By the time Watson and Crick were being honored here in Stockholm in 1962, I had been designing rockets with my adolescent companions for three years.
For fuel, we discovered that a mixture of potassium nitrate and sugar could be very carefully melted over a charcoal stove and poured into a metal
tube in a particular way with remarkable results. The tube grew larger with our successive experiments until it was about four feet long. My mother
grew more cautious and often her head would appear out of an upstairs window and she would say things that were not encouraging. The sugar was
reluctantly furnished from her own kitchen, and the potassium nitrate we purchased from the local druggist.
Back then in South Carolina young boys seeking chemicals were not immediately suspect. We could even buy dynamite fuse from the hardware with no
questions asked. This was good, because we were spared from early extinction on one occasion when our rocket exploded on the launch pad, by the very
reliable, slowly burning dynamite fuses we could employ, coupled with our ability to run like the wind once the fuse had been lit. Our fuses were in
fact much improved over those which Alfred Nobel must have used when he was frightening his own mother. In one of our last experiments before we
became so interested in the maturing young women around us that we would not think deeply about rocket fuels for another ten years, we blasted a frog
a mile into the air and got him back alive. In another, we inadvertently frightened an airline pilot, who was preparing to land a DC-3 at Columbia
airport. Our mistake.
At Dreher High School, we were allowed free, unsupervised access to the chemistry lab. We spent many an afternoon there tinkering. No one got hurt and
no lawsuits resulted. They wouldn't let us in there now. Today, we would be thought of as a menace to society. If I'm not mistaken, Alfred Nobel for a
time was not allowed to practice his black art on Swedish soil. Sweden, of course, was then and still is a bit ahead of the United States in these
matters.
I never tired of tinkering in labs. During the summer breaks from Georgia Tech, Al Montgomery and I built an organic synthesis lab in an old chicken
house on the edge of town where we made research chemicals to sell. Most of them were noxious or either explosive. No one else wanted to make them,
somebody wanted them, and so their production became our domain. We suffered no boredom and no boss. We made enough money to buy new equipment. Max
Gergel, who ran Columbia Organic Chemicals Company, and who was an unusually nice man, encouraged us and bought most of our products, which he resold.
There were no government regulators to stifle our fledgling efforts, and it was a golden age, but we didn't notice it. We learned a lot of organic
chemistry. |
That's the gentlest flame that's been thrown in this
thread.
Not like
the anarchist cookbook garbage that will get you killed in about 5 min after set-up.