On December 29 I finished the book “Golden Voice from Prague” (one of the Santa’s gifts), and the day to collect the chemical experiment gift had come. At 15:30 we started in the direction of Dejvice, The Institute of Chemical Technology. Franta with Anička already were there and were preparing ingredients for the experiments. Franta and Daughter Ltd. prepared the following experiments for me, Honza, and other spectators:

Franta started by pouring sulfuric acid on a glass through a filtration paper. The bottle said 96%, so I expected quick disintegration of paper, bubbles and rising smoke. Nothing happened. Franta even poured some of the acid over his thumb. He calmly finished pouring, closed the bottle and then went and washed his hand. The acid dissolved the paper in about half an hour.

Anička then took four small dishes with powders (all of them different) and tried to prove that these were different metals. Aluminum was not there for understandable reasons. Unfortunately, the school did not have necessary inert platinum wire, but only iron one that bonded salts, caused by burning, on itself (= the powder got glued on it), and so there was no colored burning. Not even after Vojta tried to make a spray dispenser. Things just don’t work every time.

In the meantime Franta prepared a green fire. This was the item no. 3. He poured some powder into a metal dish, poured methanol over it and set it on fire. It burned beautifully plastically and in green. This demonstration worked great.

While we were watching the green fire, Franta prepared some water with detergent in a beaker and showed us “Boil pot, boil” in practice. He brought frozen CO₂ and tossed it in the water. The carbon dioxide started to evaporate, in other words changed to a gas, and as its bubbles rose (and there was a lot of them), the detergent was foaming and there was a bubble snake coming out of the beaker. Frozen CO₂ has -78°C and we verified that we could hold it without being burned if we didn’t compress it.

The next demonstration was very similar; we tossed a piece of Sodium into water. According to stories Sodium should ignite and run around the water tank, in reality it only started to bubble a little, floated to the side a got stuck there. It was slightly better when Franta tossed in a bigger piece; it tried to show itself better. At the end Franta added some phenolphthalein, and when Sodium was slowly burning, the water colored itself more and more pink.

Then we moved over to a large hydrogen bomb. Well, it sounds interesting, but no, the Institute does not have any weapons of mass destruction, but they do have tanks with Hydrogen and Oxygen. These gases can be entertaining when you mix them together. Using the Hydrogen cylinder, detergent water and funnel we created a bubble maker. And when the detergent bubbles full of Hydrogen were rising in the air Franta lit them with a burning match, and they gave out a nice pouf! and for a little while you could see a fire in the air. That is what I call applied chemistry.

The top of the program was a gas burner exhibition. That was really something. Franta showed us that he is not only a theoretician, but a handy lab hand. He lit a glass maker burner (huge thing, noisy as a welding torch and with two adjustable and independent flames), cut off a piece of a glass pipe and showed us how to make (blow) a beaker and an elbow. He was very skillful and beautiful to watch. It was clear that he had practice, since Vojta explained that this way he can be dashy in front of lady students. Honza tried it then and managed a nice, several times bent, little thing. If you were ever to try it, there are a couple of things to keep in mind:

Then it was already after five, and we had to move over to the building D, so it did not come to diffusion of permanganate and water, but we all non-chemists stated that we remembered it from a grade school, and that it was more physics than chemistry anyway.

In the D building they waited for us already, and we could start tasting wine. We tasted for about two hours and after it went home. On the way we promised to ourselves that we were going to make a level 2 demonstration sometime. It was fantastic from the beginning to the end – thanks Santa. See the photos here. Photos here.