General   (General discussion, talk about anything.)

mollie,

They were just describing it, and it rang a bell because I recall a girl in my class at primary school bringing one into class on one occasion. I did not know that was what it was called until hearing this on TV today.

My favourite was a chemistry set.

But, not what you might think.

It was a hand me down from an older cousin, and there was not much of it left: A spirit burner, couple of test tubes, test tube holder, test tube stand, some litmus paper and a flask. Practically all the chemicals were exhausted.

I swapped my stamp album for a Bunsen Burner, and set out to restore the set to something like what it had formerly been.

Zinc granules obtained from the cases of used U2 battery cells, carbon also from the central electrode. Sulphur: well I knew where a vein of rock sulphur could be harvested on one of our many colliery spoil heaps. Once I had sulphur, I soon had Sulphur Dioxide, leading to Sulphur Trioxide, and hence to Sulphuric Acid.

I'll not bore you with any more of the list, but never did any of the experiments for which the set was designed, on the other hand, I had quite a large chemical processing and production facility on the go.

Got into glass blowing to make some of my own apparatus, including a nice voltameter: so electrolysing water provided a stream of hydrogen and oxygen.

I even got as far as catalyst technology, and was making Platinised silica gel.

Learned one hell of a lot about chemistry: far more than I would have, had that initial chem set been complete.