14 Comments

It came with batteries??? A unicorn indeed.

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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!

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And now, thanks to you, I’ve been humming that Bruce Cockburn song all morning... 😂😂😂

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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!

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Dec 15, 2022Liked by Bryn Robinson

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!

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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.

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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".

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:|

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