During my lunch times or times outside, I
began finding different pieces of jewelry and I wanted to know what it was made
of.
My dad had been a jeweler at one point in his
life and had imparted some of what he knew.
As a chemist, I had studied the different
properties of metals and did some tests.
My boss went on vacation as I found some very beat up jewelry that
appeared to be silver. I dissolved it
and tested it and found it was silver, but it was now in solution and I wanted
to bring it out as pure silver. I had
dissolved it in nitric acid and I thought, let me neutralize the acid with
ammonium hydroxide, nothing happened, so I left a small flask with maybe 10 mLs
of liquid on the counter a left for the evening. Ammonia-nitrogen compounds are not stable,
Ammonium-nitrate-silver compounds more so.
It explored destroying the flask and leaving small droplets of silver
ammonium droplets within a 25 foot area.
They popped when you stepped on them,
They left a black stain on what ever they touched with in the area. There was no other damage, but the black
spots could not be covered up. When my
boss returned, I was brought into his office and read the riot act. Simply put, if I ever tried anything like
that again, he would find some way to terminate me.
Like the chemicals I worked with, if I became
too agitated, I had a short fuse and could explode, but when I was wrong, I was
wrong and I was contrite enough to agree never to do anything like that
again.
The next spring, recognizing that part of the
issue was boredom, he sent me to an entomology work shop and with the bit of
knowledge I had from being an insect collector as a child, I became the
laboratory's in-house entomologist.
While I was definitely shaken by my
experiment gone wrong, it also shook off what ever malaise had been affecting
me. I began to develop a fire within
me, again.
Next:
The Fire Takes Off
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