Chemistry lessons
May 1, 2007This post about outsourcing led me to an entertaining series by a chemist on substances he won’t work with. School chemistry never quite had this edge.
Perhaps the most unnerving derivative I know of is fluorine perchlorate. That one was reported in 1947 (JACS 69, 677) by Rohrback and Cady. It’s easily synthesized, if you’re tired of this earthly existence, by passing fluorine gas over concentrated perchloric acid. You get a volatile liquid that boils at about -16 C and freezes at -167.3, which exact value I note because the authors nearly blew themselves up trying to determine it. The liquid detonated each time it began to crystallize, which is certainly the mark of a compound with a spirited nature.
