Jesus! Ive seen what a few grams of Sodium does in water, but five kilos!
I remember in year 9, we were burning methelated spirit using a glass container and a wick along with other fuels to compare the efficiency of different fuels or somthing like that.
Well our science desks have two sinks at either end, and a channel running down the middle between them, to allow liquids to be poured into it and drained into the sinks.
Somebody accidentally knocked over one of the methelated spirit containers and the contents were spilled into the channel in the desk, the end result being a 5 foot long river of flame flowing along the desk! Luckily a fire extinguisher was at hand soon enough and the assistant put the fire out!
Another time some idiot in class decided to sniff a test tube of diluted Bromine, right after the teacher had just warned not to do so, he did it deliberately, what an idiot, well it was fun to watch him squirm afterwards
Someone once also smacked a load of burning Magnesium with a metal ruler, they got a face full of very hot sparks, they were banned from practicals for a year for that.
This is the Applied Science AS Level group - AKA the ones who aren't clever enough for a "proper" science (except me - i do it because i can't pick a Science, and cos it's easy...). The same group that tried to fill a sink with board cleaner and set fire to it.
On second thoughts this group probably shouldn't be allowed to do ANY practicals...
Dear me. Sounds almost as bad as my top set science group. We're awful during practicals. I have a liking to dipping splints in various liquids, then setting fire to it. Or smaking bunsen burners so that all the stuff inside them burns a pretty colour. My best friend enjoys setting fire to his ink eraser and biro. I once set fire to a piece of paper by holding it on top of a fuse wire when it was very hot. I burnt my hand.
The worst thing of all - my chemistry teacher is my friend's mother!
Haha, another story we were told was that someone a few years above us stole 'a chemical' from the chemistry labs. Unfortunately, the chemical he decided to steal was phosphorus and his preferred method for transporting his ill-gotten gains was unwrapped, in his pocket.
I remember in middle school when I found a wall plug with about 1 foot of cable attached (someone had cut the power cable off of something I guess.) So, with my three friends watching, I twisted the wires together on the cut end of it and plugged it into a power outlet on one of the lab tables.
I have never in my life seen such a bright light. The whole end let up a BRIGHT white and the cable started flopping around, making a hissing sound and letting out a whole lot of white smoke. So I grabbed it and pulled it out onto the ground. Meanwhile my three friends stood in line in front of it so the teacher (who was buried in a book) couldn't see while me and another kid furiously fanned the air to get rid of the smoke...
Some idiot in my electronics class did that, except he was holding the two wires from the outlet and touched them together. It pissed the teacher off, and he gave him an F on the project we were doing (AC-DC power supply).
ive seen stuff like this but the closest ive ever came was putting a foam cup upside down on a metal plate then stuck a bunser burner underneeth it at full blast... the bang it made gave everyone a hearth attack
We did some experiment where we put a flake of some karbide in a test tube and dripped some liquid on it (acid maybe), and it expanded to over fill the tube and ooze alot. Except for one group who mumbled that all the karbide they measured diddn't fit in the tube and that they diddn't have enough liquid (prolly miscalculated milli for mega or something). Luckily, I laghued so hard in anticipation of the fireworks that the Teacher payed the group a visit and sent them study theory instead.
Doesn't Francium react so violently with water you can't even expose it to air, because of the water vapour? I may be thinking of Caesium, although I know they're both right up near the top of the reactivity series.
Ahh, a couple months ago..I was sitting in my science class my teacher wash showing us what sodium and water does..He put it in a beaker kept chopping little pieces off for about 7 trys....Well, he got a plastic case and put it over the beaker (not a very smart thing to do) So he chopped alittle bit bigger pieces off..Well the last time he cut to much off...way to much. The little spark burnt up all the air inside the case..then the rest of the sodium burnt and the whole case just exploded and glass and plastic shards when flying across the room I got smacked in the face with glass and it gave me a little cut..What pissed me off was..I was recording on my cell phone and I went to film what he was doing and i ran out of space before it exploded...
So in all, DO NOT put a plastic case over a glass beaker and drop sodium into water...
Youd be lucky if you ever saw some in your life. Very rare substance.
Funniest thing i ever did was heat a spoon on a blue flamed bunsen for 30 seconds and leave it on the table for someone to pick up (cue my teacher) end result she burnt her finger, had a really hard time keeping a straight face. She knew it was me bu just smiled musn't have been as hot as i thought.
my current teacher was showing some yr 7's something about wax and exploded covering him in hot wax he had to walk around like that all day too.
I remember one particular lesson when we were all making different chemical compounds and in a moment of collective curiosity the whole class gathered around a sink, minus the teacher who thought we were just cleaning up, and poured the contents of our beakers into one large container. It could only be described as a bubbling brew that looked like it should have been in a cauldron surrounded by witches chanting spells. It was changing colour everytime a new beaker of stuff was added and it made lots of fizzing noises. We could of blown ourselfs up, but when your 16 you get bored enough to risk that in a science lesson.
Oh and there is the time a whole section of the school was evacuated after my rather intelligent friend realised he could make smoke with the various chemicals the class were using at the time. Smoke just poured out of this tiny petri dish and filled the room, then spread into the hallway and other classrooms. The beauty of it was he had put it on the teachers desk and because it was effectively a smoke bomb, he got away without being seen!
By the way I think it is Francium, if I remember correctly they are arranged in a line going down one side o the periodic table, but it was so long ago I have probably got that wrong. I know one of them needs to be kept in oil because it will react with the air. I personally would like to throw a brick of it into a pond and see what happens...or flush it.
You can make really reactive metals (for anything more reactive than calcium - you need this) safe by storing then in an oily substance. If you then put it in water, you'd get a delay before it went bang, as the oil flowed away.
And that is true, (/me thinks) pure Caesium and Francium might react with the water vapour in the air if it was very humid.
Best that happened to me was setting my whole table on fire. We were boiling a mixture of some salts in pure alcohol, with a large glas tube ontop of it to have a larger pressure inside the conical flask and to keep it far away from the flame (IIRC). But with the teacher standing aside it suddenly boiled over, sending the alcohol through the tube in the air, raining back down in the bunsen burner flame....WOOSH, whole table on fire
She just told us to wait a few seconds till the alcohol burned away:bananadea
You didn't do it on purpose? You Germans are missing out on the UK version of science class. We used to spell our names out in stuff like that and set fire to it, it burns for about half a minute then doesn't even leave a mark. Or there is the classic one where you spray deoderant all over your hand and set fire to it, it just burns up and then goes out, doesn't even hurt but looks very cool.
ahahaha. Seen that done - take a bag, spray it FULL of Deodorant, take a power pack and "spark" the pins together inside the bag and make fire. Unfortunately they did this and the teacher started turning round - one smashed their hand down on it to put it out, but they didn't know there was a hole in the bag - the fire shot out, up the kids arm and took off his eyebrows.
Dumbass, it was a regular thing in the changing rooms after P.E at our school. People used to spray their whole arm and set it on fire, it was that or fighting.
I remember one chemistry class where the teacher demonstrated the distillation process, using his home made mulberry wine...the result didn't taste that good, but by feck, it had a kick to it!
God your school's sound fun most fun me ever had btw i'm in year 8 was last year when my old science teacher plugged a pencil into mains electricity wasn't expecting the bang lol it was my old pencil i happened to drop it in a can of beer the night before lol.
Oh yeah this years fun was when my mate dropped a beeker of hydrochloric acid on the floor
