One of my favorites is Sand Won't Save You This Time about chlorine triflouride.
A few choice quotes:
He also mentions various substances whose properties are not fully known or understood because they blow up too soon after manufacture to be analyzed. For example, cyanogen azide:There’s a report from the early 1950s (in this PDF) of a one-ton spill of the stuff. It burned its way through a foot of concrete floor and chewed up another meter of sand and gravel beneath, completing a day that I'm sure no one involved ever forgot. That process, I should add, would necessarily have been accompanied by copious amounts of horribly toxic and corrosive by-products: it’s bad enough when your reagent ignites wet sand, but the clouds of hot hydrofluoric acid are your special door prize if you’re foolhardy enough to hang around and watch the fireworks.
And about Azidotetrazolate SaltsIt's a clear oil, not that many people have seen it that state, or at least not for long. Marsh's papers are, most appropriately, well marbled with warnings about how to handle the stuff. It's described as "a colorless oil which detonates with great violence when subjected to mild mechanical, thermal, or electrical shock", and apologies are made for the fact that most of its properties have been determined in dilute solution. For example, its boiling point, the 1972 paper notes dryly, has not been determined. (The person who determined it would have to communicate the data from the afterworld, for one thing).
A more accurate song title for these latest creations would be “I Love the Sound Of Shrapnel Bouncing Off My Welder’s Mask”, but that sort of breaks up the rhythm.
And here's yet more fun in the chemistry lab:The authors went on to investigate the thermal behavior of these wonderful compounds, another risky move. As it turns out, they have calorimetry data on only five of the salts, because when they got to the sodium derivative, “a violent explosion destroyed the setup”. They also did sensitivity tests, using a standard drophammer rig from the Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung, evocatively abbreviated as BAM. These, along with the friction and spark tests, put these compounds well into the “primary explosive” category. Well, the ones that they could get data on, that is: the potassium and cesium compounds blew up as they tried to get them into the testing apparatus. So it’s safe to assume that they’re a bit touchy, too.
But it has other properties. The perchlorate anion is in a high oxidation state, and what goes up, must come down. A rapid drop in oxidation state, as chemists know, is often accompanied by loud noises and flying debris, particularly when the products formed are gaseous and have that pesky urge to expand. If you take the acid up to water-free concentrations, which is most highly not recommended, you'll probably want to wear chain mail, because it's tricky stuff. You can even go further and distill out the perchloric anhydride (dichlorine heptoxide) if you have no sense whatsoever. It's a liquid with a boiling point of around 80 C, and I'd like to shake the hand of whoever determined that property, assuming he has one left.
Offered primarily for science-related amusement but it also is one of those things that makes me think that doing something other than science for a living wasn't all bad.If you'd like to make your mark, this seems to be a relatively unexplored field. The problem is, the mark you're most likely to make is in the nature of a nasty stain on the far wall.
. (Or at least before university chemistry labs O_0).