"Everything you hear, see,
smell, taste, and touch involves chemistry and chemicals
(matter). And hearing, seeing, tasting, and touching all
involve intricate series of chemical reactions and
interactions in your body. With such an enormous range
of topics, it is essential to know about chemistry at
some level to understand the world around us."
[Courtesy of the
American Chemical Society (ACS).
"When
I'd grown old enough to have my own public library card
(probably the early 1950s), I checked out a grown-up's
book on the chemical elements. I seem to recall there
were only about 98 elements on the periodic table at the
time that book was written. I could only understand a
fraction of the information, but the names, physical
descriptions, and history of their discoveries occupied
most of my spare time. I have never been able to find a
copy of that book again, probably because I don't
remember the title, author, or publisher. Nevertheless,
it became a significant influence upon my life a few
decades later.
When I was in high school in the 1950s, chemistry was
still taught primarily as a descriptive science. But we
managed to learne our way around the periodic table, did
a few mole calculations, learned about acid-base
reactions, did the usual set of lab demonstrations, and
(my favorite) balanced formulas.
Naturally (for me, anyway), I set up a chemistry lab
in the basement of my home. It was a crude setup to say
the least, but I did manage to heat up stuff on an old
gas stove that my mom used for baking on days when it
was too hot in the house to use the regular oven in the
kitchen. My first experiments involved purifying lead
and zinc by melting them. But of course it didn't take
long to discover how to toss those molten metals into a
bucket of water--wonderful sounds, lots of steam, and
interesting "flowers" of metal. There was a period of
time when I cobbled together a carbon arc and used it to
melt copper and other metals that had melting points
beyond that of the gas cook stove.
Then there were the chemical reactions. I soon got
tired of the old baking-soda-and-vinegar routine, I
don't recall how it happened, but I eventually ended up
with a bottle of dilute hydrochloric acid. Its reactions
with my metals were slow, but fun to watch.
The high school chemistry teacher must have gotten
word about my home laboratory, because he gave me a load
of chemicals and labware he was about to discard after
cleaning up the lab storeroom at the school. I was in
heaven! Now I had free access to several ounces of
hydrochloric, nitric, and sulfuric acids. Then there
were the dry chemicals such as sulfur, copper sulfate,
and sodium thiosulfate. In today's world where you have
to post a choking warning on a box of thumbtacks, that
teacher would have been fired and his teaching
certificate revoked for handing such hazardous
substances to a teen."
Oh, and that book on the chemical element that
lit the first fires of enthusiasm for chemistry? I
wrote my own version. You can see the details above.