next day I was no worse for wear, and the cozy corner turned out great. Definitely learned to consider what's being cleaned, along with what you're cleaning with, when dealing with biological contaminants.
Remind me of org chem lab in my 1st year college. One friend sniffed brownish gas and ended up with nose bleed for hours.
Some reaction in warm water bath without film hood.
Nitrogen Dioxide.
Rule 1 is surely, 'don't sniff the pretty colourful gas'
Well I work at a semiconductor manf plant. There are huge tanks (50000 gallons) of unstabilized 35pcnt h2o2, giant drums of dry HCl gas, flourine in all its forms, arsine phosphine Germane nat gas IPA etc. I work around them all day in the subfab and fab and have never seen an accident. I myself am always professional with ppe and procedures.
Which is what makes me wonder why I seem to be so stupid when at home: i wanted to distill some drain cleaner 96pcnt sulfuric acid to be pure in my backyard, got the whole setup running and went inside. Half an hour later someone at home noticed white fog outside... Yeah i had boiled off about 500ml of sulfuric, that cloud was epic. Etched everything metal, the tree lost some leaves. Got no complaints from neighbors though (they weren't home) and i won't be that stupid or reckless again, felt really bad. So weird: safe at work but not at home..
Because at work you have the constant scrutiny and threat of consequences, maybe. Wild and interesting stories nonetheless.
Good grief I would watch that because nobody knows what could stray into a backyard -- even if it has a locked fence.
I feel compelled to put on gloves if I'm working with even the most benign things at work (Dusty boxes? Let me get my gloves!) But I just free pour the worst things at home.
A teacher of ours demonstrated acetylene by getting a big paper roll (the ones they use in paper mills to roll the paper onto), hammering a large wood plug into one end and drilling an ignition hole into it close to the wood plug. He then stuffed a towel into the other end of the tube, filled the tube with acetylene, put it onto his shoulder like a bazooka, pointed it at the door and gave fire. At exactly this moment, the door opened and the principal came in. BOOOOOM! The towel flew through the air and hit the principal in the face. We were in stitches and the teacher just stood there with the smoking tube on his shoulder. The towel slid off a very upset principal's face and he said: "Mr. Soandso, I need to talk to you!". Turned around on his heels with the sheepishly looking teacher in tow and we heard him yell in the hallway. The teacher is now the principal of this school...:)
NOOOOOO . . . Poor dragons! 🐲
if I got superglue stuck to my teeth I'd go to the dentist or hospital immediately.
It's surprisingly easy to fill a room with NO2. Once in the lab I was filtering chloroform for some polymer testing in a glass sintered filter, cleaned everything and put the bottle and filter away. Three days later I needed filtered nitric acid to clean the testing glassware, so I took a glass filter (we had 3 of the same filter, I thought I picked a different one than the previous one) and I set up and started the filtration. As I turned around I heard some bubbling behind me and I saw a red cloud exiting the filter and the beaker. That was 500 ml of 68% nitric acid decomposing in my fumehood. Closed the window and evacuated the lab for 3 hours.
I have an better grasp of chemistry than your average john doe, so I greatly enjoy this content despite the deep technical being greek to me.
One thing I recalled thinking from the toxic chemicals tier list is about how different our perspectives are due to situational experience with particular chemicals. For example, ammonia was rated as rather tame compared to some of the more nasty contenders. This is certainly true on the face of it, but in my experience working in heavy industry, it can be those more mundane chemicals that are the most sinister. Ammonia in particular is common in large tonnages for a variety of refinery applications. I worked for a time in a phosphate refinery which utilized large tonnages of anhydrous ammonia, as well as sulfuric acid and some derivatives thereof(sulfur dioxide and hydrogen di-sulfide). While not innocuous by any means, many people work comfortably surrounded by tons of these materials in industrial environments. Anhydrous ammonia is a particularly scary case, as without dilution it will scorch the receptors in your nose before you can smells it, making it undetectable until you’ve taken a extremely dangerous dose.
Not to take away from the supervillain levels of danger presented by things like phosgene, HF, and other comparable chemicals. I find it interesting how the perspective of what is “dangerous” is completey dependent on how you are most likely to come into contact with it. Carefully in a lab vs. casually on a maintenance contract.
lots of anhydrous ammonia used in refrigeration too. like 40 tons on a site. it's excellent at what it does, just a bit of a swine when it gets out.
You have old pilots, and bold pilots, but no old bold pilots.
Solution: Delete fluorine lab, LOL.
I am not a chemist, but my Dad was a pharmaceutical chemist for 42 years. I know some basics. Honestly, just the concept of nitrogen dioxide just scares the hell out of me. I am very interested in precious metals refining but I am completely unwilling to have nitric acid around without top level PPE & fume hood, way beyond any sort of home setup. It will never happen.
A little story from my youth. I was 7 or 8, and at that age I was one of those kids who just has to touch and interact with anything new.
My father happened to break a thermometer and for some reason decided to pour the mercury into a one of the ashtrays of his car. It was funny seeing the little blob of metal vibrate and bounce around with the car's movement. Yes, I did poke at it. Yes, fortunately that's all I did with it. Even today I wonder how that didn't result in some disaster.
With that NO2 incident, they could have avoided it together by capping the test tube with wool soaked in sodium hydroxide.
*looks at hands* Maybe I am a plumber
Cyanoacrylate needs water to cure/react. Very possible that the drop of super glue became encapsulated on contact, with a cured shell surrounding the liquid glue.
I can't remember how many times i've somehow got superglue stuck to my tongue in stupid ways lol. Usually it's something like gluing up a large assembly, leaning over, a workbench stretching and somehow brushing my lip or tongue something like that on an earlier glue joint, or working with 'three hands' and holding a part, tool, light, or cordage in my teeth with spilled glue on it.
👀
I get a mental picture of a cat with a bleb
Absolute power corrupts absolutely
Can be transliterated to
Absolute volatility corrupts absolutely
The unexpected alliance between peta and the NRC trying to track down who irradiated monkeys
First NO2 story: They shouldn't be working with nitric acid in a poorly ventilated room and no fume hood at all, let alone reacting it so that it releases large quantities of NO2.
NO2 can kill with delay. I can’t believe anyone would do this.
Muskrats bite. If you use one of those on a lake and it's near a muskrat, they might bite it and bye bye inflatable.