Chemistry has always been important to me. It is a powerful tool to bend matter to our will, enhancing our everyday lives. But chemistry can be even more than that. As I found when I started to experiment with home chemistry, it can also be a lot of fun. While chemistry is about transformations of matter, it has also transformed my life.
As a child, I was always curious about how things were made. Watching TV shows about how everyday objects are produced first made me realise how much manufacturing depends on chemistry. So perhaps it’s not surprising that when I later had chemistry in school, it quickly became my favorite subject.
The most exciting part was when we did experiments in class. One of my favorites was growing crystals. Seeing them take distinct shapes out of seemingly nothing felt like magic to me. I was also quite proud of making the crystal myself. This feeling of achievement would stick with me and later tempt me to try out more experiments.
At around this time, my parents broke up and I moved into my grandma’s house with my mother. This house had a shed, which was rarely ever used. This slowly transformed into my little lab.
Chemistry turned into a hobby for me. Whenever an experiment was mentioned in our chemistry classes that I could theoretically try out at home, I usually would attempt it. I also took a lot of inspiration from amateur chemists on the internet. I started with simple experiments, like making hot ice from baking soda and vinegar or making hydrogen balloons by combining drain cleaner with aluminum foil.
I found it boring to buy the specific chemicals that I would need for a reaction, so most of the time I focused on experiments that used things that were easily accessible in hardware stores. For example, I wanted to perform a thermite reaction. It would have been very easy to just buy the iron oxide and the aluminum powder, but I figured it should be possible to make everything myself.
For the iron oxide I dissolved old steel wool in hydrochloric acid and precipitated the oxide by adding baking soda. The aluminum powder was more difficult, however. After some research and briefly thinking about building a makeshift ball mill, I decided to just try grinding some aluminum foil in a mortar. After a lot of intensive grinding, I produced a fine aluminum powder.
When mixing and igniting the thermite I didn’t have high hopes, but it ignited in a flash. Even if the thermite didn’t burn as bright or long as it would have with the bought powders, I preferred it this way since I’d made everything myself.
I enjoyed filming and documenting the experiments I was doing and showing them to friends. Planning and performing all of them also really helped me boost my confidence and become more independent. Even if something didn’t work out as planned at first, I would usually try over and over again until it worked. In the end it was always worth it.
There was no better feeling than achieving something after many failed attempts
For example, I once wanted to show the chemiluminescence of singlet oxygen by bubbling chlorine gas through a solution of sodium hydroxide and hydrogen peroxide. The solution was easy to prepare but the chlorine gas caused me some problems. I first tried to make it myself by electrolysing a brine solution and collecting the bubbles in a syringe. After some failed attempts I then tried acidifying a small amount of bleach inside the syringe itself, but this was also not successful. I almost gave up, but I had one last idea. I took a small piece of a pool chlorine tablet we had lying around in the shed and threw it in the solution. I didn’t think this was going to work – but then the solution vividly glowed red. There really was no better feeling than finally achieving something after many failed attempts.
The days of my home lab were numbered, however. As I moved to another city for university, I only had the opportunity to use it during the semester breaks. Of course, at university we had lab courses in which we were instructed on how to perform various experiments, but it wasn’t the same as planning them myself. Later, my parents reunited and moved back into our old house. While I was happy about my parents making up, I now had even less opportunity to visit my lab.
Thankfully, at around the same time I got more involved in research at university, which felt a lot more like performing the experiments at home. Working in the university lab still takes me back to the times when I did experiments at home in my shed, the only difference being that I now have access to way more chemicals and equipment. In a sense I have found a new home lab.
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