Whatever happened to kids' chemistry sets?

I can't help but wonder if I'll wax nostalgic one day about the unfettered access I had to general purpose computers that I could make do almost anything as the "think of the children" types of that day tut-tut about how madly dangerous it all was.

Being Grounded?

I almost burnt down my house - burnt off my arm hair and eye brows, nearly caused a forest fire in tahoe, blew up numerous model craft from ships to russian migs and sikorski copters...

We built explosives from gallons of hairspray from my best friends mom's salons, to pipe bombs we used to blow up forest stumps, canons made from test tubes and shotgun shells... as well as the solid rocket fuel from estes engines to fill model craft with for spectacular explosions.

We found our fuse from avalanche fuse whilst on ski team at Squaw and Alpine in Tahoe...

The 80s were awesome. The NSA will love this post.

I'm only 24, but I remember when I was 12 having a chemistry set that had some pretty crazy chemicals in it. There wasn't anything crazy like uranium or other chemicals that could create amphetamines, but I do recall blindly mixing ingredients in a test tube, blowing the top and bottom of it out and covering a portion of the roof in the mixture which then proceeded to burn through the paint and etch the wood. I remember my dad painted like 5 coats of paint over the top and it kept showing through, those were the days.

Don't get me started on the excitement of burning magnesium ribbon, my kerosene powered Bunsen burner that I almost burned down the wooden front-deck with when I accidentally knocked it over, experimenting with beakers and filter paper... I feel sorry for kids these days who won't ever get to experience the fun in mixing semi-dangerous chemicals together in a test tube or beaker, I believe my chemistry set is what made me become the programmer I am today.

My chemistry set kept me out of trouble as a teenager because blowing things up, playing with chemicals and fire wasn't new to me, I was desensitised to it all when I was young and the thought of blowing up a car battery or soda bulb paled in comparison to magnesium ribbon or an explosive chemical cocktail mixture courtesy of my chemistry set.

Sadly as stated in the article alot of the chemicals your dads got to play with are no longer available at a consumer level and in that be it most protect the children approach was not even the main reason were in this state.

It is lamentable and whilst kids in the 60's could build bombs and other fun kids stuff of the time. Well if they did half of what kids back then did they would be labeled terrorists and packaged up as one, which is in many ways very very sad.

I must say the aspect of offering perfume type chemistry sets is a novel approach and I appaud that level of thinking. But for young boys who wish to see things go bang it is sadly not of much use.

Now maybe we could oneday get a digital chemistry set were you can relive all the old wonderful explosions and resctions. It's not like we don't know how every combination fo chemical in a 60's chemistry set will react in every permutation and it is also not like we don't have the processing power to do some of the cleverness in a way that is educational and appealing.

Still at least kids can buy gun-caps still and from those you can make bolt-bombs, bangers (with celotape and electic bang fuses) and also great fun added to the end of a dart with cotton wall around the shaft. So in many ways kids can still have ther bang fun and snappies are still available and great fun in pea-shooters.

But chemisty fun is one they just can't get until at school and then it's overly controlled with most being demostrations without the level of intereaction some need.

Heck if you had a place were us adults could go and play chemistry set like our old days - even if it is in a room were no chemicals can leave, well i'd know alot would be up for that.

But it is a balance between saftly and education and in many ways that balance is overly biased deeming everybody by default to be a mad drig producing, WMD making terrorist and that in itself is just sad.

In the 60s, kids used to make bombs etc. In the 90s, we used to scan huge IP ranges on the net looking for open netbios ports. I'm sure in the future, kids will find their own stupid and dangerous stuff to amuse themselves with.

Having done several undergrad chem classes, I'm impressed how much of the article was outright wrong on a chemistry basis, along with lots of the HN comments. Mostly names wrong, but some basic concepts were messed up like you don't make a fertilizer bomb out of potassium nitrate. Its like saying you could make a ipod out of a watch, because both use circuit boards and silicon based chips.

I'm almost 100% certain the article was not run past a chemist before publishing. Note that a chemistry teacher is an ed degree who was hired to teach, chemistry knowledge is a nice to have, but quite optional.

Also funny watching the article dance around the real reason, nobody on the planet works harder than teenagers trying to be cool, and its not cool to be smart, chem sets are for smart kids, therefore chem sets are not popular as a gift, compared, perhaps, to a football. They were never popular anyway, although they did "bubble" for a decade or so in the 50s. In a similar way I expect in 60 years we'll be treated to journalists writing "whatever happened to McMansions/SUVs" and they'll somehow get it entirely wrong.

> Convincing children and parents that science is safe is a priority for health and safety executive chairwoman Judith Hackitt.

What bullshit.

Lord forbid the precious little snowflakes burn their finger on the bunsen burner or make a stink bomb. However there are no problems signing them up for contact sports so they go around with concussions, broken limbs and torn ligaments.

A few years ago I bought my daughter the "Sciencewiz Chemistry Experiments Kit". We got it home and opened it and found the chemicals inside... sand and baking soda!

You can't make this stuff up:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1886978042

The reason I write software, is that I had access to a computer and I was able to try it myself, and have a seemingly infinite amount of time (my teen years) to learn and experiment.

Computers, are relatively safe, so no one has cracked down on them, yet. Although we see threats all the time with internet censorship attempts, and the like.

It's too bad the curiosity of our youth is being stifled over paranoid safety concerns. It's not making people safer. It's causing them to grow up with no sense of personal responsibility because they have never been exposed to real danger.

How about creating a chemistry kit with all the necessary instruments and experimentation guides but without any chemicals?

Just add a guide on how to get the necessary chemicals as an adult.

This allows chemistry set manufacturers to stay out of legal trouble and allows parents to decide for themselves what kind of experiments they allow.

Edit: TBH, it should be possible to make a whole DIY chemistry kit guide. Getting the instruments to do microscale chemistry[1] is incredibly cheap. Some glass rods, a few microscale testtubes + holders, some filters, a small glass funnel, a gas burner and maybe a few other things should be enough to do quite a lot of experiments.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microscale_chemistry

Well, the UK has gone mad about safety, and the US is following them. Chemistry is not safe, no matter how you want it to be. You can generally avoid injury with proper equipment & training, however.

Anyway, this set seems to be relatively complete. http://chemistrysetstore.com/chem-c3000-chemistry-set

ok, not chemistry, and maybe not quite for kids but http://diybio.org/ shows that there is something really interesting happening where for a few $100 you can do some amazing physical science.

Practical experiments at school have gone through a similar sanitisation. At the same time contact sports are encouraged, though are statistically more dangerous.

O'Reilly/Make author Robert Bruce Thompson has been selling a line of science kits. The chemistry kit is a little closer to an old-school chemistry set than the dumbed-down "chemistry sets" of today (though still not quite the same; it's designed for formal academic instruction rather than just fooling around). Unfortunately he can't send them anywhere other than the U.S. and Canada.

http://www.thehomescientist.com/kits/CK01/ck01-main.html

In the UK a child died after drinking a beaker of (I think, my memory is hazy) copper sulphate.

This very rare but avoidable death possibly led to people thinking "chemistry sets are dangerous" and not buying them. Or maybe as makers made sets safer people felt that the sets were not worth the money - not exciting enough.

The toy industry is pretty brutal too. It is a multi billion dollar business, with a limited number of companies in the sector.

The BBC article mentions a radioactive toy. With careful websearching you can find safe versions of similar items. Here's one, a spinthariscope:

(http://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath...)

EDIT: I'm unable to find the news report of the child dying. Here's a result from Google Books:

(http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=xXVEKN79diAC&pg=PA371...)

Here's another result about Cobalt Chloride:

(http://sci.tech-archive.net/Archive/sci.chem/2006-07/msg0000...)

This happened...

http://www.thejayfk.com/?p=621

Yup ... I still remember going almost blind by throwing Mg in H2O ... and coming back for more, both experimentally an theoretically.

Contemporary parents must learn that it is good for kids to get cuts, bruises, broken bones, infections ... blinding flashes of Mg in H2O ... otherwise you didn't have a childhood ... otherwise you may not become a well-adjusted and curious adult.

KOSMOS experimental sets are still somewhat popular in Germany.

http://www.kosmos-shop.de/Experimentierkasten-640132/Kosmos-...

I only had the electronic sets as a kid, so I don't know how much the chemical ones have been dumbed down since.

"... Yes they are safe. Are there some hazards associated with them? Yes, but of a very minor nature. The whole idea of them is you learn from handling real materials, ..."

Hmm I remember doing that & learning about the burn properties of sulphur. I had a lab under the house. My dads vice held an old bent spoon where I could mix things up and burn them. It was the first time I found a noxious gas burning sulphur, looking at the small blue flame. Taking a small breath of the stuff gave me a bit of a fright as the gas (SO2 or sulphur dioxide) literally sucked my breath away. I just discovered my first oxy-philic reaction :) (previous chemistry set Qs: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=bootload+ch...)

I think I must have been on the edge of the chemistry set rule. One of my uncles bought me one for Christmas, much to the consternation of my slightly overprotective mother, however she let me play with the kit, got me the necessary fuel for the bunsen burner and so on. Didn't blow anything up, had much fun with the magnesium ribbon, all very jolly good fun. That must have been about mid-90s, didn't see many sets after then.

However I do feel sorry for kids who have science lessons without a practical, I had two very excellent chemistry teachers who were very happy to get kids involved in chemistry demonstrations (without incident), and an excellent biology teacher who had nothing but trust with arming a bunch of 15 year olds with scalpels.

When I was in middle school I took a class at OMSI (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry) called "explosive chemistry". We made black powder, sparklers, bombs, blew up water-filled pop cans with sodium, and all sorts of other things that would never be allowed today.

It was great fun.

> "Most of them are what you could refer to as kitchen chemistry," says Cook. "Using things you can find in your kitchen - baking soda or vinegar."

Cost savings, a moral high-ground, and buyers who won't use the product themselves. It's an unholy trinity.

When I was a kid, several of us in my neighborhood had vials of mercury that we enjoyed playing with. We didn't do any chemistry experiments with it, though--we just enjoyed watching solid metal objects float on it, and taking it out and feeling how weird it felt rolling around in our hands.

This was in the late '60s and early '70s. I don't remember where we got it, but we didn't keep it secret, and no adults (parents, teachers) freaked out if they saw us with it.

I wonder what would happen nowadays if a kid brought some mercury to school to play with?

I'd add: whatever happened to microscopes? I loved getting one of those and a box of slides: bugs, plants, cells, all kinds of cross sections... And what happened to the 160 in one electronics kits from Radio Shack, ala http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/html/1987/h104.html? (Actually, those last evolved into the rather clever SnapCircuits which are pretty fun, sold in Radio Shack and other fine stores).

I recently discovered an old chemistry book that is supposedly banned from publication, but since it's not under any copyright anymore we can download it with breaking any rules : http://openmaterials.org/2010/03/18/banned-the-golden-book-o... -- I am finding it really cool to read and learn from.

Here's a fresh example: http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml12/12234.html

Now buckyballs are mortal hazard and have to be banned. They are marked 13+, but who cares - it's obvious that it's fun, thus has to be banned by federal government.

In that same vein, I like Gever Tulley's "5 dangerous things you should let your kids do" TED Talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_...

Kids should definitely be allowed to play with fire.

There 'is no demand' for it.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/07/epic-fraud-how-to-suc...

The internet? I remember going over to a friend's house in middle school, and him showing me how to make a small bomb using stuff from the chemistry set using instructions he found online...

European legislation interference health and safety BS happened.

I think its sad that our society has become so divorced from reality that Uranium- a naturally occurring element- is considered a "crazy" thing for kids to have. It takes huge amounts of uranium and processing and a lot of technology to make a bomb, most of the difficulty has nothing to do with the uranium.

You can get uranium simply by buying old fiestaware. The paint they used in certain colors used uranium as part of the pigment.

If you have a geiger counter you can make noise with it. (not that I think there's much useful to do with uranium in a chemistry set, but then I was always poor at chemistry.)

It is just a real shame that "uranium" has become a scary word.