A Good Reason to Drink

So, this is just silly, but perhaps it might make you laugh. Well, if you can get past the initial blithering.

Stuck inside on a rainy afternoon, a guy needs some kind of project to keep occupied.   What I'm up to is using cabbage to figure out the pH of my garden soil, because I am trying to produce blue flower blooms (which need relatively acidic soil).  Someday I'll post this wonderfully cheapo (and accurate!) cabbage solution, but right now I'm laughing about hydrogen.  I dunno why I'm so curious about chemistry; perhaps it's simply generalized  geekery.  At any rate, for some reason I know that sodium hydroxide, water, and aluminum, when combined, generate hydrogen.  Sodium hydroxide is common lye, aluminum is the everyday beer can, and water is a relatively common chemical -- bihydrogen monoxide -- that can be found pretty much anywhere.  I've even got some spigots in my house that it comes out of.  Mix'em together, and what do you get?  Fun.  Pure, unmitigated, fun.

Sodium hydroxide is a strong (read: caustic) base.  It's a white solid, which when combined with water results in Na and OH ions in solution with the H20.  When adding aluminum, there is an exchange of oxygen atoms that results in a free H2 which bubbles out as a gas.  Basically, the aluminum dissolves and hydrogen comes out*.

When I was an undergraduate, a buddy and I made a hydrogen generator this way: get a five-gallon plastic bucket, drill a hole in the lid, put a pipe in the hole, and then dump lye, water, and aluminum into it.  We had pre-prepared several balloons made of trashbags taped together, and filled them all with the resulting hydrogen (which comes out fast and furious, mind you).  We had also preprepared a bunch of slow fuses from paper towels and a homemade solution (no reason to describe that, don't want y'all to get arrested†).  We filled a bunch of balloons, tied on fuses, and let them loose from his balcony.  After lighting the fuses, naturally.  It was amusing to watch them float up and away, and then explode over the city.  We probably did about ten of these, and then got the idea of cutting apart and taping together six trashbags to make an enormous überballoon.

The resulting balloon, once filled, was far too large to release off the balcony.  The fireball was going to be epic!  So we floated it downstairs, to his car; stuffed it in, and drove it across town to a ballfield.  I still laugh at how stupid we were, driving across town with the equivalent of the Hindenburg in the car.  But we got to the ballpark and set it loose (fuse aflame) and watched it float off into the nighttime sky.  As we were watching, waiting for the fireball, I happened to glance over my shoulder and saw a police car pulling into the parking lot.  I immediately said "COP!" and we both started walking towards our car, in an extremely guilty/suspicious fashion.  As it turns out, the cop had to make a turn in order to approach us, such that his back was towards the drifting balloon.  As he got close to us, he briefly hit his siren, and then ran his lights.  We stopped, and turned.  As we turned, he was getting out of his cruiser, and we saw the dying remaments of the HUGE hydrogen balloon explosion in the distance -- which he saw reflected in his side mirror.  He spun around, but it was too late: it was gone.

He started asking us standard questions: what are your names, what are you doing out here, etc.  On his radio, we heard the dispatcher report: "All units, report of another fireball over Broadway."  Both of us were trying desperately not to break out snickering.  The cop was about to get our information and possibly even take us in, when a new report came over the radio, "student on the rampage in XXX hall, all available units please respond!"  The cop warned us about illegal fireworks, gave us back our IDs, and sped off in his car.

And so that's how some drunken idiot saved my bacon, 24 years ago.

†Okay, I know that you're just DYING to know how to make a slow fuse.  One word: saltpeter.  Now go google it yourself.  (That wasn't an option in 1985, when we had to figure this stuff out all on our own!)

*Hydrogen is really an amazing atom.  It can leak through solid metal walls, because it's so tiny.  It's the most prevalent substance in the universe.  Certain large-scale rotating machines are filled with hydrogen (instead of ambient air) because a one-atmosphere-pressure of hydrogen is easier to move (turn) than ambient air, which is laden mostly with much heavier nitrogen, and that makes a real energy savings after a year of turning.  It can also escape the gravitational field of the earth: if you create hydrogen as I once did, without blowing it up, it will one day leave the solar system, all on its own.