It’s posts like this that make Substack so special: amidst all the talk about “media empires” and Chat GPT, there are people like you who just nerd out on the weird stuff that fascinates them. Love it!
Really interesting, Bryn - wow! In my days as a glass artist I had some rods of 'uranium yellow' in my stash. It was a great colour, but I was too chicken to use it.... and to my disappointment with hindsight, I never DID check to see if that glass glowed in the dark!
Yes, I think so! More scary than cool... which is why I didn’t use it! Mind you the pigments in all kinds of colours of glass were stuff I wouldn’t want to mess with! Not a dumb question at all - and to my shame I was more about the art than the science!
I had a chemistry set in the late 70s/early 80s ... it was brilliant. Tons of chemicals, various flasks (my favourite was - and still is - the Erlenmeyer flask, for some wholly geeky reason). It had these little spoons to accurately measure the chemicals when you replicated the various experiments in the handbook. But those were SOOO boring. So my friend Jon and I did our own ... let's just say we were lucky boys, but it's amazing what could happen when you lived at a time when health and safety were just two words in the dictionary!
That’s awesome! I always wanted a chemistry set. I wish there was a way they could bring them back in a safe way that still provided that level of learning.
I probably would have begged for one of these, but I wasn't born yet. My parents would have denied it, though. When I was in junior high school, I made a Wilson cloud chamber. And it worked great. I tracked cosmic rays (I think) and stray background radiation. Such an interesting post, Bryn.
Love all this! Not much to add, though poking through some of those reference sites, it's a bit ominous that the kit is probably safe "as long as the material is not removed from their containers".
It came with batteries??? A unicorn indeed.
It’s posts like this that make Substack so special: amidst all the talk about “media empires” and Chat GPT, there are people like you who just nerd out on the weird stuff that fascinates them. Love it!
Haha thanks Tom! You can count on me to nerd out 🤓
And now, thanks to you, I’ve been humming that Bruce Cockburn song all morning... 😂😂😂
I played it more than once while writing it, Chris 🤓😂
Really interesting, Bryn - wow! In my days as a glass artist I had some rods of 'uranium yellow' in my stash. It was a great colour, but I was too chicken to use it.... and to my disappointment with hindsight, I never DID check to see if that glass glowed in the dark!
Really?? That’s scary cool. Was it actually using uranium to colour the glass? (Dumb question perhaps.)
Yes, I think so! More scary than cool... which is why I didn’t use it! Mind you the pigments in all kinds of colours of glass were stuff I wouldn’t want to mess with! Not a dumb question at all - and to my shame I was more about the art than the science!
I had a chemistry set in the late 70s/early 80s ... it was brilliant. Tons of chemicals, various flasks (my favourite was - and still is - the Erlenmeyer flask, for some wholly geeky reason). It had these little spoons to accurately measure the chemicals when you replicated the various experiments in the handbook. But those were SOOO boring. So my friend Jon and I did our own ... let's just say we were lucky boys, but it's amazing what could happen when you lived at a time when health and safety were just two words in the dictionary!
That’s awesome! I always wanted a chemistry set. I wish there was a way they could bring them back in a safe way that still provided that level of learning.
I probably would have begged for one of these, but I wasn't born yet. My parents would have denied it, though. When I was in junior high school, I made a Wilson cloud chamber. And it worked great. I tracked cosmic rays (I think) and stray background radiation. Such an interesting post, Bryn.
Love all this! Not much to add, though poking through some of those reference sites, it's a bit ominous that the kit is probably safe "as long as the material is not removed from their containers".
...
:|
That was what made me laugh. As if a kid WOULDN’T. Do you think the containers would be safe enough, though?
Probably? I’ll defer to the idea that they were “low-level” emitters. But for sure a bit eyebrow-raising!