On school days — Part IV

I’m sitting in a hotel in Charleston SC, in a somewhat uncomfortable armchair, MacBook on lap and cursing the dodgy wireless signal in this place. Looking around, lots of people seem to be having similar problems. I’ve forgotten my adaptor so I’m hoping that my hung-over colleague makes it in with the work laptop.

It’s around 72°F outside and it hurts to look at the pavement sidewalk through the hotel window; my boots and winter trousers are definitely not suitable.

I’ll talk more about the conference some other time, but rather than go through my presentation again (I hate over-rehearsing) I’m going to tell you the long-promised story of how I nearly burned down the chemistry lab at school, assuming I get enough connectivity to upload it.

You might presume I was a keen student. Indeed, my imagination was limited only by limited access to necessary reagents and school safety policy (although when I did my A Levels I managed to—but no, that’s another story). So when Mr Woods performed a demonstration of something that didn’t blow up or burn holes in hands or set fire to massive amounts of paper, I thought this was my chance to have a little play.

Take, if you will, one open-ended glass cylinder about two inches in diameter. Place a square of wire gauze in one end and push it up a little way. Clamp the arrangement over a Bunsen burner. Ignite the Bunsen, allow the gauze to start glowing, then remove the heat.

Listen

This simple set-up results in an organ-like descending tone, full and rich and reasonably loud. (Why this was in a Chemistry lesson and not Physics yet escapes me.)

I turned to Allan Jones and said, ‘Let’s come back at lunchtime and see how loud a sound we can make.’ He agreed, so we approached the teacher after the class ended and put our proposal to him. He readily agreed to find the largest cylinder he could, and have it ready for us.

An hour or two later we had wolfed down our lunch, and hot-footed to the sixth floor of the Science block. Woods was waiting for us, with a cylinder about six feet long and six inches diameter.

Made of cardboard.

‘You are having a laugh. Sir.’

‘No,’ he told us, ‘it’s compressed cardboard that they ship glassware in. It won’t burn.’

‘Fair enough,’ we said, ‘hand over the kit.’

So he went off for lunch and we were left alone in the Chemistry lab with a huge cardboard tube, clamps, a box of metal gauzes and an endless supply of natural gas. And matches.

We clamped the tube between two retorts on the front bench, stuck the largest piece of gauze we could find up inside the tube, and lit a Bunsen under it. After a minute or two we guessed that the wire might be hot enough by now, and removed the burner.

Nothing.

Not an issue, we said, we’re obviously not getting the gauze hot enough. A problem solved by the application of scientific thought, and a second Bunsen. We repeated the experiment with this minor modification. Again, after a couple of minutes we removed the heat.

There was a rich, deep, loud tone. It went sort of

bwooooPHUMP

As one, we looked up. smoke billowed from the top of the tube. Faster than you could say ‘nucleophilic substitution’ I had vaulted the teacher’s bench, wrested the fire extinguisher from the wall and was climbing on the bench with the chimney, pointing the extinguisher down the hole from the top.

I squeezed the trigger.

Allan screamed.

I squeezed the trigger again, and looked down.

Flames licked round my feet and trouser leg: this was the same extinguisher Woods had used a couple of weeks previously to put out the fire in the wastebasket… and replaced without recharging. The compressed air in the extinguisher was having exactly the opposite effect as I’d intended.

I leapt off the bench, flinging the worse-than-useless extinguisher towards my friend, and sprinted to the next lab. There was no extinguisher there at all. I ran into the third and final lab on that floor, grabbed the extinguisher and pelted back into our room, which was rapidly filling with smoke. I scrambled up onto the bench, pointed the extinguisher into the top of the very flammable indeed cardboard tube, and squeezed the trigger.

The tube broke free of the retorts and tumbled to the floor. I jumped down, squirted again and the tube shot across the lab’s floor like an off-course Saturn V. Through my laughter, I managed to make Allan understand that I needed him to stand on the tube, and we got the fire under control.

‘Open a window, Jones.’

We coughed our way to the exit, just as the end of lunch bell rang. Mr Woods was coming up the stairs.

‘We had a slight fire, Sir,’ I said, ‘but it’s out now. The class is a little bit smoky, though.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ he said as he pushed open the door.

We ran.