One thing that imediately came to mind was something that started when I was at high school and continued, with varying levels of activity, until my last year in college. My high school was Haileybury College in England, an expensive boys boarding school. One of the subjects new to me at Haileybury was chemistry. In this class, I developed an interest in explosives, not in a destructive frame of mind but to investigate the means to create, for instance, an exploding toilet seat.
So, I needed an impact explosive. Such an explosive was potassium iodide, an easy to make, relatively stable yet powerful explosive. When I first made this, I mixed the chemicals in a jar in the lab and sneaked the jar out of the lab in my pocket. Back in the common room, I put the mixture through a filter paper and was left with about two teaspoons of wet brown powder. When this dried, it would be my explosive. Other boys in the common room watched with interest but one classics student, Tubby H, jeered "That won't explode, it looks like a pile of s..t." So, I put the filter paper with the little pile on the floor and invited him to step on it. Of course, I did not know if it would explode or not when it was this wet. Tubby continued to jeer, so I again told him to step on it if he really believed nothing would happen. Now, of course, he had to. So he did. What followed was a very much bigger explosion than I had ever expected and it echoed around the school quadrangle through the open windows. The lower half of Tubby disappeared in a cloud of reddish-brown smoke. His foot was propelled upward by the blast so fast that his knee almost hit his chin. He was left standing on one leg, red faced and looking a little like a constipated flamingo. "Well" I said " that was a success." I don't think Tubby agreed with me.
Now that I knew I could make the explosive, I could think about the exploding toilet seat but, it had to be worthy of Monty Python's Flying Circus.....a lofty ambition. One of the good things about potassium iodide was that you could paint it on something while it was still wet and, when it dried, that object was then covered in an impact explosive.
One Sunday in the summer, my mother had invited some people to tea. Before they arrived, I painted the bump feet under the seat of the downstairs toilet with a thick coat of the wet brown paste and put the seat down very carefully.
We were all seated in the living room enjoying our tea and then Mae, a somewhat ample lady, excused herself and left the room, closing the door behind her. At this point, I went behind the couch and pretended to look for something in the bookcase. I knew I would not be able to keep a straight face if we heard the explosion. A minute or so later, there was a double Bang-bang as she obviously squatted assymetrically. Nobody said a word, maybe they did not hear while they were all talking. When Mae came back into the room, she didn't say a word either. Well, you wouldn't would you? She looked visibly shaken and probably did not say anything for an hour or more. Chalk up another success.
I found many other uses for potassium iodide. One was painting a thin film on the underside of the bases of wine glasses, after the table was set. Then, as each person took a drink and put his wine glass down again, there was a sharp crack. Very good conversation starter..."static electricity, its been very dry today." Also at school, it was fun to simply scatter drops of the wet powder everywhere, on tables, on desks, on the floor,etc. This produces a whole cacophony of cracks and pops whatever you do. Painting door handles was another favorite, but that can get moderately painful.
One explosive device I made I called a land mine. This idea was based on the large cylindrical devices that German bombers used to drop in rural areas of England during WW2. I made it from a thin metal can about five inches in diameter and ten inches high. These were sold during the war containing dried milk. They had very tight fitting lids with a twist on feature. I drilled a hole in the base and fitted a model airplane sparkplug in it. A battery, an ignition switch and a coil of wire completed the kit. To arm the device, I put just a few or up to a handful of crystals of calcium carbide in the can and just a little water. Then, I screwed the lid on tight. The can now became full of acetylene gas and was armed.
Next door to my parents lived Mrs S, her son, one dog and about eighty rabbits. The son was a maniac around guns. The fruit and vegetables we grew were constantly full of lead pellets or small bullets. So, they owed us. Mrs S had a stud bunny, I believed she called him Basil. One day, while Mrs S was out, my cousin and I went into the next door property and buried a powerful land mine under the straw by the edge of Basil's pen. Then we trailed the wire back to our fence. Basil seemed to like his new hump and proceeded to lie on it. When Mrs S came home, we could see her at the kitchen sink looking out of the window. That is when I pressed the switch. There was a loud woomf and Basil took his first flying lesson. Mrs S looked horrified as she observed Basil's inability to remain airborne. We rapidly reeled in the wire and can and left the area. At this point, I felt very sorry for Basil, but I went back to check on him a while later and he was running around, apparently fine.
The land mine was a partial success but nowhere near as much fun as potassium iodide.
There are many more stories on this subject but I'll leave it there for another day. Then, maybe I'll tell you how we kept the residents of a sleepy English village awake for most of a night by mysterious loud explosions going off every fifteen minutes. When we thought we had got all the fun out of it, we decided to quit and go to bed. But, we couldn't sleep, those bloody bangs kept going for another four hours.
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