“Obviously my parents, had they known, would not have allowed me to muck about with explosives…”
I could read pretty competently, indeed all of us could, at an early age, and soon got into the mass of books distributed about the house (and there were hundreds). Possibly that was one reason, plus the fact that our parents and sisters seemed to enjoy reading to us, that encouraged our reading skills to develop rapidly.
We had books on just about every conceivable subject in addition to a considerable amount of fiction. Every week my father kept us supplied with a good cross-section of magazines and publications — he needed to be kept up to date for his commercial art and we needed to read for entertainment and education. Among the periodicals that arrived every week or month, as the case may be, were The Sphere, The Tatler, The Illustrated London News, Saturday Evening Post, Punch, National Geographic Magazine, The Model Engineer, Gebrauschgraphik, English Mechanics, Meccano Magazine, one or two fashion periodicals like Vogue etc., several comics and “penny bloods” such as Wizard, Adventure, Skipper, Hotspur, Gem and Magnet. I expect the girls got their share of “bloods” too, but the names escape me for the moment. A selection of the daily and the evening papers also duly arrived.
When I think back, it’s possible they were relatively a lot cheaper than nowadays, but it still must have cost my father a small fortune in reading matter each week. I daresay that when times were tight they were all curtailed, but at the time I was never aware of it. The American comics used to arrive quite regularly via Uncle George, I think they were sent by his brother who lived in Sacramento, California. I loved them. For one thing, they were always in colour, and Lil’ Abner, Flash Gordon, Major Hoople, Katzenjammer Kids, etc. were read avidly.
However, as I mentioned, I read at an early age and discovered that, amongst all the volumes, were some on chemistry and experiments. Since we had quite a lot of apparatus and chemicals, I quickly became intrigued by the mysteries of chemical changes. One volume entitled, The Young Chemist (should have been called The Young Arsonist!) gave very detailed advice on Pharoah’s Serpents, flash-powder, gun-cotton, nitrogen tri-iodide, crystals, chemical gardens, lead acetate ferns, fireworks and much more.
It would be frowned upon today, but in those days you could buy practically anything very cheaply, from chemists, oil-shops and chemical supply houses, with which to experiment. Nobody seemed to worry about age and I certainly could, and did, buy potassium chlorate, potassium nitrate, sulphur, charcoal, sulphuric, nitric and hydrochloric acids, magnesium ribbon, caustic soda, copper sulphate, mercury and many more chemicals that are not on general sale today. Nevertheless, I must agree that the powers-that-be are probably right to restrict the availability of a lot of chemicals as the following passage illustrates.
Nitrogen tri-iodide is an explosive which is too unstable to be of any general use. It is made by a wet process involving iodine and ammonia, and so long as it remains wet it is perfectly safe, but let it dry out and then it cannot be touched without exploding (even a bluebottle landing on it will disappear with a loud report and a violet hued cloud).
The first time I made it I let a smallish quantity dry out on the bench in the workshop. I gave it a slight tap with a hammer — loud bang, and the hammer is blown out of my hand and makes a hole in the workshop ceiling plaster! This left me covered in wood-wool from a sizeable cavity in the bench top. At least I learned what the book meant by “only make a small quantity”! I tried making little spiders out of a piece of cork and some bits of bristle for legs. A tiny cavity made in the abdomen was filled with moist nitrogen tri-iodide. Placed on the class-room floor, or somewhere fairly obvious, and waiting for it to be discovered by someone who tried to move it, provided a surprise that was worth watching. No real harm done of course, but it did appeal to my sense of humour and I expect that spiders were treated with a certain amount of reverence by the victim in future.
Obviously my parents, had they known, would not have allowed me to muck about with explosives, although folks were pretty tolerant of such things in those times and kids were almost oblivious to danger. Another old book that interested me greatly (in fact, I still have it) gave more detailed information and formulae for all kinds of fireworks — I did have enough sense not to make “banger” type gunpowder, as the process was too long and complicated anyway, and even I thought it was pretty dangerous. However, I did make loads of coloured fires and “Golden Rains” and had a go at the odd rocket. My popularity rose around the time of November 5th.
One experiment that seemed hilarious at the time, although with hindsight was very unthinking, concerned the garden flowers of one of our neighbours. One evening at dusk I worked my way along the back garden walls to the garden of No.16 (Mrs Bath’s, a friend of my mother) and with a large jam-jar filled with sulphur dioxide, bleached some of her roses and chrysanthemums. She apparently was astonished in the morning, and couldn’t wait to tell my mother about it. I think Mamma had a pretty good idea as to how the “miracle” had occurred but she never let on.
The firework book had some marvellous old-fashioned names for a lot of the chemicals. I remember some: “Liver of Sulphur” for ammonium sulphide, “Sugar of Lead” for lead acetate, “Spirits of Hartshorn” for ammonia, “0il of Vitriol” for sulphuric acid, “Spirits of Salts” for hydrochloric acid, “Lunar Caustic” for silver nitrate, “Blue Vitriol” for copper sulphate, “Olephiant Gas” for ethylene and many more — it took me quite a time before I could reconcile some of them with the modern terms.