Kitchen-based catalysis

Yer commoner garden Chemistry Set box lid always featured 12-year-old boy with brown hair in the pudding-bowl style, wearing a white lab coat and oversized safety goggles, peering intently at a few cubic centimetres of vaguely blue compound in a test tube. The over-serious look in his eyes said it all: “Why won’t this explode?”

Yes, the substances you’d find here were seriously dull. The set always included Bloody Copper Sulphate followed by a rack of anonymous-looking off-white powders (“Slaked” Lime, Tartaric Acid, etc.¹) and rubbish stuff like iron filings and litmus paper. C’mon guys, where do you keep all the fun stuff? The red lead? Arsenic? Silver Nitrate? A lame spirit burner provided the only vague threat of impending danger, and there were usually only enough chemicals to do about 13 experiments even though the box proudly advertised 150 different activities available. And one of those was “growing a crystal out of sugar” on a string. For crying out loud! On a string!? Heaven only knows what we were supposed to do with the mysterious “watch glass”. Just sit and watch it, perhaps?

But, and this is an important but, at least the chemistry sets of yore marketed by the likes of Salter, Merit, et al, made some affectation towards proper school lab learning. Dreary they may have seemed, but they didn’t patronise us youngsters to the level that the modern day National Curriculum-approved Key Stage 1 “yukky science”-type sets do. Science isn’t fun, no matter how much you dress it up with green food colouring, fizzy sherbert and words like “cool”, “slimy” and “funky”.

Back in the day, warnings of “adult supervision recommended” abounded in the instructions, even though every single kid in the land threw these away after a while and just bunged a bit of everything in one test tube then heated it up to see what happened (a vague fizzing, and a chemical ponk). As if we were hoping to drink the stuff then transform, Dr Jekyll style, into a horrible monster and eat our own parents. Really, as if!