I used the balance to weigh something for the first time. Copper sulfate, sodium carbonate, sulfur, cobalt chloride, logwood, potassium ferricyanide, ferrous ammonium sulfate, and dozens more. I carefully examined each of the chemical bottles.
I started reading the manual, jumping from one experiment to another. I instantly forgot about the rest of my presents, even the BB gun. Everything I needed to do real chemistry. Glassware, an alcohol lamp, a balance, even a centrifuge. The biggest one, with dozens of chemicals and hundreds of experiments. It was a Lionel/Porter/Chemcraft chemistry set, and the exact model I’d asked for. My father said, “This is from your mother and me. It was already unboxed and spread wide open to show the contents. There it sat, on the kitchen table: exactly what I’d been hoping for. Just as I’d decided that I hadn’t gotten the one gift that I really, really wanted, my mom and dad called me into the kitchen. My parents had been watching my brother and me ripping through gifts like Tasmanian Devils. I searched frantically through the piles of discarded wrapping paper, hoping I’d overlooked a box. One item had been at the top of every iteration of my wish list since the Sears Christmas Wish Book had arrived, and that item was nowhere to be found. We’d both gotten everything we asked for. A casting set, with a lead furnace and molds to make toy soldiers.Īs we opened the packages, my br other and I mentally checked off items against our wish lists. A bicycle for my brother and a BB gun for me! Lots of books, the kind we both liked to read. A battery-powered Polaris nuclear submarine that actually fired small plastic missiles. Sports equipment and a cap pistol for my younger brother. There were the inevitable disappointments: sweaters from Grandma, school clothes from Aunt Betty, and hand-knitted stocking caps for both of us from Pete and Sarah, our elderly next-door neighbors. Being boys, we started tearing open the presents with no thought at all for the care that had gone into wrapping them. Colorfully wrapped presents were scattered-not just under the tree, but across most of the living room floor.
My younger brother and I arose at the crack of dawn and noisily rushed downstairs to find out what was under the tree. Scheele died at age 43, apparently from mercury poisoning contracted as a result of his unfortunate habit of tasting the new compounds he prepared.Ĭhristmas morning, 1964. As a practicing pharmacist without access to the advanced laboratory equipment available to many of his contemporaries, Scheele discovered numerous chemical elements and compounds-including oxygen, nitrogen, chlorine, barium, manganese, molybdenum, tungsten, citric acid, glycerol, the pigment Scheele’s Green (cupric hydrogen arsenite), and many others-debunked the phlogiston theory, and was among the first to establish the rigorous, standardized, consistent quantitative procedures that are the hallmark of modern chemistry. To Carl Wilhelm Scheele, one of the first true chemists, who did so much with so little. Food and Drug Administration regulation 21CFR 177.1520 (1) 3.1 and 3.2 for storage of potable water.DIY Science: Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture