Boing Boinged: Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments

Mark Frauenfelder, Make magazine’s editor in chief, posted the preface of Robert Bruce Thompson’s latest book, the Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry: All Lab, No Lecture recently on Boing Boing.

In the preface Thompson tells about receiving his first chemistry set from his parents one bright Christmas morning in 1964. “It was a Lionel/Porter/Chemcraft chemistry set, and the exact model I’d asked for. The biggest one, with dozens of chemicals and hundreds of experiments. Glassware, an alcohol lamp, a balance, even a centrifuge. Everything I needed to do real chemistry. I instantly forgot about the rest of my presents, even the BB gun. I started reading the manual, jumping from one experiment to another,” he explains.

Thompson, the author of Building the Perfect PC, Astronomy Hacks, and the Illustrated Guide to Astronomical Wonders, also explains that he set out to write this book after a conversation with his friend and neighbor Jasmine Littlejohn.

“If Jasmine was to do more than make pretty colors and stinky smells, if Jasmine was to do real chemistry, she’d need more than just access to a lab. She’d need detailed instructions and some sort of structured plan to guide her through the learning process. She’d need to learn how to use the equipment and how to handle chemicals safely. She’d need well-designed experiments that focused on specific aspects of laboratory work. In other words, she’d need a home chemistry lab handbook, one devoted to serious chemistry rather than just playing around.

My first thought was to get Jasmine one of the classic home chemistry books published back in the 30s, 40s, or 50s. Some of those were excellent, but all of them required chemicals—such as benzene, carbon tetrachloride, salts of mercury, lead, and barium, concentrated nitric acid, and so on—that were once readily available but are now very expensive or difficult to obtain.

In one sense, that wasn’t really a problem. I already had most of that stuff in my lab. But even the best of those old books would have required some serious red-lining before I’d have turned Jasmine loose with it. One, for example, suggested tasting highly toxic lead acetate (also known as “sugar of lead”) to detect its sweetness. Others were a bit casual about handling soluble mercury compounds or contained experiments that were potentially extremely dangerous.

You can read the rest of Thompson’s inspiring preface here.

Thompson’s new guide is for responsible teenagers to adults, folks who want to learn about chemistry by doing real, hands-on laboratory experiments. It isn’t for those who want to make fireworks or explosive.

I’m also giving away a free copy of the Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry. All you have to do is post a comment about your favorite chemistry set and/or experiment and/or why you think hands-on chemistry education is important by May 12, 2008. You may be the lucky winner of my fair but arbitrary selection.

In other news, Kevin wins a copy “Google Apps Hacks” for posting his favorite Google app hack. Check out Kevin’s winning hack and the all the other hacks here.