Families are a great invention.\u00a0 They allow us to remember stuff from long ago and be young again.\u00a0 Case in point, I have a descendant who is in middle school.\u00a0 He is forever describing to me machines he has invented that turn kinetic energy and wind and sunlight into potential energy stored in batteries and flywheels and allowing him to perpetually power the imaginary kingdom he rules with an iron hand.\u00a0 On a fairly frequent interval I remind him of the three laws of thermodynamics and the scourge of entropy.\u00a0 He laughs it off as fake news.\u00a0 Apparently, his generation has formulated the fourth law, magic.<\/p>\n
All of these flights of fancy reminded me of my own early technological history.\u00a0 As a youngster, I had a fascination with chemistry.\u00a0 I quickly graduated from the hobbyist set up with a few bottles of sodium bisulfate, test tubes and an alcohol lamp to a professional ground glass distillation set up, temperature controlled electric heating, reagent bottles full of mineral acids and even some formidable organic solvents.\u00a0 I searched in arcane book stores for the organic chemistry recipes and set-ups that allowed for practical synthesis of various compounds that in my young mind were interesting.\u00a0 At one point, I obtained an old organic chemistry text that was part of a medical school curriculum from the 1920s.\u00a0 It included a number of compounds that interested me including nitroglycerine and trinitrotoluene.\u00a0 I went as far as obtaining all the reagents, equipment and vessels I would need to perform the reaction.\u00a0 On the day I had set for producing the first batch I was walking down to the supermarket to buy the fifty pounds of ice I needed to cool the reaction when it occurred to me that this might just possibly be a \u201cbad idea.\u201d\u00a0 You see I remembered that nitroglycerine was a material that wasn\u2019t just dangerous during production but remained sensitive to heat and vibration at all times.\u00a0 Not owning a reinforced concrete bunker, I realized that after I manufactured the “soup” I had no place to keep it.\u00a0 Well, no place that would survive a detonation.\u00a0 Now you might think that this kind of rational evaluation would have steered me clear of all pyrotechnic and explosive materials.\u00a0 You would be wrong.\u00a0 The extent of my caution was to shift over to something less unstable but equally exothermic.\u00a0 I started working with thermite.\u00a0 In these post 9-11 days I imagine my experiments would probably fall under the heading of possible terror activity.\u00a0 Back then they were the stuff of Fourth of July celebratory hijinks.\u00a0 But even these relatively tame and successful forays into amateur pyrotechnics now give me pause.\u00a0 Just precisely how stupid is a teenage boy when it comes to unsafe activities.\u00a0 The answer comes back loud and clear.\u00a0 Infinitely stupid.\u00a0 I can remember what back then seemed to me to be failsafe precautions. \u00a0In hindsight what I see was ignorance and just plain dumb luck. \u00a0And that really frightens me.<\/p>\n
Needless to say, these memories inform my present situation.\u00a0 It occurs to me that the adults around when I was hatching my munitions program thought that my forays into chemistry were altogether benign and to be encouraged.\u00a0 Hmmm. \u00a0Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?\u00a0 Not just the Shadow.\u00a0 Any man who was ever a fourteen year-old boy knows too.<\/p>\n
I intend to monitor my young Archimedes\u2019 progress with an eye for safety.\u00a0 I have gotten him some books on electricity and machines that stress safety and standard components.\u00a0 I know he has an interest in robotics.\u00a0 And I know he enjoys BattleBots so I will keep an eye out for any indication that his creations will include cutting surfaces or kinetic devices such as circular saw blades or pneumatic hammers.\u00a0 If my cautionary tale rings any bells in your own case, remember, the apple does not fall far from the tree.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Families are a great invention.\u00a0 They allow us to remember stuff from long ago and be young again.\u00a0 Case in point, I have a descendant<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[26,83],"class_list":["post-1061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","tag-american-exceptionalism","tag-family"],"yoast_head":"\n