Model Forum / General / Rockets / November 2005

....from rec.pyrotechnics.....

When Worlds of Creation and Destruction Collide
By MALCOLM W. BROWNE
New York Times 5v99

His diary entry for one day in 1898 read: "Fired cannon, pop and
firecrackers all
day. in evening had five sky rockets, three Roman candles, one large
pinwheel
and a Japanese match which I made."

The words were not those of a vengeful delinquent planning a schoolyard

massacre; they were written by a 15-year-old Robert Hutchings Goddard,
whose
later inventions - liquid rocket fuel, multistage vehicles and rocket
gyrostabilizers,
among them - opened the way to space travel.

One wonders what would have befallen space science if Goddard and a
host of
youthful experimenters had been denied access to the very things
legislators
and others these days are seeking to ban. The fact is, many young
people have
been drawn to careers in science and engineering partly by spectacular
chemical
reactions, especially explosions.

Recent school killings have prompted calls for banning almost every
potential
weapon from flint knives to nuclear bombs. (Somehow the automobile is
never
included.) But to ban all dangerous substances would be a tall order.

There has never been any lack of explosive materials, and explosives
have
proliferated at a tremendous rate over the years. A dictionary of
explosives in
1900 contained 1,091 entries, whereas the current tally of
"satisfactory"
explosives (according to an expert at Los Alamos National Laboratory)
is about
20,000.

There are those who would favor outlawing all 20,000 of them if it
meant keeping
children safe. But it's worth remembering that at least some explosives
are vital
to modern civilization; explosives are needed for mining, building
roads, digging
foundations, welding pipelines and railroad tracks, actuating
automobile air bags,
sending rockets to Mars and simulating conditions deep within the
atmospheres
of giant planets, among countless other thmigs.

During my own childhood in the 1930's and 1940's, dangerous chemicals
including explosives and poisons were easy to come by, and yet I cannot

remember a single incident comparable to the disaster in Littleton,
Colo., and
other recent killings.

Not that kids didn't experiment and play dangerous tricks.

Firearms and explosives (including fireworks) invite mischief, but in
the past it
was usually of a fairly harmless kind. Farm children of a more relaxed
generation
than the present one used to annoy dairymen by detonating sticks of
dynamite
under empty 20-gallon milk cans, sending the cans sailing into the sky.
College
students delighted in flushing lighted firecrackers down dormitory
toilets, causing
fountains to erupt from toilets on lower floors. Mild but startling
explosions
caused by ammonia-moistened iodine crystals scattered around lab
benches
enlivened many a chemistry class.

Recreational explosions are not necessarily dangerous. Since 1912, the
Conestoga Company of Bethlehem, Pa., has been making and selling
acetylene
cannons that delight children with satisfying bangs free of any risk of
injury.
But fireworks containing explosive or propellant charges are not
harmless; every
year children lose fingers or eyes by holding lighted firecrackers or
rockets.
Moreover, fireworks can be put to criminal purposes. Most of the pipe
bombs that
have figured in recent terror incidents have been filled with aluminum
powder
and oxidizers extracted from ordinary firecrackers.

Naturally, people are eager to prevent massacres. The response has been
an
effort to prevent the trafficking in explosives and guns, and to
somehow
reprogram children with violent proclivities.

Snuffing out the fire of genius for fear of a few psychopaths.
Fireworks are banned (or limited to relatively innocuous pyrotechnic
products like
sparklers) in 16 states, and each year sees new legislation to prevent
substances like ammonium nitrate fertilizer from falling into felonious
hands. The
sale of old-fashioned black powder, the propellant needed for firing
antique
weapons, has been sharply curtailed because it has been used in
homemade
bombs.

As the trend continues, government agencies have also constrained the
sale of
chemicals so tightly that it is difficult or impossible for most young
students to
buy them.

Until 1957, when it moved to New Jersey to provide chemicals and
apparatus
exclusively to manufacturers, the Ace Scientific Supply Company on  11h
Street,
Manhattan, used to count many neighborhood high school students among
its
customers. A thicket of regulations eventually blocked such sales, but
the com-
pany's president, Robert L. Lowenstein, remembered his student
customers
fondly.

"Many of those young customers made important contributions to science
and
are now research directors," Mr. Lowenstein said. "I wish something
could be
done to make chemicals and apparatus more available to students, but I
can't
see anyway."

Similar regrets are often expressed by older teachers.

Dr. David Weitzman, a professor of biochemistry at the University of
Bath,
England, wrote in the New Scientist nearly two decades ago that
although he
had accepted the chairmanship of his university's safety panel, the
reduction of
laboratory risks had had its down side.

"In the laboratories, we forbid this, don't allow that, and prevent the
other ... and
we're all safer and less at risk of harm and hazard. Most commendable,"
he
wrote. "But have we, at the same time, removed some of the fun and
excitement
of laboratory life, the thrill of experimenting with the unknown?"

Dr. Weitzman described some of the risky experiments and procedures
once
common in student laboratories, including a very hazardous method for
cleaning
flasks by filling them with an explosive mixture of nitric acid and
alcohol.

"These encounters conveyed a sense of intimacy with one's chemical
materials,"
he wrote. "One saw reagents and reactions at their most angry and
violent and,
having done so, one learnt to tame them and discipline them to do one's
own
bidding."

He concluded that "perhaps just a little bit of danger might bring a
lot more fun
and lead to more insight and understanding."

Banning several thousand chemicals as well as timers, pipes, epoxy glue
and
other items that can be combined as bombs would be one approach to
denying
bombs to potential criminals. Another would be the reprogramming of
violence-prone people to eliminate aggressive impulses; it might be
done with
psychotherapy, chemical castration or brain surgery.

By selective breeding or gene manipulation, traits associated with
aggressive
behavior and the creation of sociopaths might be reduced throughout the
world,
spawning the most well-behaved human race the world has ever seen. A
similar
result has been achieved in Siberia, where fur breeders have invented a
com-
pletely docile breed of silver fox -one that licks its keepers' faces
while being
prepared for slaughter.

But must we really squelch all the things that can contribute to
anti-social
behavior to protect ourselves from a handful of sociopaths?

Could an aggression-free race produce a Jefferson or Beethoven or
Einstein? As
we race to eliminate aggressors and their weapons, should we not take
care to
avoid throwing out the baby with the bath water?