Chemistry Horror Stories (1 Viewer)

[hipsta_jess]

nothing exciting ever happenned in my chem classes..apart from putting the anode and cathode in wrong solutions and stuff like that...

 

[kimmy_nlhs]

I (stupid me) heated up a piece of magnesium (in a crucible) just to see what it would do......
in my boredness i rolled it up into a coil before i put it in.....
i opened the top with tongs after 10mins heating on the blue flame....
my friend goes "is it hot?" and im like.... "dont think so"....
so i pick it up....... with my fingers....
let me just say.....
i have a new set of finger prints.....
shaped in a coil.....
Ah, stupid me!



I was also boiling up a noice chemical mixture (in a test tube) on an angle..... Y - i dont know.....
it ended up all over my hand.... burning chemicals.....
Ouch....
although. it doesnt beat the whole pipette thingy story

Anyhow,
Caio.
I must get back to more chemical accidents

 

[yulia]

ooo the magnesium reminds me of something! our teacher turned the lights off so it was pitch dark in the room, and told me to light the magnesium, and then drop it into the test tube that contained some chemical, however, I was to do so with my eyes shut, as everyone in the room had to watch this - with their eyes shut?!?!. Anyways, I'm holding the magnesium in a pair of tongs, and my teacher goes to light it for me - she bumps my hand, I'm not longer positioned above the test tube, she yells at us to all shut our eyes, and I can't find the test tube - so I drop it on the bench, when she lets us open our eyes, we discover a nice new burn hole in the chemistry bench

 

[Collin]

A fat friend of mine was being an idiot by dipping his hands into a beaker of sodium hydroxide. Then people told him that the base dissolved fat, and he freaked out.

 

[yulia]

hahaha. a guy in my class drank copper sulfate to make himself look tough. he ended up crying coz he felt sick and threw up everywhere.

 

[Collin]

He drank copper sulfate to make himself look tough? Tell him next time to drink a flask full of 20 molar HCl if he wants to be a REAL man.

 

[xiao1985]

Originally posted by JKDDragon
He drank copper sulfate to make himself look tough? Tell him next time to drink a flask full of 20 molar HCl if he wants to be a REAL man.

AHAHAHAHAH.... that's hilaious ^^ u guys crack me up!!!!!

btw jkd dragon: LUV the pic in ur sig!!!! ^^ also, i am yet to meet u =)

 

[Charon]

Wow... Some of you guys have had some real bad luck in the lab... makes my stories seem rather tame.

Anyway, I suppose my lab is rather good. Teacher keeps watch most of the time, but sometimes things go wrong...

Most things that happen are either due to a little stupidity (though to say that is probably unfair) or the rest is just curiosiy... like the time a friend of mine decided to see what would happen if he put a mercury thermometer in the blue flame of a bunsen... luckily someone turned off the gas tap before anything happened.

Another little accident hapened when we were decomposing copper carbonate, with the CO2 gas going into lime water. After about 10 minutes, I look at the tube and see that the lime water is slowly being sucked into the tube towards the very, very hot flask. I had no idea what to do, so I called out to the teacher, who was busy talking to someone else. In the meantime I turned to my partners for some advice, they'd bolted to the other side of the room. The teacher continued not to take any notice, so I decided to yell out. Just as I went to CRACK, the flask had shattered... He rushes over "Why didn't you say anything?!?"... and I'm there left shaking my head. While this is going on, one of the girls calls out from the next bench before CRACK and a flurry of glass. Their flask had exploded, coating her and her friend in dark black lumps of now burnt copper carbonate.

The last one only happened the other week. We had a prac assessment on titration. The unknown was weak HCl, which proved to be lucky for me. I was on the last repeat of the experiment, and went to use a pippette to get 25ml of HCl. All I can say is air bubble, and me left with a mouth full of acid. I took about 10 seconds to react, all that was going on in my mind was what I had just sucked into my mouth. After that little period of shock, I dramatically spat out the remaining acid into the sink, just as the surrounding benches burst out laughing... Mind you this was an assessment, with the teacher still in the room, and still didn't take any notice...

Apart from that, my chemistry lessons have been tame. Most of the time, the worst that happens is that we go through about 3 pieces of glassware per prac. I think we've gone through a fractionating column, a condensation tube, a couple of volumetric flasks, and the standard dozen or so test tubes, beakers, flasks, and god knows what else...

Anyway, those are my stories... sad, no?

 

[Collin]

Originally posted by xiao1985
AHAHAHAHAH.... that's hilaious ^^ u guys crack me up!!!!!

btw jkd dragon: LUV the pic in ur sig!!!! ^^ also, i am yet to meet u =)

You're dead when I see you!

 

[yulia]

as far as breaking stuff goes, one time during a prac, this guy had about 10 test tubes, stuck them on his bench on the side, dropped his assessment sheet, kneeled down to get it and SMASH SMASH SMASH SMASH SMASH, 5 test tubes followed him down, and as he went to clean them up, the other 5 followed.

Whereas I'm the Queen of spilling stuff on myself. The bad thing about that is, if we're working with something rather toxic like....we used.......I dunno, something highly toxic that if you say, get in your eyes, they have to be flushed for 15 minutes and then rushed to hospital, hmmm can't remmeber what it is. Anyways, the boys chicken out and make me do the work. Now I'm not allowed to wear gloves because they're too big for me and are a "distraction" ... I'm waiting for my hands to fall off from all the stuff I've spilt on my hands.

 

[Collin]

Oh I forgot to mention!! Just the other week at chem, we were doing titrations (at uni), and I accidentally spilled a flask of acid onto my CALCULATOR. Ten minutes later, I spilled another flask.. of base onto it.

Funny thing is, the thing still works fine.

 

[yulia]

I hate titrations. It took me so freaking long to learn how to do the calculations. My teacher has a one-on-one tutoring session with me once a week. She decided one of them we'd spend working on titration calculations seeing as I had trouble. She starts of by saying, "now, you work these out that strange other way that I don't use," and I'm thinking, do I? I can only do it the way you've shown me. So then she proceeds to write down numbers and "x"s all over the place then she stops and says, "hmmm, I don't know how to do this. This method is confusing. Lets try it my method." So she writes down more methods and decides "no, this is confusing you, and now I'm confused. We'll have to stop this session now, I can't get past this".

Wonder why I found it so difficult??

 

[Collin]

LOL.

New question: 'Are you REALLY a chemistry teacher?'

*crickets*

 

[yulia]

lol...no one in our school has got over 65 with her in chemistry.

I ended up having to learn titrations off a pharmacist. Took him 2 hours to explain because shock horror I'd never been taught the basics, but that's because her attitude is "they're not in the syllabus, so I don't have to show you, and if you didn't learn them in junior years, that's not my problem either".
Ironic, as she was my teacher throughout my junior years!

 

[Plebeian]

Nothing too drastic - we have good teachers and lab assistants.

One guy set fire to a gas tap - massive 1m flame shooting out and he had no idea what to do.

 

[xiao1985]

Originally posted by yulia
I hate titrations. It took me so freaking long to learn how to do the calculations.

lolz, wait til u get to DO the titration... how that's PURE horrible =(

 

[Collin]

Originally posted by Komaticom
This isn't really an accident, but it's stupid anyway.
We had an old incompetent substitute teacher for a Physics prac lesson. I said to her "we need a qualified teacher to supervise pracs". She got offended and blamed someone else because she didn't see me saying it.

LOL. Eh don't you love the subbies.

 

[yulia]

Originally posted by xiao1985
lolz, wait til u get to DO the titration... how that's PURE horrible =(

Oh we've done the titrations, but we didn't know WHY we were doing them. The whole time everyone was asking our teacher...can you explain the reason why titrations are done? What is the point of them? In the end one of the guys in my class went and researched it and told us because she never explained.

And this isn't a chem one, it's an earth science one, but we were using bunsens, and the teacher left, and this guy sucked up gas from the bunsen burner and blew it over a match like a fire breather. Haha, he is also the one who drank copper sulfate solution *Shakes head*.

 

[tina_goes_doo]

Not really an accident but a nice little "horror" story:

If you find a bug in the lab, keep quiet about it!

The guys in my class have a weird fetish with torturing insects and spiders. It seems to be a combination of pulling legs and wings etc. off them, burning them with matches and if they're lucky, dripping conc. acid onto them.

And we have a nice little waste jar in our lab too. Everything goes into it and it is now a nice suspension of oily grease, some indistict liquid, and a chucky goo on the bottom. It has a sick shade of orange too from some guys pouring a whole bottle of methyl orange into it.

Needless to say, the bugs go in too...

 

[spice girl]

i've recently discovered where the store of calcium carbide is in our school

muhuahaha