I don't think the sixties were over yet when my older brother learned the formula for
gunpowder.
He must have been around twelve years old, so I was around six at the time. Back then, we were sort of a Batman and Robin team, specially during the summer months. I was always amazed by how much he knew compared to me. When my brother was around ten, he got a chemistry set and he enhanced his mad scientist skills by doing research at the library.
Yes kids, at the library. No Google back then. We would walk twenty minutes to get there. This is back in Alicante, Spain, where the weather was always nice, a la San Diego in the US. There was always the possibility that a trip to the library would turn into something else. Sometimes on our way there we would run into friends that were playing soccer or doing something fun at one of the parks. The beach was just a thirty minute walk or a ten minute bus ride from our home. We went to the beach a lot, but we would get bored of it after a while. The summer was great and it lasted for a very long time.
I learned to read very quickly and became interested in science early in life. Our parents ran their own business and they had their hands full at the time. The fact that Spain only had two TV channels back then, pushed us out of the house early during the day. Channel 1 started to broadcast at noon, mainly news. Channel 2 at 4pm, mainly NPR like artsy content. This was not an "electronics centric" era, for entertaintment we had to do physical stuff.
My brother had many cool chemical experiment ideas that were a source of thrills. My brother sold them to my parents as scientific "research", that is, if we were caught doing something dangerous. My parents had mixed feelings about this, they were proud of our learning resourcefulness but they were concerned about our safety.
My brother started with his experiments by burning things. Alcohol burns at a low enough temperature that you can actually set your hand on fire for a few seconds without hurting your skin. We successfully attempted this a few times. It was a tremendous rush, if you didn't get burned, that is.
One time the experiment went wrong just as my mother walked into the family room. We were both yelling and flailing our arms in a panic. My brother had a portion of his arm on fire. I had the back of my hand. Somehow, we spilled the alcohol container and the fire got out of control. It is a blur from there. I remember how shocked my mother looked when she walked in. I remember my brother crying pretty hard and me yelling when my mom rubbed burn ointment on the back of my hand. Good times.
After we were grounded from ever burning anything, we started experimenting with chemicals. Hydrochloric and sulfuric acid were readily available at the old fashion hardware store nearby. The fact that they would sell this stuff to children would be unthinkable in the US of today. This was Spain in the late sixties, early seventies. People could not vote, but they could buy any type of dangerous chemicals. The clerk would naturally assume we were on an errand for our parents. Those substances were commonly used for masonry work.
The experiments went pretty well for the most part. I recall getting some superficial acid burns here and there from splashes since the whole concept of using gloves was still too advanced for our skill level. Cool stuff. One day we decided to mix hydrochloric acid and bleach. My brother was trying to make chlorine. We did this at the kitchen table, on some plastic bucket. As my brother expected, we got chlorine, but in gas form. I don't think he was clear on how toxic this gas really was.
The white fumes coming out the mixture were as unbreathable as tear gas. It looked like the white smoke you get from dry ice. We had the windows open, but we started coughing uncontrollably and tearing up pretty bad. My brother tried to dump the mixture in the sink to stop the reaction, but he was getting too close to the fumes and it was hard for him to see where he was going, not to mention breath. My father walked in, with the same shocked look on his face that my mom had before and pulled us out of the room. We were grounded from chemistry for a long time.
After this we decided that biology was the thing to do. We had tadpoles, a pet spider, a pet preying mantis and silk worms. Somehow we didn't get the powerful rush from biology that we got from chemistry. I truly sympathise with Walter White on this. So we had to go back to chemistry, but this time we went under cover and without the help of an RV.
Gunpowder.
-To be continued. -
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