Science Lesson "Excitement"
Discussion
Right, one of the other threads was complaining about it only being rockets on here so I thought I'd start a thread where we could regale each other with stories of entertaining incidents from our science classes. Just thought of this as my eldest starts his mock GCSEs on Monday & has been asking me about chemistry.
In my first year at secondary (Year 7 in modern speak) we had convection demonstrated to us in Science using a jig that simulated the central heating in a house. The glass tubing contained a liquid that changed colour from blue to red as it got hot thus demonstrating how the heat transfer occurred around the system. The only down side of this was the liquid was highly flammable and was heated in the jig by a Bunsen Burner.
So the inevitable happened, whilst Mr Wright was waffling on about the system the liquid boiled, expanded, shot out of the top of the jig and was ignited by the Bunsen. The jig was about two feet tall and was engulfed in flame that shot up another two feet, nearly to the ceiling it seemed. It also spread out to cover the adjacent desks as the plastic fluid reservoir weakened and spilt more fuel on the conflagration. (un)fortunately Mr wright was pretty good with the fire extinguisher and the class room was saved, though I did have a friend who would show anyone who cared to listen his scorched pencil case for a while.
Sometime later we had one lad who though the hydrogen generating experiment who be more interesting if instead of igniting some hydrogen collected in a test tube he just shoved the lighted spill straight into the hydrogen generating apparatus. He didn't do a very good job of explaining "just what the bl**dy hell he thought he was doing" in front of the rest of us. still, it was a good demonstration of rocket propulsion as some of the glassware was fired across the lab and smashed against the wall.
Ahh, strayed back to rockets.....
In my first year at secondary (Year 7 in modern speak) we had convection demonstrated to us in Science using a jig that simulated the central heating in a house. The glass tubing contained a liquid that changed colour from blue to red as it got hot thus demonstrating how the heat transfer occurred around the system. The only down side of this was the liquid was highly flammable and was heated in the jig by a Bunsen Burner.
So the inevitable happened, whilst Mr Wright was waffling on about the system the liquid boiled, expanded, shot out of the top of the jig and was ignited by the Bunsen. The jig was about two feet tall and was engulfed in flame that shot up another two feet, nearly to the ceiling it seemed. It also spread out to cover the adjacent desks as the plastic fluid reservoir weakened and spilt more fuel on the conflagration. (un)fortunately Mr wright was pretty good with the fire extinguisher and the class room was saved, though I did have a friend who would show anyone who cared to listen his scorched pencil case for a while.
Sometime later we had one lad who though the hydrogen generating experiment who be more interesting if instead of igniting some hydrogen collected in a test tube he just shoved the lighted spill straight into the hydrogen generating apparatus. He didn't do a very good job of explaining "just what the bl**dy hell he thought he was doing" in front of the rest of us. still, it was a good demonstration of rocket propulsion as some of the glassware was fired across the lab and smashed against the wall.
Ahh, strayed back to rockets.....
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