My reading material this evening is The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, a wonderful children’s science book published in 1960. ((Hat-tip to Boing-Boing.)) Of course it’s been out of print since the mid-60s, and no-one would publish such a volume in these litigious days. Fortunately, somebody has scanned it, and a BitTorrent PDF is a couple of mouse-clicks away. ((I’m using Transmission these days – a very nice BitTorrent for the Mac.))
The writing is wonderful – clear, accurate, and never condescending. And the experiments take me back over 40 years: preparing hydrogen from HCl and zinc (and “popping” it, of course); ranking various acids and bases; preparing plastic sulphur (sorry, “sulfur”); preparing and testing ferrous chloride and ferric chloride; and so forth. Happy days…..