My grandfather worked for AC Gilbert, which made the Erector Set, and American Flyer trains. I had rather complete sets growing up, and couldn't figure out why my erector set and toy trains were so much better than everyone else's.
An official lead casting kit? That's pretty neat. I just pulled cells out of discarded car batteries that I found while playing on a construction site, and melted it in bottle caps over the kitchen stove.
I cannot believe my parents let me do ANY of that. The joys of growing up in the USSR.
If it had already been used as a reactor coolant, or was from some other industrial processes, it could be more radioactive than you would like it to be.
Otherwise, no, unless you get enough of it to saturate your tissues and cause problems due to it being denser than your biochemistry evolved to expect water to be.
An early experiment reported not the "slightest difference" in taste between ordinary and heavy water; on the other hand, rats given a choice between distilled normal water and heavy water were able to avoid the heavy water based on smell, and it may be possible that it has a different taste.
Didn't everyone make "tin" soldiers? We had a supply of old metal types (they are basically made of lead, no idea where we found those) and made armies of them on the stove. You could buy molds of various kinds to make them in. I wonder how much lead we ingested in the process (and from playing with them)...
i seem to remember these been sold as multi part magazines even into the 80s here in ireland. checking online it looks like an irish site is still selling the molds.
though when my brother was messing with them my father made sure we did it outdoors and with a breeze taking the fumes well away from the person pouring lead.
so we've lost the hobby of lead soldiers but we've gained 3d printers. i think we've gained overall.
Prince August! Yes, those are the molds we used, too! (And I'm talking about the 80s, too. I'm not THAT old. ;-)
Whether we have gained overall is an interesting question. If kids really learn to design and make what they want on 3d printers, that would be awesome. But many of the "improvements" since then are unfortunately mostly black boxes meant for consumption, not exploration.
Back in the early 80s at high school in chemistry class we had a beaker full of mercury we'd float nuts and bolts on. The teacher would just let us grab 'em out of the beaker with our bare hands.
Crazy stuff -- I'm still not sure how I feel about it. We've gone too far in the name of safety in some ways but in others it's needed as we learn more about the risk factors.
Regardless, my kids experience in school is profoundly different than mine -- very little hands on stuff or experiments. Hell, just going on a school field trip with your own kids requires a criminal background check...
I graduated highschool in 2007 and science class was devoid of experimentation. I remember there being a bunch of hype months in advance for a day where we just watched our teacher do something with a bunsen burner. I don't remember what she did with it, but it was undoubtedly within the realm of making food-dyed water boil over a flame.
I graduated highschool in 2007 and "luckily" our chemistry teacher assessed us with our bunsen burner skills every fortnight. We basically put all sorts of chemicals and heat them up; recognize what materials depending on color of the flame; create compounds from different elements; etc... Once some of that stuff splashed into my eye, after the burner was turned off and I took off my goggles. Off to the eye wash I went...
Oh, man. The eye wash tower. An eye washer and a shower rolled into one pipe that extended from the floor to the ceiling. The thought of ever working with a substance that could validate suburbia's property tax spent on those things was the subject of every kid's daydreams during science class. Or that poster of that girl with the seeing stick that said something like "Karen didn't wear her goggles. But now she doesn't need to anymore." Gee, Karen, I remember muttering, I'd at least like a shot at danger.
Six bunsen burners, test tube racks built into the three sinks, and an eye wash tower in each science classroom of my youth. Yet the only thing I remember doing in four years of highschool is an over-chaperoned field trip with drug dogs and watching baking soda, vinegar, and water expand a balloon (goggles on, of course).
Might as well teach class in a Willy Wonka factory but feed us celery all four years.
Maybe most high schools have gotten that way, but I had a very different experience. Made some chemical mixture in Chemistry that would go up in a puff if it was bumped. In my high school engineering classes, we stripped the motor out of a CNC router, attached a custom built head on it and then connected that router's computer to another control box we used to control two robotic arms, a conveyor belt, and a couple of control valves for water.
There are still a few good high schools left at least.
I realize the experience I described cost quite a bit, but for some context, our high school was in a blue collar town. We several neighboring high schools in white collar towns, that didn't have what we had (and in fact were sending a few of their students to our school to participate in these classes). Instead they had fancier sports teams and facilities than we did. It was a matter of prioritizing money and energy, not necessarily spending more of it.
We used to steal stuff from the chemistry storeroom and make bombs. Today that'd get you a visit from the DHS and probably onto some kind of terror watch list.
I did that too, and used to worry about it. Then I saw a video of a guy messing around with a giant tub of liquid mercury, talking about how it's not all that dangerous in that form.
As far as I remember, mercury isn't the best thing for you, but it's not as bad as people make out. It takes a fair amount of exposure to do anything too terrible. It's the compounds that become very nasty (eg, dimethylmercury).
Indeed. The equilibrium vapor concentration of mercury is, IIRC, high enough to be hazardous, and you only need a tiny drop to saturate a room.
This was all prominently on my mind as I broke a mercury manometer during an unofficial experiment in school and was trying to find all the little drops that exploded across the floor and hid themselves in the corners. However, I can say that it's a very efficient way to collect dust bunnies... ;-)
> probably because I was already too stupid from the lead fumes out of the crucible.
Ha! Remembering back all the nights I hovered over electronics, soldering, breathing all those fumes, blown capacitors with nasty smoke billowing into a small apartment. You know you got a heavy dose of all kinds of nasty compounds when you can tell what kind of component blew by the smell only.
Melting lead in this way is still very common in Germany, where Bleigießen is practised by many families during New Years Eve in order to 'tell your future' (you just pour the lead into water to create a shape). Didn't notice any nuclear play sets though...!
The vapor pressure of molten lead has got to be pretty low... and I expect the bioavailability of elemental lead isn't all that great in any event, compared to some of its salts. You're probably OK. :)
> The vapor pressure of molten lead has got to be pretty low
If you go to the bottom of the Kaster link: Cast Number 12 was a whistle. The casting was in multiple parts, and I never figured out how to assemble it (I actually thought it was supposed to be a biplane. Probably the fumes again.)
So you were supposed to assemble this thing and then stick it in your mouth. :O
My grade school class toured the Enrico Fermi 1 nuclear power plant in the sixties. They had a movie showing us that by the time we were adults that all cars would be nuclear powered.
When it came time for questions I asked what would happen if one of those nuclear powered cars were in a bad crash and its reactor was compromised?
The guy rolled his eyes at my teacher and said next question ;<). Later the teacher told me she thought it was a perfectly valid question and he dodged it.
Several years later that plant had a partial fuel melt down. They said no radiation was leaked but there was dispute about the official account. There was a book (and later a song) written about the accident.
What a bunch of overblown crap... "wildly irresponsible" my ass! It's perfectly safe holding a piece of red-hot glass, as long as you don't hold the red-hot part. But since the red-hot part is also the part that's in the Bunsen burner, you generally don't do that. Glass has such low thermal conductivity that the part that's not heated stays at room temperature.
Edit: I "played" with most of those as a "kid" (the radioactive kit excluded, that would have been awesome.) I put those words in citation marks because I wouldn't call it play, per se, and there's obviously an age limit. But, believe it or not, "kids" (something like 12 and up) are capable of being perfectly responsible and learning proper respect for things like using tools. Heck, in many countries kids are saddled with real responsibilities at those ages.
Receive responsibility and you will learn responsibility. But if you lived the sheltered life that typical American kids seem to live, I guess you have no way of knowing that...
Actually, hot glass can be a lot safer than hot water. As long as it's solid it won't soak through your clothes and cling to your skin (causing 3rd degree burns). It might give you a burn (like the one I've just got from the red-hot element in my oven), but it's not like you are going to hold it in your hand going "ouch ouch ouch" - most people will drop it in a split second if it's hot.
I'm from the second half and had some pretty cool chemistry sets as a child. I've noticed recently that all the chemistry sets are really rubbish now. Where's my strip to magnesium to set fire to?
Yeah vinegar and soda is now the most exciting stuff you can get for kids' science experiments.
Not many people mind kids playing contact sports, getting concussions, broken ligaments, but when it comes to stuff like this is "Oh, no! Hide all the science equipment, we don't want them to burn their little fingers on the Bunsen burners".
This is a really good point, actually. (I'm hypothesizing here) Since to so many people so much of what they call "science" is basically magic, all of it seems much too dangerous. Especially now that most things in a halfway decent chemistry kit are probably banned or closely scrutinized by the government.
Exactly. Despite the official lip service of lamenting how we are falling behind in science, anyone finding you have beakers, Bunsen burners, and shelves of chemicals in your basement will likely report you as either a terrorist or an illegal drug maker. Science went from being boring and unpopular to being suspicious and dangerous.
I think the riskier chemicals that might be included in a chemistry kit aren't today because of the potential for lawsuits. It's also probably a lot cheaper to produce a chemistry kit with non-toxic chemicals.
The US government doesn't care much about the chemicals that might be reasonably used for chemistry experiments. The DEA watchlist is pretty specific and I don't believe the DHS/FBI/ATF are going after people buying small quantities of chemicals that have legitimate uses.
My child got one of these vinegar and soda rocket kits a few years ago. You can shoot it up all day long for a dollar.
The best part is that you set it up and back away quickly - no Estes electronic remote control firing - because they do tip over and fire sideways from time to time.
That is a cool toy. I wasn't talking specifically about them but rather commenting on how in the name of safety they have reduced chemistry lab sets to basically just vinegar + soda type things, thus sucking all the fun out of it.
Before 9/11, my little sister built a cloud chamber for the science fair. This required using a small vile of Uranium, which my dad was able to obtain for her from a nearby university. This didn't require any extraordinary connections or security clearance. I think he just phoned up a professor and drove to the university to meet him. This was probably 2000 or 2001. I suspect this wouldn't be possible now, after 9/11, but I haven't tried.
Are there statistics that show us how hazardous such products were? I doubt that many were injured by them.
We had chemistry sets and carbide cannons, played with mercury, painted with red lead, and cleaned spots off clothing with benzene. I have inadvertently taken a swig of gasoline. We played with firecrackers, cherry bombs, roman candles and rockets. We were always lectured on safety first and took those lessons to heart.
I honestly can't say that I learned anything useful from the chemistry set (although at the time I believed it was an absolute necessity, something I regret putting my parents through). OTOH work in chemistry labs as an adult confirmed that I was not inclined to that profession.
But from each particular encounter I learned interesting and useful facts which could later be tied into the theoretical frameworks of formal physics and chemistry.
Odd thing is I wasn't allowed a BB gun until I was 16! I never shot a living thing with it - it was simply fun to hit something at a distance. Anyway I'm still alive and doing better than ever.
> Anyway I'm still alive and doing better than ever.
Probably survivorship bias.
Anyway, there was also an article in the New Yorker, I believe, about a guy and his father, grandfather and his son. He put up a map and showed how much each person was allowed to roam on their own at age 6. His grandfather walked five miles for fishing. His son isn't allowed to cross the road on his own.
That being said, radiological material regulations are very strict these day. Back when I was working at a lab at school, I had to go through several days of safety courses before I could even be in the same room as some very weak alpha particle sources. The work I was doing did not utilize them, and the whole time the sources were locked in a cabinet.
It amazes me that this playset contained beta and gamma sources. Hopefully they were extremely weak; but still the radiation accumulates. (alpha particle sources are really only dangerous if ingested or inhaled, since outside the body, air shields against them)
no, not most. but a significant percentage in the us[a].
where I live, ionising smoke alarms have been deprecated in favour of photoelectric alternatives.
In 2012, there was the Raspberry PI computer for $25. As much fun as I'd have with a Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab, the present isn't too shabby either.
I've also seen someone fly a Geiger counter on an autonomous quadcopter, so there's that.
Sure, but if you're shipping radioactive materials into the country, you probably want to wrap it in lead, or anything that'll keep it from damaging you while in transit, which means lower counts, right?
I figure that even a small amount of detected radiation would make people worry - "oh no, a terrorist is trying to smuggle plutonium into the country but his lead-lined briefcase has a hole in it!" - so generating a lot of false positives might cloak an actual delivery.
Or it could just cause panic, akin to calling in random bomb threats. Terrorism doesn't really have to kill anyone, just has to scare them.
i grew up with a copy of 'the boy electrician' that my father born in 1921 had. it showed how to build an xray machine from 'commonly available' parts. the only warning was a brief note that long exposure caused blood vessels to break which looked like bruising. though this warning is missing from the 1913 version. i do know that the plans were removed from later 1930ish versions.
i'd say that there were at least 1-2 other experiments that would be discouraged due to health and safety these days.
I have a 1940 copy of "The Boy Electrician" given to me as a boy by the librarians when our small-town library closed. It includes a section on X-rays ("[X-ray tubes] usually cost about four dollars and a half.") and shows how to connect the tube to a spark coil, how to make a fluoroscope and how to make photographs with X-rays. No warnings are present!
This is a wonderful book because it covers so much ground and the writing and drawings give a physical sense of the topics: static electricity, magnetism, electrochemical cells, induction and capacitance, even semiconductors (cat's whisker detectors and selenium photocells).
You can get uranium ore from the four corners area pretty easily (for free) if you know how to spot it, especially around Moab, Utah.
You can build a cloud chamber with everclear and dry ice easily. If you have enough area (the size of a dinner plate, for example) it's very easy to spot muons at a rate near 1 particle every two seconds.
The problem with geiger counters is often the dead time after ionization. If you run at too high of a voltage and/or have too many particles, you risk saturation (which also isn't good for the high voltage power supplies)
The section of the pamphlet titled "Radioactive Source Replacement" is spectacular. I wonder how many -- if any -- reorders they ever processed. Was there a crate of radioactive zinc sitting in Gilbert's warehouse waiting to be shipped to rosy-cheeked little scientists?
"...waiting to be shipped to rosy-cheeked little scientists?"
Or whatever address those rosy-cheeked little scientists decided to put on the form. I remember sending ants to unsuspecting neighbors using the refill from that came with my ant farm.
I thought the same thing, but then I realized it's not much different from a kid asking for a new videogame console on the launch date, including all the accessories. A tricked out PS3 would run you over $600.
I remember similar science kits from the early '60s. I had my eye on a set that had a cloud chamber, but I'm pretty sure it was not this set. Science toys were all the rage. There were several series of science kits I would buy, my favorite was one that built a small electric motor that could also be re-ranged into a generator.
Makes me think of an exhibition on Marie Curie I saw in the Nobel museum in Stockholm not long ago. Shoe sellers used to have x-ray machines, so that they could look into the shoe and make sure that the fit was correct. And you could buy radioactive make-up for "bright" (literally) women...
Great article. Would like to point out an interesting fact though. $50 in 1951 was worth 1.5 ounces of gold. The article claims that currently collectors pay 100 times more for it in USD terms, aka 5,000usd. Which is 2.5 ounces of gold. In other words in the real value the set appreciated about 75% even though 100 times in nominal terms.
In the same timeframe price of oil in gold stayed the same for that example. Even though it is also 100 times more in USD terms.
Sorry, but you're wrong. 50 dollars in 1950 would be worth $447.81 in 2010, roughly ten times moer. The dolar value of the toy increased roughly 100 times. Therefore, the true value of the toy increased 100/10 = 10 times. The price of gold is irrelevant. All you showed is that gold would have been a better investment.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with you. Calling gold an investment is akin to calling USD or Swiss Franc an investment. It might be but its first and most important function is this of money. Think store of value and not profit.
Currently, an ounce of gold buys you a nice suit in New York. Two hundred years ago 1 ounce of gold was enough to buy a nice suit in London. And 2,000 years ago 1 ounce of gold was enough to buy a nice toga in Rome.
Price of oil in gold fluctuates around 15 barrels per ounce since World War 2.
The list continues... the point is that gold is an excellent store of value reflecting real prices increases much more accurately than government figures (a.k.a. CPI).
Gold is money. Historically, gold has been the best indicator and instrument to gauge inflation. The CPI numbers from Government don't even come close.
At the end it all really boils down to: is the Government provided CPI number or gold better instrument to gauge inflation?
My take is that if something has worked great to gauge inflation for the last 5,000 years then it probably still measures it pretty well.
The CPI number from Government that has vested interest in underreporting inflation? (because of debt). Thank you, buy I firmly believe that is has been grossly understated for for the last 60 years, ergo my numbers probably illustrate the real increase in value of the set better.
But gold isn't the only store of value. You could have used silver or copper. And, the value of gold fluctuates wildly in response to fears of future inflation. This creates a lot of noise. Finally, you should know that most economists consider the CPI to overstate inflation due to substitution bias:
http://www.frbsf.org/econrsrch/wklyltr/el97-16.html
Gold isn't money, and it's not a store of value, any more than any other tangible asset is.
I don't know ANY STORE ANYWHERE that takes gold as payment. That means it's not money. You can pawn it or sell it, which exchanges gold for actual money, which you can then use as payment.
But another toy was a lead casting kit: You would melt lead in a crucible, which would then pour into a mold. http://www.girdersandgears.com/kaster.html
Never had the atomic energy kit, probably because I was already too stupid from the lead fumes out of the crucible.