Story Time - Chemistry

Yes, it's story time again, but before I start I'm today expecting Virgin Media to be installed at the old country house we're back in... Lets hope they arrived, else this might be our last message... *cough*...not...

Anyway, story... I was just watching this 

And I thought back to my days at school, in the 80's and 90's the school system I went through here in the UK, after paying the teachers, had a budget left per student, this was 25p a day.  I remember reading the report, 25p was the price of a Mars Bar at the time, so the report was a pun on the then Mars slogan "A Mars a Bat Helps you Work Rest and play", because it was conjectured some pupils would be better served with a Mars bar to help concentration than to waste 25p of chemicals or paint or pencils on us.

Anyway, to my story, in school I was once performing an evaporate experiment, it needed heat on an acid to leave a salt, or some such thing.  I was in a fume cupboard, and I loved chemistry, but because I was able they moved me out into another room, with another class... To let the dangerous less wary students work in the fume cupboard...

In the other class, I was listening to the lesson quite intently, so intently that I ignored my now free to the open air experiment, which went dry... And which then ignited... In a pure white column broiling hot acid smoke poured from this tiny crucible... It went up straight up... And then started to spread across the ceiling.

The whole class turned to me as I panicked and pulled the gas from the bunsen burner and looked around for a fire blanket...

And little white specks started to fall on everyone... As the ceiling tiles began to disintegrate and this rain of snow came down...

The whole class I was in now had to leave the room, evacuate was the term used, and this insidious cloud just started to swell over the whole ceiling...

As it crossed more and more ceiling tiles were flaking and bubbling... But it was crossing the whole room because of a high level extractor fan in the opposite window... As it hit the fan the orange plastic blades went from dirty grey orange to bright clean... the dirt being scrubbed off by the acidic cloud.

Then little speckles of orange started to flick off the end of the blades and run around the case inside the fan cover... Slowly the fan blades parted and melted as the acid was sucked through... the fan spinning wildly as the weight of the blades left the motor and it slowly burned itself out with no air flowing.

On my side of the room the cloud kept coming, but to deflect it form eating the whole ceiling the teacher (hello Mr Babb) of this class had opened a window, this window over hung the crucible now and the cloud escaped into the air quickly... But the paint on the window frame was bubbling...

My own teacher (Mr Bolt) had now come into the room and was stood, his hands on his hips and looking at my face... he just patted me around the head with an exercise book and in the best impression of Dad's Army's Mr Mainwaring he said.... 

"Stupid Boy"

It was all good fun though, I learned about burning acids and acid salts, the third year class got to cheer as they were led out, and for a while it was the talk of the school... "Some lad melted Mr Babbs room".

I personally never heard a thing about it, it was learning gone wrong, but I did learn, and it taught me that I had made an honest mistake and you could get away with that... A valuable lesson at 14 me thinks.