“We are in deep shit.” The tension in my friend Mike’s voice on the phone was all too obvious. “We’ve got ten millilitres of it.”
Strictly speaking it was Mike who was in deep shit rather than the rest of us. The Covert Chemistry Club had recently started its quest to make nitroglycerine and as Mike’s house was the only one with a fridge it was in his kitchen that the final mix had been prepared using the ice from the fridge to keep the reaction cool. Now it looked as if we had been successful in preparing about ten mils (two teaspoons) of the explosive, which was rather too much for comfort and certainly too much for Mike’s fridge.
In the science stream at school we had been studying chemistry and physics for a while. Whereas our physics teachers didn’t quite hit the mark, our two chemistry teachers, in their different ways, had managed to enthuse a reasonable number of us in their art. To be fair to the school, we had been allowed to prepare a number of interesting compounds in our classes but a few of us were more adventurous. Hence, our formation of the Covert Chemistry Club to expand this interest outside school. We got the idea from a lecture given to our school science club by a retired army explosives expert. He did the rounds demonstrating just how many things were actually explosive and how you could handle them safely (while still exploding them.) It was the only lecture I have ever attended in which the preparation consisted of opening all the classroom windows and lining up the fire extinguishers.
We were aware that what we were doing could be dangerous and, within the limits of our knowledge, we were careful about how we went about things. For example, the newspapers often featured kids who were maimed or worse after con-structing fireworks from chemicals that were readily available from hardware shops. We knew enough science to understand that these mixtures were inherently unstable and didn’t touch them.
Nitroglycerine, though, providing it is manufactured with high grade chemicals, washed, then kept cool does not spontaneously explode. In a second hand bookshop I had found an American self-help book published at the turn of the century for settlers in the wild prairie. It contained details of how to make everything needed on the Oregon Trail, from cesspits to blacksmith forges, including along the way how to manufacture most common explosives on an industrial, or at least a large farm, scale. The Club had already experimented with small amounts of nitrogen tri-iodide, manufactured from ammonia; we made it in small quantities and it exploded when you touched it with a satisfying crack and a puff of purple iodine vapour. We had done gunpowder but that was a bit boring. It was useful in my home made cannons, but since my mother had placed a restriction on when I could fire them because of the council rent man’s sensitivity to noise, that area of research was somewhat in decline.
Our current quandary was that we hadn’t really considered what we would do with the nitro if we succeeded in making it. Firstly, it had to be washed fairly quickly so that the remaining acid didn’t make it unstable, then we had to decide where and how to detonate it. Also, we didn’t know how often Mike’s mother would go to the fridge before she noticed a small additional bottle up the back.
In the end we decided that we couldn’t leave it lying around and would have to detonate it as soon as possible. Which brought us to the second problem: perhaps surprisingly, nitroglycerine doesn’t explode that easily. If you used a normal slow fuse, it might catch fire and burn but it probably wouldn’t explode. For that you need a detonator which provides a short, sharp impulse, and we couldn’t find anything that could be easily made up to do this. However, as part of another project, I had been experimenting with exploding wires. These were fine pieces of copper wire through which you discharged a very large electric current. The sudden rise in temperature caused the wire to vapourise explosively with a sharp crack. If you inserted such an assembly into a bottle of water, for example, the resulting shock wave from the spark would easily shatter the glass.
So, overnight I prepared an exploding wire detonator and early Sunday morning the nitroglycerine was retrieved from Mike’s fridge and we carefully carried it down the far end of his garden to a tree stump next to the back fence. Mike took the top off the bottle and I gingerly inserted the detonator on the end of the longest stick I could find; we all knew that we were way outside our safety zone but what else could we do? We retreated up the garden path, energised the wire and the stump disappeared in a cloud of smoke, accompanied by a decent explosion – decent, because it was loud enough to satisfy but didn’t break any windows. Which is more than could be said for the tree stump which was now in splinters; accompanied, unfortunately by a couple of yards of fence. At this stage, though, there wasn’t much we could do about that. When Mike’s parents got home from church later that morning we apologised for knocking their fence down while playing cowboys and indians, received a good dressing down and Mike was grounded for a while but other than that they didn’t seem to notice the absence of the tree stump.
In reflecting about this incident later, it occurred to me that, had the Native Americans had us on their side during the frontier wars, they might well have done somewhat better against the cowboys.
Accidents with Ink 