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Registered Member #96
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4062
"Came the moment, and I tried to syringe in my solution. But the plunger was putting up a fight - in fact, it was good and stuck. What I didn't realize was that this was one of the generic medical-supply syringes with the black rubbery tip on the plunger - for a good seal, you know, with blood and so on. Most organic solvents make that stuff swell up like a puffer fish, though, and I was just finding this out. I pushed harder. Nothing. I had to get that stuff in there, though, so I really put my thumb into the job, and SPLAT! The barrel of the syringe blew apart from the needle, and my compound sprayed all over the front of my shirt.
I didn't handle it too well. When I realized what had happened, which didn't take long, I started yelling and cursing, and then spotted a stack of cork rings. With plenty of venting left to do, I started throwing them out the door, with a different obscene adjective to accompany each one. My labmate, realizing that something was amiss, had already moved out of the flight path. But one of the inorganic chemistry professors was coming down the hall and just missed catching a cork ring in the ear. "Think I'll go around the other way," he said, taking a quick look around the door into my lab. ...."
Registered Member #2123
Joined: Sat May 16 2009, 03:10AM
Location: Bend, Oregon
Posts: 312
My personal worst was in Organic Chemistry Lab in college. I knocked a graduated cylinder full of Chlorosulfonic Acid into a sink where there was running water, none of this under a fume hood. Evacuated the entire class from the lab room, nobody got hurt.
Registered Member #16
Joined: Thu Feb 02 2006, 02:22PM
Location: New Wilmington, PA
Posts: 554
My Grandfather successfully destroyed the Chemistry building at Allegheny College here in Meadville PA back in the 50s. Apparently they were working with anhydrous alcohol of some flavor, and a flask full of it failed and exploded during a weekend when thankfully nobody was around.
He said that as near as they could figure, some kind of contamination started a reaction Friday afternoon, and late that evening...boom. The explosion occurred in the back of the room, blowing all of the furniture in the room out the exterior walls and into the yard.
Registered Member #72
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 08:29AM
Location: UK St. Albans
Posts: 1659
I nearly killed a French teacher.
17 years old, I and my chemistry course mates had just discovered acetalydes. At that age we were allowed priveledges like being allowed to do stuff in the school advanced chemistry lab, unsupervised, at break time (the fools!). So we'd cooked up an inadvisably large quantity of copper acetalyde, and were evaporating it to dryness over a bunsen burner, at one end of the lab.
As the euphoria of having made this stuff uninterrupted by staff began to wear off, we began contemplating the situation we'd got ourselves into, as we looked at the now spitting evaporating dish. The power-assisted drying plan didn't seem so good after all. You turn it off, no you, no you, we argued, as we backed away down the lab. Eventually we crouched down behind the furthest bench, peering beneath exercise books, as we waited for the bang.
The lab door opened and in walked a French teacher. The duty of staff at break time was to keep the school rooms clear, and he was obviously cruising from room to room, ejecting errant pupils. Even if I had had no science training at all, if I walked into a lab, which contained spitting apparatus at one end, and several people hiding behind a barrier at the other, I would not have done what Mr. Souster did. Stunned into speechlessness by his behaviour, we watched, wondering what sort of fuss would be caused by a dead teacher, as he glanced at us, walked over to the bunsen, peered into the dish, grunted, and left the lab after a final puzzled stare in our direction.
After a further 20 minutes of nothing significant happening, we drew short straws for who was going to investigate. Fortunately, the boiling had been so vigourous that all of the compound had been spat out of the dish onto the bench.
The following term we put in a project proposal to make silicon, using a thermite-like rection with magnesium and sand, initiated by a magnesium and potassium chlorate fuse. We were turned down!
Registered Member #902
Joined: Sun Jul 15 2007, 08:17PM
Location: Pacific Northwest USA
Posts: 1042
Dr. Slack wrote ...
I nearly killed a French teacher.
17 years old, I and my chemistry course mates had just discovered acetalydes. At that age we were allowed priveledges like being allowed to do stuff in the school advanced chemistry lab, unsupervised, at break time (the fools!). So we'd cooked up an inadvisably large quantity of copper acetalyde, and were evaporating it to dryness over a bunsen burner, at one end of the lab.
As the euphoria of having made this stuff uninterrupted by staff began to wear off, we began contemplating the situation we'd got ourselves into, as we looked at the now spitting evaporating dish. The power-assisted drying plan didn't seem so good after all. You turn it off, no you, no you, we argued, as we backed away down the lab. Eventually we crouched down behind the furthest bench, peering beneath exercise books, as we waited for the bang.
The lab door opened and in walked a French teacher. The duty of staff at break time was to keep the school rooms clear, and he was obviously cruising from room to room, ejecting errant pupils. Even if I had had no science training at all, if I walked into a lab, which contained spitting apparatus at one end, and several people hiding behind a barrier at the other, I would not have done what Mr. Souster did. Stunned into speechlessness by his behaviour, we watched, wondering what sort of fuss would be caused by a dead teacher, as he glanced at us, walked over to the bunsen, peered into the dish, grunted, and left the lab after a final puzzled stare in our direction.
After a further 20 minutes of nothing significant happening, we drew short straws for who was going to investigate. Fortunately, the boiling had been so vigourous that all of the compound had been spat out of the dish onto the bench.
The following term we put in a project proposal to make silicon, using a thermite-like rection with magnesium and sand, initiated by a magnesium and potassium chlorate fuse. We were turned down!
funny, when I wrote a proposal to make silicon I got it approved!
I used the following reaction (may not be properly balanced here due to laziness)
Mg + SiO2 => Si + 2 MgO
then the contents, which were undoubtedly a non-perfect result containing some remaining sand and magnesium, were hand dumped into a vat of Hydrochloric Acid which produces a nice little firework show (which our Chemistry teacher was, apparently, unprepared for). The result is the impurities producing Hydrogen Gas, Silane Gas (which ignites spontaneously with air) and some dispersed magnesium powder
the result was this: once the test tube with the Mg and SiO2 ignited, our teacher jumped back from the shield, managing to weave the test tube in her hand out from the other side of the shield, and after a few seconds in panic holding a flaming test tube, and us screaming "Dump it in the Acid Vat!" she dumps it in, and after big bada boom we had low grade silicon.
About a year ago in our chemistry lab we were reacting potassium with ethanol, which normally just results in some violent fizzing. My friend however decided to react the potassium with a bowl of water. Im sure youv all seen this reaction, big blue flame with the potassium skidding around the water. Well this happened for a few seconds, then for some reason it stopped reacting and just sank to the bottom of the bowl, not too sure how or why this occured, but anyway my friend then decided to stab it with a scalpel. The following explosion spread the bowl across most of the desk, cutting my fingers a bit but miraculously he was unharmed.
Registered Member #96
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4062
hmm. My worst one was the exploding pint glass, due to inadvisable drilling with a press drill too quickly while unsupported. Never seen a glass disintegrate like that before, be warned guys...
Registered Member #2261
Joined: Mon Aug 03 2009, 01:19AM
Location: London, UK
Posts: 581
Sounds like that was toughened glass, as used in pubs and bars. Toughened glass isn't considered workable: even if you managed to drill it without mishap, it might shatter unexpectedly at a later date due to the inbuilt tension in the glass.
Registered Member #1062
Joined: Tue Oct 16 2007, 02:01AM
Location:
Posts: 1529
@Conundrum
Yea, seems like you had tempered glass. This is the same reason car windshields are tempered. They are stronger, and when the break, the break ALOT, preventing daggers of glass impaling you.
You guys had some big accidents.... my worst was chemical burns around my eye from sodium hydroxide. There was more NaOH in the water than there was water (110g in 100g).
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Chemistry lab mishaps
