Science and Other Flights of Fancy
In 1964, at the age of ten, Chris almost burned his family’s house to the ground. The fault lay in the science. Luckily, the damage was limited to the downstairs bedroom closet and it’s surrounding area. That was lucky because this was an expanded log cabin from about 1850 (the oldest home in the neighborhood). It was old enough and dry enough, being all wood, to have gone up like flash paper.
Chris blamed the event on science for good and honest reasons. At the age of ten (6th grade), Chris was enthralled with science. He was a normal suburban kid living in Wisconsin, but he was abnormally gifted as a student. He was skipped over second grade, so he was younger than his class. Because of astigmatized eyes, he was a slower than average reader, but more than made up for it with scientific curiosity. It was a genuine interest that led him to ask for a Chemistry Set for Christmas. His mother was recently flush from an inheritance and liked academic gifts (she was, herself, a graduate student at the time), so she went out and found the best age-appropriate Chemistry Set she could find.
The big company in the erector set business was A.C. Gilbert, and after WWII the overall interest in science drove the company to expand its business into the Chemistry Set business. Learning toys (specifically designated as being for boys) were all the rage. Gilbert had two notable lines. In the 1950’s they had an Atomic Chemistry Set with a small amount of radioactive isotope. Imagine that on the shelves of Toy’r’Us or its successor. They also had a line of regular inorganic Chemistry Sets for various ages. They were branded as Chem-Lab #1 – #5. The #5 was for 12-year-olds. Chris wanted the Gilbert Chem-Lab #5.
Chris’ mother, probably out of one portion of motherly academic pride and one portion of guilt for the lean years on the $3,000 per year fellowship, bought him the Gilbert Chem-Lab #5, complete with scale, microscope and alcohol Bunsen burner. There were perhaps thirty different chemicals and an array of implements, beakers and test tubes for experiments. There was also a full course of experiments ranging from simple ones to complicated ones involving heating and microscopic inspection. The staff chemists at Gilbert must have had fun in a sort of Mr. Wizard (or Bill Nye, the Science Guy) way.
Chris was a precocious kid. He read through the booklet and marked the experiments that he found interesting, which meant the ones that sounded cool, had cool outcomes, had multiple steps like heating and generally made him feel like he was doing advanced research. He was ten , so his ability to discern the limits of his own capabilities was….limited.
He also completely ignored all the warnings and disclaimers from the A.C. Gilbert Company about only doing certain experiments under the guidance of an adult. Specifically, any experiment involving the use of the Bunsen burner was to be done under adult supervision.
One evening, while his sisters were watching TV, Chris was downstairs in his room playing with his new Chemistry Set. The Bunsen burner was called for. Chris kept a box of kitchen matches to light the burner. He used one to light the burner, waved the match to douse it, and tossed it casually at the waste basket in the corner. He went about the experiment and found it mostly unexciting. He liked things that made noise or foamed up or otherwise did something dramatic. This particular experiment was a dud. He turned off the burner and carefully put the metal cap on it and put away his kit. He suddenly heard the theme song from the TV upstairs, “Have gun will travel reads the card of the man……..”. Chris ran upstairs so as not to miss his favorite show.
About twenty minutes later, Chris’ mother came out of her room and asked, “why do I smell smoke?” That was it, the whole household jumped up and all saw the flames licking up from the downstairs room. Chris was sent running to the neighbors for help. Two hours later and six fire trucks later, Chris sheepishly returned to the scene of the crime to a soggy charred house and the Fire Department investigating the fire’s origins.
The Fire Chief stood and told Chris’s mother that it must have been some bad wiring and would write it up as such. As she walked away shaking her head, the Chief grabbed Chris by the elbow and handed him a charred match and said, “son, I found this on the closet floor. Be more careful with that Chemistry Set if you get a new one….that one’s long gone.” He patted Chris on the head and went off to write his report.
Years later, Chris sat in a conference room at Worcester Polytech Institute listening to a thesis defense by a young Asian woman describing her work on ammonia-based fuel cells. He was the CEO of a scientific research company that was working on electrochemical synthesis of ammonia and hydrogen. He was not a scientist, but rather a financial guy. He was learning enough about the science to make important strategic decisions. As he sat and listened and watched the slides with the scientific equations and ceramic tube pictures and machinations, he thought about his Gilbert Chem-Lab #5. He had taken Chemistry in freshman year in college and found it impossibly difficult. Who knows, maybe it was all the aggressive pre-meds in the class. Maybe it was the large lecture room teaching format. Or maybe, Gilbert and it’s Bunsen burner had done him a bigger favor than he realized at the time.
Chris liked learning about the science, but he liked it a lot more as a voyeur than a practitioner. It was fun that way and not so much like work. And Chris was less likely to burn the house down this way.