Sciencemadness Discussion Board - Tons of demos and experiments but how to share?

Tons of demos and experiments but how to share?

Mailinmypocket - 7-4-2012 at 18:18

I have been digging through my boxes and boxes of books and other chemistry stuff and came across something I forgot i had!

Its a collection of chemistry demos and experiments from 1924 and later, the book itself is over 250 pages of compressed text, just solid blocks of amazing demos, one after the other. The safety precautions are definitely light and very old style. Nothing like you would see for demos in modern chemistry manuals.

A collection of "Tested Demonstrations in Chemistry". Has lots of experiments I have never heard of or known of but that seem very cool including chemiluminescence, one of the ingredients is cayenne pepper!! (I havent tried it but its in there)

My problem is here: The book is bound with huge staples that I can easily remove and glue on the spine. I will try and scan it all into one document if there is enough interest from you guys... It feels like a waste to not share the amount of cool stuff in this collection! If this is a fairly common book I wont bother but I cant seem to find any copies online...

Worse comes to worse if anyone wants old fashioned experiments on certain elements, reactions, mixtures, let me know and I will scan the pages on that topic and post them

There is something for everyone

I threw a few photos of the pages, some are compressed text with instructions for one demo after another and others have more complex diagrams and whatnot. A very cool book!

Does anyone know an easy way to scan and assemble the pages in order easily?

[Edited on 8-4-2012 by Mailinmypocket]

malcolmf - 8-4-2012 at 01:48

That book looks fabulous!

Most cameras these days will have sufficient resolution to produce readable images. Even with the low resultion images posted, it looks as if yours will do the trick, so with a simple stand and higher resolution you should get decent results.

The diy bookscanner web site would be a good place to start: http://www.diybookscanner.org
There's open source software called Scan Tailor for tidying up pictures, deskewing etc. that's worth investigating: http://scantailor.sourceforge.net

But if it's only held together with staples, disbinding and a flatbed scanner might be the best way to go.

Morgan - 8-4-2012 at 04:43

That book looks familiar to me somehow. DId it have a light blue cover do you know? In the book is there was experiment called purple rain in which it said it was no longer recommended.

[Edited on 8-4-2012 by Morgan]

neptunium - 8-4-2012 at 05:52

i love older books like this one! i have a collection of them from 1876 to present most of them from the early 1900 and the 50's.
cant find anything quite like this anymore! always a good find! treasure it keep it safe away from humidity..... and kids!!

Mailinmypocket - 8-4-2012 at 06:14

Thanks for the suggestions malcolmf! Sadly I took a closer look at the binding and despite the book being bound in huge staples it is also made up of about 15 "mini-books" so after removing the staples I would need to actually cut the spines off with an x-acto knife and then scan them normally etc.

After the whole affair is done, knowing my excellent organizational skills when it comes to keeping papers in order.... it would be the end of the book. The pictures there were just taken with my iPhone 4 and it usually makes good pictures of print. The idea crossed me to set up a stand with clamp over the book and then turn the pages one by one and photograph them. That would work pretty good except that the iPhone creates huge photo files (2-3 mb each) and doesnt give the option to reduce quality. Meaning I would not only need to attach each image separately and assemble them with software, I would also need to reduce the file size for each one.. Just seems like too much work.

Maybe on some rainy day I will commit to trying along with having a few beers

The book did have a blue cover which fell off when I took it out of storage, not a big loss though... didnt even say anything on it.

The purple rain experiment you mention sounds interesting especially since even THEY said it wasnt recommended... must mean it was something good! Another drawback to this book is the fact that there is no list of the names of demos, just topics like : Plastics, Platinum family, Poisonous gasses, Pyrophoric materials etc etc

Nothing mentioned for purple rain though, I checked precipitates and there was nothing. I plan on going through the book page by page and putting those sticky tabs on all the ones that I find interesting and that have things I want to try. The last time I opened this book I had nowhere near the reagent selection I do now so lots more things will be possible

I do love the older books too neptunium! The style of writing is different, safety considerations are at minimum but still not dangeous if one uses common sense and keeps the feeble warnings in mind lol

When I come across cool pages ill upload them individually to shareif theyre worthy of it, and again, if anybody wants demos on a certain aspect or topic of chemistry, let me know and I will share everything on the subject

Morgan - 8-4-2012 at 06:51

The purple rain demo was more of an explosion and it cited a few detailed accidents when being demonstrated, ending in a caution the experiment was no longer recommended. It was a KMNO4 demo I think.

Mailinmypocket - 8-4-2012 at 11:17

Ah, okay.. Just checked and the index lists about 20 pages with "explosion" demos so I will check and see if I can find the details later

I did find a demo that instructs each student group to place a pile of sodium peroxide on some tissue papers and to use squirt guns to spray the peroxide and "witness the violent reaction" ... it later mentions to be careful for skin and eyes when doing this due to "spray, mist and particles" hahaha!

Morgan - 8-4-2012 at 16:00

If that is the book I am thinking of there is another unintentional explosion where two uncommon sounding liquid chemicals were mixed together and then exploded 5 or 10 minutes later, something like that with glass flying and perhaps some minor injury. Fortunately the person had walked away from where the flask was resting. It was unsuspected that these two liquids would form an explosive. Again, they were odd compounds if I recall. It's been so long I could be mistaken about the details of the explosion or have it confused with the purple rain accidents.

[Edited on 9-4-2012 by Morgan]

Paddywhacker - 8-4-2012 at 17:20

Sweet. We definitely need more experimental procedures that include the use of cow blood.

Just those pages you posted were a hoot. The whole book would be a great read.

I would suggest doing just a few pages at a time. A maximum of, say, ten. And converting the scanned pages into Word by using Abbyy Finereader or something similar.

Tested Demonstrations in Chemistry

Mailinmypocket - 9-4-2012 at 11:00

Okay so here is a first try at creating a Word document and using a flat-bed scanner, thanks for the idea btw!

Instead of driving myself mental and trying to scan the whole book all in one go, I will add 5 mini chapters every few days to the document, probably a lot more if I have free time.

The cover page had to be omitted as well as the last page of the Hydrogen section because of file size limitations.. this is where my problem is. My scanner usually makes a scan at low quality at about 1 mb, my current method of reducing file size brings them down to about 250-300k ea. Anything smaller causes a serious degradation of quality and loss of readability.

That means that the current document is just below the forums 2mb upload, this also means that the whole document would be over 300mb at my current rate. This is my problem... I dont mind scanning page by page manually, but the file size is an issue that i cant figure out. How can I make a word/PDF file that contains all pages and stays within an acceptable size? I could always use external file hosting I suppose, until it is complete and of acceptable quality to be added to the SciMad library.

Anyways, the first parts of the book are basic experiments on oxygen and hydrogen, my next scan will add (provided I can fix my scan and file size issues):

-
-Water, Acids, Bases and Salts
-States of Matter: Solutions
-Ionization
-Energy
-Equilibrium/ReDox
-Atomic Strcture: Radioactivity
-Group Zero (inert gases) and The Atmosphere

Attachment: Tested Demonstrations in Chemistry.docx (1.6MB)
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[Edited on 9-4-2012 by Mailinmypocket]

Paddywhacker - 9-4-2012 at 13:34

You are doing this the hard way, saving scans in Word as graphics. What I was suggesting is that you use Abbyy or some other OCR to scan and convert to actual text in Word. Then the results will be hugely smaller and be searchable and indexable.

chemrox - 9-4-2012 at 19:57

Scanners now have software that make multi page tifs and pdfs

Mailinmypocket - 10-4-2012 at 10:49

Thanks for the help! My job provided me with a copy of acrobat which allows me to scan directly to pdf, so much easier! I will replace the word file with the pdf once it is started.

gutter_ca - 10-4-2012 at 13:16

Could this be the "Purple Rain" demo?

EDIT:

Forgot link: http://www.chemistry-blog.com/2009/02/17/chemistry-lab-demon...

[Edited on 4/10/2012 by gutter_ca]

Fossil - 17-4-2012 at 15:52

You could always scan the whole book into a PDF file, upload to a website like mediafire, and post the link here, effectively bypassing the forum file size restrictions.

I myself am really intrigued by this book. Many of the old books are the most interesting to read, "Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments" to name one.

Mailinmypocket - 18-4-2012 at 05:34

I have actually been scanning pages daily, im about halfway through at the moment. I decided to convert it all into a pdf with Acrobat... Its just taking a little while but it should be complete by end of month!

Originally i was going to add a few pages every so often and update the document but I think it would be much easier and much more interesting to wait for the entire book to be done and that way everyone has a full copy.

Fossil - 18-4-2012 at 17:56

I cant wait for this, the few pages I saw really have me wanting the rest.

Releasing the book as a whole is pretty good idea, that way nobody ends up with a partial copy, scouring the Internets for the rest. Should be quite a good read once it gets out.

Really appreciate what you are doing for the community by the way.

annaandherdad - 19-4-2012 at 14:42

Is there a problem with the copyright on this book? That is, would it be a copyright violation to scan the book and post it as a pdf?

I don't know what the relevant laws are, but the book is almost 50 years old.

Mailinmypocket - 20-4-2012 at 09:28

I have no clue. It's an old collection of journals so I'm not certain. The SM library has lots of books scanned to PDF and it doesn't seem to cause much of a fuss, I'm not overly worried though.

New Clock Reaction/ Preparation of Dicinnamalacetone!

Mailinmypocket - 11-9-2012 at 09:24

The scanning of this book is taking much longer than I thought, been busy..

I did come across this experiment on the weekend, tried it with nice results with cinnamaldehyde.

Thought I would share it

Attachment: Default_Scan_20120911131901.PDF (99kB)
This file has been downloaded 1001 times

Mailinmypocket - 5-11-2012 at 17:58

Sorry I haven;t updated this in a long time, it's time consuming to scan a book and hard to find time to do it. I did some of the photographic chemistry demos and thought they were worthy of sharing though.

Recipes for all sorts of photographic formulations are given and experiments with the solutions also provided. Was fun!

Unfortunately my scanner makes images too large for the forum to accept, so I had to compress each scan\page into a zip file. One page has a bit of blurring where the spine of the book is but no information is lost.

Attachment: photography1.zip (1.3MB)
This file has been downloaded 457 times

Attachment: photography2.zip (1.4MB)
This file has been downloaded 506 times

triplepoint - 5-11-2012 at 22:46

I believe that book is a compilation of articles that appeared in JCE. I think that anyone who is a member of ACS can access pdf versions of the original articles from the ACS website. I assume we have some ACS members here...

sargent1015 - 6-11-2012 at 21:46

Quote: Originally posted by triplepoint

I believe that book is a compilation of articles that appeared in JCE. I think that anyone who is a member of ACS can access pdf versions of the original articles from the ACS website. I assume we have some ACS members here...

Why yes we do

I'll take a look when I get some freetime

Mailinmypocket - 7-11-2012 at 07:14

Quote: Originally posted by sargent1015

Quote: Originally posted by triplepoint

Why yes we do

I'll take a look when I get some freetime

Sweet! Thanks! In the meantime if anyone has a specific topic of interest, let me know and I don't mind scanning some requested pages/topics

Mailinmypocket - 14-1-2014 at 20:36

Well it looks like scanning that book never happened due to lack of time and motivation

I did however come across this online. Quite a few neat things in there, the first page has an interesting demo with an activated cobalt complex.

MrHomeScientist - 15-1-2014 at 08:39

Interesting indeed, thanks for posting. I do a science stage show for local schools, and resources like this are invaluable for finding new material to use.

Side note: I see that this publication uses the "water notation" - i.e. CoCl₂*6H₂O is called cobalt(II) chloride-6-water instead of the more familar (to me) cobalt(II) chloride hexahydrate. It's really off-putting. To my ear it sounds like a dumbing-down of the scientific language. It takes 5 minutes to learn the number prefixes (di-, tri-, hexa-, etc.) and that "hydrate" means water.

[Edited on 1-15-2014 by MrHomeScientist]

a document management system

quantumchromodynamics - 16-1-2014 at 21:03

I would be happy to donate a document management system to assist with this work. It has a very nice document capture feature that allows you to scan documents in batches and assemble and fix pages using drag and drop. Please U2U me if interested.

DraconicAcid - 16-1-2014 at 21:21

Quote: Originally posted by MrHomeScientist

To my ear it sounds like a dumbing-down of the scientific language. It takes 5 minutes to learn the number prefixes (di-, tri-, hexa-, etc.) and that "hydrate" means water.

I hate it, too, but this allows us to name hydrates with fractional water molecules, and allows us to use the same principle for other solvates, such as things crystallized with ethanol or acetone.

Mailinmypocket - 17-1-2014 at 03:12

Quote: Originally posted by quantumchromodynamics

I would be happy to donate a document management system to assist with this work. It has a very nice document capture feature that allows you to scan documents in batches and assemble and fix pages using drag and drop. Please U2U me if interested.

Well, if there is sufficient interest in willing to try this again. I have a scanner with a paper feed so what might be easier is to cut the pages out with an x-acto knife and just let Acrobat scan them into a PDF.

Previously I was turning the pages and pressing the book very hard onto a flatbed scanner since the area near the spine was a pain in the arse to capture. Then I'll just 3-hole punch the pages and stick them in a binder.

If Acrobat proves to not work the way I think I can get it to work (scanner only does one side scanning, not sure how to go about scanning even and odd numbered pages and merging them properly while not ripping my hair out of my head in frustration) then I might take you up on the offer, thanks!

[Edited on 17-1-2014 by Mailinmypocket]

NOV:5 - 14-10-2014 at 14:57

Cool, thanks

j_sum1 - 14-10-2014 at 15:58

Count me interested.
Come to think of it, I am half way through scanning a couple of books of lab demos too. Probably nothing as exciting as these. But I can post them up when done.
(There. Now that that's said, I have some incentive to get onto the second book.)

Little_Ghost_again - 14-10-2014 at 16:17

Just a idea for future, The main camera I use (dads) makes huge files for each pic but has alot of resolution, we also have a Nikon D3s which is 20 something megapixels so again fabulous resolution but massive files.
What I do is take a pic then on a decent size monitor so I can see everything clearly I take a jpeg screen shot

so it turns a 12 megabyte picture file into a 172 kB file. you just have to make sure you have a good size monitor and off you go.
I know its not exactly on topic but just a tip when taking pics of books, i am currently doing this to all my books to upload

Oscilllator - 14-10-2014 at 18:17

Quote: Originally posted by Little_Ghost_again

Just a idea for future, The main camera I use (dads) makes huge files for each pic but has alot of resolution, we also have a Nikon D3s which is 20 something megapixels so again fabulous resolution but massive files.
What I do is take a pic then on a decent size monitor so I can see everything clearly I take a jpeg screen shot

I can pretty much guarantee that there will be a setting in your camera to save the pictures as .jpg images. If you want to keep the uncompressed images though, you can use paint to save the images as .jpg's, and resize them downwards if needed. Either method is more efficient than saving a screenshot, although it is *possible* that the screenshot method could have a slight edge in speed.

j_sum1 - 14-10-2014 at 21:25

There is software out there that will resize images in batch. Or, you could just reduce the resolution in the camera settings.
I scan using a photocopier/scanner that saves as a multi-page pdf.

pneumatician - 24-10-2014 at 16:49

hello put this part: chemiluminescence in cayenne pepper!

for build a ebook you need a soft like PDFill

take the pics with around 1800 pixels!

also cool experiments in old numbers of popsci mag! bet. 1930-48