Dancing Naked in the Mind Field Read Online Free PDF Page A

Kary B, don’t you blow your eyes out!”
    I’d respond cheerfully, “Okay, Mom, I won’t.”
    But kids being kids, and explosives being explosives, occasionally the fuel would explode. One time it set a big tree on fire. This taught me an important lesson: Never mix explosive chemicals under a big tree.
    The first chemistry lab in which I spent some time was Dreher High. Our teacher would leave the lab open in the afternoons so Al Montgomery and I could play in there. She was pleased we wanted to be there. Most of her students hated chemistry. Everything we played with would today be consideredtoo dangerous for adults to use without federally approved supervision. But in 1960 chemicals were just bottles of stuff that no one took very seriously. It was perfectly acceptable to turn sixteen-year-old boys loose in a chemistry lab.
    When I became president of the Junior Engineering Technical Society (JETS), Al and I thought it would be fun to put on a science show for the elementary schools in Columbia. The stated objective of the show was to demonstrate the basic principles of science as they had been explained by Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century.
    The show consisted of a series of demonstrations. We rolled metal balls down inclined wooden troughs to illustrate how mass is accelerated in a gravitational field. We taught that a hypothesis is a guess that can be proven into a theory by doing experiments.
    We had a dramatic opening. A concoction with iodine and potassium perchlorate. It began with burning some alcohol, quietly heating and concentrating the other ingredients in a porcelain dish behind a crack in the curtains. When the eerie blue alcohol flame died out, the residue would blaze up into serious pyrotechnic action for a second and then there would be sparks till it was over. It always worked before.
    But when we did the show at A. C. Moore Elementary, my neighborhood grammar school, it didn’t. The blue flame wavered for a second, and then the whole thing exploded. Shards of the crucible blew all over the place. Everyone sat in complete awe of chemistry.
    I held my breath waiting for someone from the bloodstained front row to be carried backstage in the arms of my first-grade teacher. No one appeared. I walked tentatively ontothe stage and started talking about Isaac Newton, checking out the front row for blood. I didn’t see any.
    When we were through, a boy with blond hair and a little blood on him came backstage with a small piece of glass that had hit him in the forehead. He wasn’t bothered by it. It was as if he’d caught a baseball after a home run. I took the piece of glass from him and asked him not to tell. He was a kid from my neighborhood. I knew he’d keep quiet.
    I first worked in a professional lab the summer after my high school graduation. My dad helped me get a job at Columbia Organic, a supplier of research chemicals. There was no excuse for such a company in a little town like Columbia, except for the person of Max Gergel. Max is an amazing entrepreneur, a courtly gentleman, and a wonderful storyteller. He wrote some of the stories down in
Excuse Me Sir, But Could I Interest You in a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide?
    Max owned and operated Columbia Organic. He made about a thousand research chemicals, but he resold a lot more. My job was to go through his orders in the morning and find the cheapest supplier of the chemicals we were ordering. The same chemicals can have several different names, depending on who is using them and for what. I would translate them into all their chemical names in different languages.
    One day I discovered a bizarre oversight that had gone unnoticed for years. We were buying a chemical from Fluka, a Swiss company, for one of our customers in Illinois. We were paying Fluka $100 a gram. No one in the company had noticed that we had a kilogram of the very same chemical in stock but under another name. When we would place an order with Fluka, they would turn around