Chemistry 101: "Step Back"

After the flash, a pillar of smoke rose and spread out like a great mushroom. We gasped. We had heard about the bombs and what they had done in Japan. Now we were witnesses to a second phenomenon. The year before we sat in awe in front of a volcano and watched the convulsions from its inside pour over its slopes in a sea of hot goo.

The bomb that we watched was set off by our teacher. "Step back," she advised us. The bomb, and the volcano, were demonstrations that were planned to excite us and to tease our interests in the hope that we would pursue the science of elements and compounds and mixtures that was called Chemistry I.

Our introduction to chemistry in eighth grade was helped along with a little luck at home. At birthday time (August) and at Christmas, parents worth their salt included educational toys with their list of presents for their children: erector sets, exacto knives, printing presses, caligraphy pens and india ink, chemistry sets. The big boxes that contained these gifts inticed us. Little male models demonstrated their products. On the chemistry box a kid lifted a beaker full of mystery...a budding Irenee duPont or Mr. Hyde? The classroom might turn a hobby to a way of life if the chemistry was right.

We got the recipe for the bomb from the teacher. Here's an opportunity to show the parents what goes on in class. In earlier efforts they weren't able to relate to Latin — too foreign. But this might interest them.

Before the time when prohibitions made the purchase of certain chemicals difficult, you could buy a Vicks inhaler across the counter, that, sufficiently snorted, would soon allow an MG to drive through your nose. Even Coca Cola had to change its formula when the government noticed some potential for making soda-fountain habitues into junkies.

The Gilbert chemistry set was fundamental. Experiments, in those days before lawyers got clever, didn't take a toll on those who mixed things up. But the classroom did have the potential to get the imaginative going beyond the parameters of its program.

"What was that formula again?"

There was a chemist in Germantown who sold all of the stuff that would make my bomb (bigger than the one at school). Those things weren't in my Gilbert inventory so I walked across town to purchase the ingredients, and I brought them home and mixed them and prepared the fuse. After a proper introduction to my parents and my sister, all to their shame demonstrating no interest, I lit the match that would rouse them from their torpor.

It did indeed.

"Step back!" I echoed my teacher's advice. The flash seemed bigger in our kitchen. The cloud mushroomed to the perimeters of the room and spilled into the dining room. The fallout filled the house before anyone could act. Act? What could they do? The choices lay between fleeing and trying to save the house. The table where the bomb was detonated was ruined. Its porcelain cover was mangled from magnesium fusion. The shock of things gone bad was so sudden, so monstrous, that their assent to the experiment being done indicted them in its stupid complicity. Punishment was beyond their agenda once air was restored. They were struck dumb and when they recovered they just wanted things cleaned up. Nothing more.

But the Gilbert chemistry set, which was not a part of the atom bomb on Mayland Street, disappeared. If you think that I protested, or even inquired about its fate, you are a fool. Let sleeping dogs lie, I say. I was thankful that the mean arm of retribution didn't smack me for my error. Shame suppressed any thought of making light of the incident to my friends. But a pattern developed and some unauthorized moves in the classroom that involved magnesium, phosphorus and iodine didn't set well with people in charge. I seemed to have bent more toward Hyde than duPont.

The hole in the table that sat at the curb with the trash was a testament to my failure to do my homework. At school the bomb was ignited on an asbestos mat. I confess I'm still not much disposed to details.

Chemistry went the way of Economics.