Dangerous Childhood Chemistry Experiments

I almost got banned from high school chemistry for making this (UK 1970's). Made it during break in middle of Chemistry lab while the teacher was out, and sadly was rather sloppy - got it over the floor, threw damp filter paper covered in it into the waste paper basket (which later self-detonated), etc.

Reminds me of the Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments:https://archive.org/details/GoldenBookOfChemistryExperiments

Let's see: spilled some nitrogen tri-iodide on the floor in my high school. Even on the following day people were walking on the dried crystals, setting off small explosions that stained the linoleum brown (or was it violet?, it was 40 years ago...).Also burned off my best friend's eye brows/lashes when he got a little too closely at the blackpowder I had lit.A carbon arc I made using battery cells drew so much current through the salt-water "rheostat" that it boil

And it tastes so so sweet...When my friends and I were children we found pieces of lead while dumpster diving. Probably 5 pounds of it. We taught ourselves how to make plaster-of-paris molds and tried to counterfeit the most important thing to us - video game tokens from the local arcade.We made only a handful of tokens before we realized the effort was more than the payoff. We had to rebuild the mold each time and break it with a hammer to pull out the token.We never even tried the tok

We tried making thermite, but got sloppy and used pellets rather than powder. Our chemistry teacher (whom we did not inform of this) had fooled with stuff that went bang when he was a kid.

Try to buy a "junior chemistry set" that provides real chemistry. Or a Pyrex flask, for that matter.

Of possible interest: Experiments without explosionshttps://archive.org/details/ExperimentsWithoutExplosions

12 year old me made napalm with the dissolved styrofoam

This is really cool. I wonder if you could make a simple DIY solution using small amounts of explosive?

Nice! Goodness...you certainly played with a much more dangerous and combustible "recipe" then I, and it's good to hear you didn't hurt yourself in the process.Isn't it amazing how our inquisitive youth shields us from realizing how dangerous what we are doing really is?