“Chemical Magic” Chemistry Set, London, c. 1920 (Inv. 92768). Would you play with this chemistry kit?

Name: Jane

Age: 61

Occupation: Teacher

From: Oxford

Object: Chemistry Set

Story: My friend and I would go into her dad’s garden shed and play with her brother’s chemistry set. We knew we shouldn’t so we had to wait till no-one was at home. I think we were about 10 years old. I came joint first in my chemistry exam at grammar school but chose not to take chemistry and further! I eventually married a chemistry teacher.

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Did you try this at school too? Photo credit: shoots by Mycatkins (License)

Name: Sophia

Age: 5

From: Bicester

Story: We took some cress seeds. We had two groups in the light and two groups in the dark. One of the groups in the light and one in the dark got watered. The group that was in the light and had water grew. The group in the light without water grew but it was yellow. The groups in the dark didn’t grow.

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Why don’t you try this at home too? We don’t recommend eating it either! Photo credit: Milk 340/365 by Eric.Ray (License)

Name:  Ruth

Age: 33

Occupation: Teacher of English

From: Birmingham

Object: Milk

Story: I used to sneak a cup of milk out of the kitchen at home when I was a tiddler, and conduct ‘experiments’ on it – largely this involved leaving it in the garden for a couple of days and being amazed that it turned into something vaguely resembling lumpy yoghurt. I wasn’t brave enough to eat it though. Even I had limits.

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Age: 11

Occupation: School

From: Leicestershire

Object: Blowing up a balloon

Story: First I put baking powder into a balloon then I poured vinegar in and tied the end. The two reacted to give a gas which expanded and blew the balloon up.

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Age: 52 (50 when I first saw this!)

Occupation: Engineer

From: Leicestershire

Object: Exploding Coke Rocket

Story: Drop a polo mint into a bottle of coke. Put the lid on and it explodes then erupts like a volcano.

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One of Joanna’s great photographs of the crystal garden in a jam-jar she made last week.

Name: Joanna

From: Oxford

Object: Crystal Garden

Story: As a child, in the 1950s, encouraged by my father I set about making a crystal garden in a jam-jar. The brilliance of the colours and feathery forms of the crystals was probably one of my first experiences of chemistry and the sense of wonder has stayed with me through the years.

Who was to know that much later, in my twenties, I would find myself in a laboratory at the University of Oxford, growing crystals as part of my job. My aim was to grow a crystal of rabbit troponin C, a key protein vital in muscle contraction. With a crystal, chemists can work out the structure of very complex molecules such as proteins and find out much about how they operate in the body.

Amazingly after only a few months of working on this project, one morning, on examining my tubes of solution, I discovered the first ever recorded crystal of rabbit troponin C glistening in the bright morning light. It was a spectacular crystal and you can see a photograph of it published in Nature (Mercola, D., Bullard, B., and Priest, J., Nature Vol. 254 p 634-635 April 17 1975).

Dorothy Hodgkin, who had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1964) for her work on the use of crystals to discover the structure of biological molecules using X-ray diffraction, just happened to be in the department that morning. To my intense pride, she came and looked down my microscope at the precious crystal!

Close up of Joanna’s crystal garden.

For fun last week I made a crystal garden once again and have included some photographs with this recollection for any reader who has never made one!

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Boom! Photo credit: DSCF1311s by deradrian (license)

Name: Ben

Test Tube Stand with Test Tubes, Mid-19th Century (Inv. 34639)

Age: 15

From: Newcastle, UK

Occupation: Student

Object: Chemistry Kit

Story: When I was five my grandparents bought me a large chemistry set. Doing the proper experiments was boring, so I just mixed everything together in a flask and pushed a cork into the top. After a minute or so the cork blew off the flask and sprayed the contents all over the ceiling of my bedroom.

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Gauze Top Bunsen Burner, c.1874, (Inv. 45602). Who else used Bunsen Burners similar to this when heating things at school?

Name: Priyam

Age: 12

From: London, UK

Object: Jelly babies

Story: We did screaming jelly babies at school – we added potassium chlorate, a heated substance, to the jelly babies and they turned a lilac colour and screamed and then blew up.

Mmmmm, tasty. Photo credit: jelly babies by Sam Greenhalgh (license)

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