01.04: Chemiluminescence
Cleaning Out Chemical Storage
HausLab gets glowing! I was really nervous to shoot this video, because it’s in the dark most of the time. My camera has limited night shooting capabilities. It’s more of a point-and-shoot than a DSLR (though it’s somewhere in between). It doesn’t have open shutter capabilities, and the manual settings are still bound by automatic programs.
But it worked! (Mostly.)
Getting back into doing chemistry has been surprising in many ways. The only real chemistry I’ve done in the last five years or so has been at university. Working at home has been limited to little experiments to answer a friend’s questions about his own experiments; questions that needed a more diverse chemical inventory to answer. And every time I’d help him out, I realized how much I missed doing chemistry!
So now that I’ve been doing more chemistry on my own, I’ve been reinvigorated with the amateur chemistry buzz. It’s been a real joy to watch a reaction fail, mix up a new solution, and then watch it do exactly what it’s supposed to. I’m also over the hoarding of chemicals: they’re there to help me experience chemistry. To do that, they must be USED!
The large scale demonstration in this video brought back another part of amateur chemistry that I haven’t experienced in quite a long time. Amusement! Even though the camera didn’t pick it up too well, I can’t tell you how much fun it was to make my entire bathtub glow with luminol. To spray the walls of the shower enclosure and watch them glow was just… fun! I spent over an hour playing with about 50 liters of glowing solution.
Pour it in the toilet and it glows. As soon as it stops glowing, flush the toilet and the glow starts up again!
One of my favorite things about having a chemistry lab at home is that if I have a question, I can do an experiment and find out the answer. (I actually made use of that resource on an online dating website once; the question was “when a glove fitted to the right hand is turned inside out, it fits…” Now I could have just done some mental acrobatics, but instead, I got a fitted glove and turned it inside out! (It fits the left hand, by the way).
So when you want to find out if pee makes luminol glow…
I learn best when I learn from experience. I can read and learn stuff, but until I do something, it doesn’t become clear. There’s even a Chinese proverb about it: “Tell me, I’ll forget. Show me, I’ll remember. Involve me, I’ll understand.”
Well, the good news is that I’ve come to the end of testing the”questionable” solutions in my inventory. Next, I’m going to use up some chemicals that are either essentially empty already or otherwise completely useless to me. There will probably be two videos out of the remainder, so numbers six and seven. Then number eight will be when I reveal the second series!
Wait! What about number five?! Well, I’ve got a bottle of chemical that’s total garbage. It came that way from the supplier, and I wasn’t very happy about it. I found that I can recover bits and pieces of it, so I’m going to see how much I can salvage and if there’s a better way than the tedious way I found already.
See you soon!
–Jason
