Great read. Laughing at: “But when he started working on the mercaptans, he and his accomplices were exiled to a wooden shack out in the boondocks at least two hundred yards from the main building. Undeterred and unrepentant, he continued his noisome endeavors [snip] Anyhow, he came up with the ethyl mercaptal of acetaldehyde and the ethyl mercaptol of acetone respectively. The odor of these was not so much skunk-like as garlicky, the epitome and concentrate of all the back doors of all the bad Greek restaurants in all the world. And finally he surpassed himself with something that had a dimethylamino group attached to a mercaptan sulfur, and whose odor can't, with all the resources of the English language, even be described. It also drew flies.”

“it was magnificently hypergolic with many fuels. (I used to take advantage of this property when somebody came into my lab looking for a job. At an inconspicuous signal, one of my henchmen would drop the finger of an old rubber glove into a flask containing about 100 cc of mixed acid —and then stand back. The rubber would swell and squirm" a moment, and then a magnificent rocket-like jet of flame would rise from the flask, with appropriate hissing noises. I could usually tell from the candidate's demeanor whether he had the sort of nervous system desirable in a propellant chemist.)”

I don’t know if anyone has confirmed this explicitly, but it’s a likely assumption that Ignition! went back in to print after many years of unavailability precisely because of all the interest stirred up by this post.

Are there other works like this? I know about Gergel mentioned alongside this post, and if you're dutch, K.G. Paulus' Kernenergie en opwerking was also an eye popping cynical book about ongoing stupidity in the nuclear world.