My first chemistry set

My first chemistry set

Short

Remembering the joys of a chemistry set for a child of the 1970s

12th December 2014
By Rhodri Marsden

It’s hard to remember what motivated us to ask our parents for certain things when we were eight years old. I’ve no idea why I implored them for a chemistry set; I’d had no prior interest in chemistry and have had almost none since, so I can only conclude that the marketing campaign must have been astonishingly effective.

A Merit chemistry set purchased by The Long + Short on eBay last week

There’s often a disparity between the anticipation of getting your hands on the product and the dull reality of using it, and chemistry sets provided children of the 1970s with a particularly irksome example of this. Any chemicals that may have been capable of causing explosions or general mayhem had, thanks to several rounds of health and safety legislation, been weeded out of the sets in preceding decades. This left us with second division chemicals such as cobalt chloride and potassium permanganate. We lurched off-piste, excitedly mixing them in conical flasks with the exhilaration of potential discovery, then throwing away the resultant sludge with a wistful sigh of disappointment.

It did, however, enable me to grow large copper sulphate crystals in jam jars. These were beautiful. Friends were amazed. So it was worth the money my parents spent. But only just.


Republish

We want our stories to go far and wide; to be seen be as many people as possible, in as many outlets as possible.

Therefore, unless it says otherwise, copyright in the stories on The Long + Short belongs to Nesta and they are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

This allows you to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. This can be done for any purpose, including commercial use. You must, however, attribute the work to the original author and to The Long + Short, and include a link. You can also remix, transform and build upon the material as long as you indicate where changes have been made.

See more about the Creative Commons licence.

Images

Most of the images used on The Long + Short are copyright of the photographer or illustrator who made them so they are not available under Creative Commons, unless it says otherwise. You cannot use these images without the permission of the creator.

Contact

For more information about using our content, email us: [email protected]

HTML

HTML for the full article is below.