Page 41 - the NOISE March 2014

where we boarded the “F” train for Manhattan. It was about a 20-30 minute ride and we got off at the 23rd Street Station.
It was about 10 or 11 in the morning, I would guess, as we climbed up out of the dark, dank and fetid smell of the subway into the bright sunlight of lower Manhattan. We had the address of the company written on a small scrap of paper, but we didn’t know in which direction to walk to get to the store. We decided to walk towards the East River and spotting a postal carrier; I approached the official and asked, “Do you know how to get to ...”
He quickly answered, “I know every address in this area, where you want to go?” I showed him the piece of paper. “Okay turn around, it’s about two and half blocks west, on the other side of the street.” We walked towards the store and the closer we got, the more and more excited we felt.
We quickly walked past the front of the store glancing furtively through the plate glass windows to what lay inside. Mustn’t appear nervous. We each were going to buy one of the chemicals, and flipped a coin to see who would be first. Jack won the coin toss and he went into the store to buy one ounce of sulfur. I leaned against a street lamp, several feet from the store, waiting for Jack to emerge with the goods. He came out excitedly, clutching a small paper bag and we opened up the bag to reveal a small brown bottle capped with a black rubber plug. Inside was the precious sulfur.
Great, we just needed the charcoal and the Saltpetre. I approached the storefront, heart in throat, and opened the door. As I went inside, I could smell the sharp odor of myriads of chemi- cals. Along one wall in glass showcases were every kind of laboratory apparatus such as Bunsen burners, beakers, flasks and test tubes. Measuring devices on another wall with some of the more expensive items such as crucibles, magnifying lenses, and ring stands. Dr. Frankenstein would feel right at home.
I approached the sales counter just as the salesman was finishing up selling a chemical to a young guy, he probably being a college student.
“What do you need today, Son?” he asked.
I said, “I’d like to have two ounces of Saltpetre, please.”
The salesman responded, “Oh, you mean Potassium Nitrate, I have to go in the back to measure
that out for you, just a minute or so.” So, the salesman has revealed the “secret” name of Saltpetre to me. But then having come over into lower Manhattan for the chemicals, I surely didn’t want to disappoint Jack, much less myself. My heart was pounding, and I was almost ready to turn around and flee. About a minute later the salesman came back up to the sales counter holding another brown glass jar, this one probably twice as big as the one that had held the sulfur.
He said, “That’ll be a dollar 19.”
I fumbled around in my pocket for a much wrinkled dollar bill and counted out the 19 cents onto the counter. I handed over the dollar, no doubt my allowance for doing household chores. The salesman took the money, put it into his cash register and then handed me my precious chemical.
As I turned to leave, the salesman said with a chuckle: “I guess you and your friend are going to make gunpowder, eh? Now, just be careful, Sonny, I’d hate to lose a customer ...”
I quickly opened the door and rejoined Jack. We took the subway back to Astoria, all the time whispering about our little adventure so far and the plans to be, furtively. Okay now we’ve got two of the three ingredients. We can get charcoal from some burnt matches or the remnants of some local hobo’s campfire.
We were well on our way!
We decided to perform our experiment in the basement of Jack’s house, there being no really private location in the apartment where I lived.
We passed by a local hobo’s encampment, and grabbed a small piece of charcoal from the unfor- tunate’s spent campsite, there being a number of WWII and Korean veterans about.
I had the magic formula, but we didn’t have any method for weighing the ingredients. We simply crushed the charcoal to fairly fine powder, added a generous amount of KNO3 and sprinkled some sulfur onto the pile. We stirred the ingredients with a teaspoon that Jack had purloined from his mom’s kitchen. The colors in the pile began to blend together and we knew that we were almost ready for the big bang to come!
Jack carefully gathered a small amount of the “gunpowder” and placed it onto the top of an empty one quart oil can that he’d previously swiped from his father’s gasoline station. I was pre- pared with several wooden kitchen matches I’d snuck out of the house that morning. I was sure my mother wouldn’t miss the few matches she kept in the small metal container mounted to the wall near the stove.
I gingerly struck the match against the exposed brick of the basement wall. It didn’t light! I tried again with a little more effort and succeeded in breaking that matchstick. The moment of truth would have to wait as I fished another precious match from my pocket. This time the “strike any- where” blue-tip diamond match flared to life! I let it catch, and then pitched it onto the small pile of “explosives” in front of us.
The match sputtered a couple of times and went out, rewarding us with nary an earthshaking ex- plosion. What have we done wrong? We looked over the formula again and decided to add a little more of the Potassium Nitrate. So a few small bits of the pale white crystals came out of the tightly capped brown glass bottle and onto the experimental pile. I stirred the pile a bit as Jack retired the KNO3 to its safe storage location above his father’s wall-mounted workbench.
This time I handed the match to my friend. Jack’s sure hand resulted in a good flame on the first strike! He bravely and carefully placed the glowing end of the match onto the pile and we were re- warded not with the desired explosion, but with a fizzling, bubbling, small fire that danced around on the surface of our “gunpowder.” The sulfurous smell soon followed and thankfully the “fire” soon went out before we were asphyxiated.
Jack opened the basement window to clear out the smoke while we regrouped to figure out what to do next. We never did get our “gunpowder” to explode properly that summer, no doubt due to the incomplete instructions in the encyclopedia!
There is more of a method to properly make this oldest of explosives, mainly the proper use of equipment, and the chemical ratios and most important, the careful milling technique to combine the ingredients, something we should have done. In hindsight, I recall working with an engineer who blew off two of his fingers at age 12, attempting to do what Jack & I had tried so many years ago. I wonder if this is how the Manhattan Project scientists got started?
| Steve Imms is a professional amateur radio repairman, among other hobbies.
steveimms@cableone.net
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