Personal Chemistry

A week or two ago, Kyle over at the Chem Blog described how chemistry helped him solve the problem of cooking collard greens in a suitable time frame. Apparently he was successful; although I’m not sure cooking (or eating) collard greens could ever really be called a success. Anyway, this reminded me of my undergraduate days, when I marveled at all the chemistry I was learning, sure that I would be using chemistry in non-laboratory settings all the time. I would be MacGyver with chemicals — astonishing friends and enemies alike with my ability to solve problems using my vast stores of chemical knowledge. I began recounting all those problems I had solved chemically and... uh…. well, uh… hmmmm. In all my years of chemistry, I can only recall one time in which I actually used chemistry outside the lab, and that was while I was still a freshman.

During my freshman year, while I was living in the dorm, my roommate brought in a dart board and managed to convince me to hang it on my side of the room. Despite the relatively small size of the room, which meant I was throwing the dart less than 10 feet, I had a distressing tendency to miss the board. It probably had a lot to do with the way I was throwing – overhand. I didn’t learn the proper way of throwing darts until later, when I was under the tutelage of another undergrad, Tom O’Halloran (now a professor at Northwestern), at various pubs around town. Needless to say, I left quite a few puncture marks in wooden areas for which I was quite sure I would have to pay a damage fee. In order to make the holes look less fresh, I brought potassium permanganate from the lab to “age” the wood. Unfortunately, I ended up making the blackening the hole with manganese dioxide. So I got some hydrogen peroxide and removed the MnO₂, but bleached the wood white while doing so. To make a long story short, I alternated between the KMnO₄ and H₂O₂ for awhile until the original damage began to look like it had occurred back during the civil war. Not the most auspicious start for my life as a chemist (although I didn’t get charged any damage fees!). Possibly that’s why I haven’t tried using chemistry outside the lab again for all these years. If any or you have a similar story to tell, let me know. It might jog my memory.