How to Spot a Psychopath

In the comments of this post about chemistry sets and science education, gwdonnelly asked:

As a kid I loved playing with tools, fire, magnifying glasses, etc, etc. Along with some mates I made thermite and even had a go at some very small touch powder (could do with more practice at growing crystals there!)...

Anyway, I would like to get my kids into doing experiments in a slightly more controlled, and safe, way - any recommendations on what to get a 4-5 year old started with?

I've made this a new post so that other commenters can chime in with ideas. Here's what I managed to think of:

1: As mentioned in that post, growing crystals, including sugar crystals so you end up with rock candy:

(source: Flickr user futileboy)

2: A chemical garden, a quite different kind of crystal experiment often sold as "Magic Rocks".

3: While you're at it, the cheap-'n'-lazy version of a chemical garden, those little cardboard trees that grow fuzzy crystals:

(Source: Flickr user drewish)

(Source: Flickr user watz)

4: Go for a wander and collect and identify rocks, plants and other people's unattended property. (Strike out whichever does not apply.) You can build a collection of a wide variety of rocks you can't find in your own neighbourhood quite cheaply via eBay, too. Just bear in mind that if a mineral sample seems too good to be true, it's eminently possible that it is.

5: Tumbling your own rocks has been a popular hobby for ages, too; all sorts of ordinary-looking rocks come up lovely when highly polished:

(Source: Flickr user vpickering)

You can make your own tumbler (or "ball mill", which is only a ball mill if you... put balls in it) from a plastic container and a scrounged-up motor. All you're likely to have to buy, besides perhaps a grab bag or two of guaranteed-impressive un-tumbled minerals, is some "tumbling media", so you can have fast abrading of rough stones and fine polishing later on without just hoping a handful of sand will do both jobs. (There are some other inexpensive tumbling-media options, too.)

6: Five years might be a bit young for soldering or an actual microcontroller (look how cheap!), but you can still play with electronics - wires, motors, batteries (and/or a jimmied PC PSU), switches (you've obviously got to have at least one knife switch)...

(Source: Flickr user LenP17)

...breadboards and jumpers and, as I've mentioned before...

(image source Flickr user c3o)

...a ton of super-cheap LEDs and other components, and surprisingly young kids can build all sorts of things.

7: Make your own thumb piano:

(Source: Flickr user Trocaire)

8: Growing mustard/cress/bean sprouts on a wet paper towel...

(Source: Flickr user kidicarus222)

...or the classic toothpicked spud.

9: Magnets.

Rare-earth magnets are very cheap these days, and small ones make great toys for any kid old enough not to swallow them.

(And even then it's no big deal, unless they swallow more than one. This has recently turned into a problem for people who sell small rare-earth magnets as toys in the USA, because apparently you can't trust an American child under the age of 14 not to eat everything they touch. See also the American Kinder Surprise ban. Apparently something magical happens between the ages of 14 and 18, which transforms American children from Lego-eating lackwits into citizens responsible enough to be trusted with a firearm. But not a beer until they're 21, of course!)

[UPDATE: A less snarky version of the above can be found here. On reflection, I found that the tiny-toy-magnet bans now spreading across the globe are actually quite defensible.]

Do make sure you stick with small rare-earth magnets for toys. Obviously really big rare-earth magnets can crush your hand, but much smaller ones can snap together hard enough that they break. Don't get any very thin ones, and don't get anything with a diameter much more than a centimetre (half an inch, say), and their field is small enough and their momentum low enough that they'll last a long time.

If you want safe big magnets, get simple and cheap black ferrite ones instead; they're much weaker than rare-earth magnets. (It's theoretically possible to lever the big ferrite ring magnet off the back of a speaker driver, but only once have I managed to do that with a magnet of any size without cracking it.)

10: Looking at stuff under a microscope. A proper lab microscope would be best but those sell for pretty large prices, and the cheap small ones for kids are, I think, usually pretty crappy quality. Instead, you could go for one that plugs into a TV:

(Source: Flickr user Neven Mrgan)

Everybody seems to like the Eyeclops camera-microscope.

A cheap alternative is, of course, your basic magnifying glass, or a "loupe", which is either a small high-powered magnifying glass, or a monocle-style mad-scientist magnifier.

Or you could buy or make your own Leeuwenhoek glass-bead microscope:

(Source: Flickr user rouwkema)

(One of van Leeuwenhoek's greatest, but least helpful, achievements was concealing how easy it is to make his microscopes' tiny lenses. Everybody thought he ground them with fantastic accuracy, when all he actually did was melt the end of a glass rod and allow surface tension to pull it into a sphere.)

Leeuwenhoek microscopes aren't the easiest to look through, but can effortlessly resolve the tiny beasties in pond water.

Oh, and then there's the quickest microscope ever, provided you have a digital camera with a very small lens, like the camera in a phone: Just put a drop of water on the lens, turn the phone over carefully...

(Source: Flickr user ipasha)

...and bingo, one microscope!

OK, folks; what have I missed?

There's a BBC News piece called "Whatever happened to kids' chemistry sets?", which makes the same point that many people have before, that zero-tolerance for any possible risk to children does not actually do those children any favours. It's hard to gain anything without at least exposing yourself to the possibility of pain; kids should be able to learn and have fun in ways that are at least a little dangerous.

You know the drill, though. Playgrounds, unsupervised play in general, chemistry sets; all neutered in the name of safety. For some reason many kids are still allowed to ride a bicycle, but heaven forfend you give your ten-year-old a pocket knife.

The video at the top of the BBC piece...

...shows some experiments you can't do with modern kits. These experiments are as un-dangerous as they look.

The classic potassium-permanganate-plus-glycerol fire reaction (with some glucose added to provide additional fuel) does not have to be done in a fume hood. Just doing it outdoors and not deliberately inhaling the smoke will do.

You can still get the ingredients for that one quite easily, too. Glycerine and glucose powder are in many supermarkets, and potassium permanganate is still used as a disinfectant and general-purpose purifier of anything that benefits from being exposed to a moderately strong (by sane people's standards) oxidiser. So it's probably not illegal to send it through the post where you live (though there may be some ridiculous restriction having to do with drugs), and there are plenty of people selling it on eBay. (Check the Readily Available Chemicals lists, if you find yourself unable to locate some reagent or other. )

The only other old-chemistry-set "experiment" in the above video is even less alarming, simple flame tests. Again, salts that create brightly coloured flames or sparks aren't very hard to find; the one stop shop for them is a firework-supplies place, and you shouldn't need any fancy licenses or expensive special shipping to get them, since they're just the stuff that colours the fireworks, not the stuff that makes fireworks go bang. (And, again, Readily Available Chemicals can help.)

Oh, and that bit at the very end of the video with the squeaky test-tube sounds just like lighting hydrogen, which you can easily make electrolytically. But the tube seemed to be mouth-upwards, so it may have been some other flammable gas.

So the video's a bit boring, but OK. The actual BBC article, though, contains several mistakes.

The author says, for instance, "some chemistry sets of bygone ages even offered instructions and materials to be able to blow glass at high temperatures".

Well, yeah, of course they did. Making your own simple glassware - which pretty much only means bending and stretching tubes, not much in the way of actual "blowing" - is not particularly dangerous. You can do it on a kitchen gas stove if a proper burner is not available. Just stretching a glass tube lets you make very fine dropper nozzles; add some commercial flasks and beakers, some stoppers and a cork borer, and you can make a reasonably effective condenser, with a wet cloth and a fan standing in for the proper water jacket.

"Rosie Cook, assistant curator at the Chemical Heritage Foundation", is quoted as saying "You are letting a 12-year-old blow glass, there was uranium dust with a stereoscope where you could see the radiation waves..."

Bending glass tubes is not a task for toddlers, but any 12-year-old who cannot be trusted to do this is a 12-year-old who should also not be allowed to make themselves a sandwich. OK, the dangerous part of a bread knife is easier to tell from the safe part than is the case with glass (the First Law of the Laboratory: Hot glass looks exactly the same as cold glass), but this is no reason to presume that a 12-year-old has no more sense than a toddler.

And as for the "uranium dust" part... oh, man.

First, if any chemistry set ever came with actual uranium dust, I'll eat a whole shop full of hats. What chemistry sets came with was some bits of uranium ore or, at the very most, yellowcake.

And they didn't come with a "stereoscope"; you can't view ionising radiation with a View-Master. They came with a spinthariscope. (Perhaps the original piece as written had this right, but a sub-editor helpfully "corrected" it.)

That's a simulation, via Theo Gray, of what a spinthariscope looks like to a dark-adapted eye. (Actual video of the very dim twinkly lights tends to look rather underwhelming.)

And the "radiation waves" thing is a mess, too. I think you can see wave/particle gamma photons with some kinds of spinthariscope, but I'm pretty sure the chemistry-set ones - which you can still buy today - only respond to the alpha and maybe beta particles that decaying uranium and its daughter products emit on their way down the line to lead.

And then there's a neat-o little table at the middle of the BBC article, listing the interesting ingredients chemistry sets used to have and why they don't have them any more:

It says the intended purpose for potassium nitrate in chemistry sets was to make gunpowder, but it's not there any more because you can also use it to make a "fertiliser bomb":

Well, yeah, I suppose potassium nitrate could technically count as a fertiliser-bomb component, but I think they've actually confused it with ammonium nitrate. "Can be used to make gunpowder" would be a perfectly good thing to put in both the "original purpose" and "why it's no longer available" columns.

(I also love how the table lists one of the "dangers" of lead acetate as "Blamed for death of Pope Clement II in 1047". I don't think that fact actually played a major role in the thought process that led to the removal of lead salts from chemistry sets.)

And the only "why was it included" reason for sodium hydroxide was "used in colour-changing experiment".

That was it, huh? That's all it's good for? That's the sole purpose for a strong base? Makes you wonder why it was in there in the first place, doesn't it?!

It really does look as if nobody who had anything to do with the creation of the BBC article knew what they were talking about.

I found the BBC piece via this Boing Boing post by Maggie Koerth-Baker, which discusses the BBC article but does not dissect it. I suppose this proves the point; even Maggie, excited about science even by Boing Boing's standards, didn't notice the glaring errors. Perhaps I wouldn't have, either, if I hadn't spent a lot of childhood hours in the little workshop/laundry melting, boiling, reacting and distilling things.

And, of course, setting stuff on fire, more than once with the permanganate/glycerol reaction.

Among other things, I discovered that zinc burns with a pretty blue flame, and produces copious white fly-ash:

I never burned enough of it to get sick, though.

Making "plastic sulfur", a rubbery polymeric pseudo-allotrope that's the initial form of quenched molten sulfur, was also fun:

But smelly.

And yes, a kid can do this, in the kitchen, with very little chance of winding up dead:

(I'd also like to rehabilitate mercury's image. It seems almost nobody these days knows the difference between organomercury compounds - which are very very poisonous - and metallic mercury, which isn't good for you, but which is not actually very dangerous.)

I did the iron-and-sulfur reaction, too:

You can even get away with making nitrogen triiodide...

...if you make a respectfully minuscule amount, and wear eye protection. Which should be your habit when doing anything with chemicals or power tools, for the same reason that it's sensible to train yourself to use your indicators, by reflex, while driving. Yes, that does mean you'll occasionally feel silly because you indicated for, say, a turn in a road that isn't actually any kind of intersection. But it's better to indicate when you don't need to, and wear eye protection when reacting vinegar and baking soda, than to forget to indicate when it does matter or leave the goggles off when playing with explosives.

I didn't make thermite...

...until I was a grown-up, but I now champion that as an excellent experiment for kids, too.

Actually setting the thermite off definitely requires adult or responsible-teenager supervision, but the components of standard iron-oxide/aluminium thermite are quite inert and non-toxic (again, the kids should wear eye protection while mixing the ingredients, even though it isn't really needed), and the mixture won't light without a high-temperature fuse - a sparkler or magnesium ribbon. So small children can mix up thermite all by themselves, quite safely. And they should.

(One caveat: If they mix anything else into the thermite, especially water, then it will flash to vapour when the thermite burns and throw blazing thermite all over the place. This shouldn't matter unless you're setting the thermite off in an unsuitable location - q.v. - or standing unwisely close, though. You also don't need to panic about one drop of water or a couple of hairs in the thermite; it's not that touchy.)

If chemistry sets and, increasingly, schools no longer provide any real hands-on experience with chemistry, parents and kids themselves need to step up and do it, even if all you do is grow some crystals.

There's a lot of fun, and entertainment, to be had in the wide area between the kindergarten-science of dumbed-down chemistry sets and the truly hazardous experiments that, for instance, produce copious amounts of highly poisonous fumes, or have reaction products that are illegal to throw away.

Teaching kids that "chemicals" are dangerous is as stupid as teaching them that all drugs are equally, and enormously, bad. You let 'em ride a bike; you should also let 'em make some stinks and bangs.