I was ten years old when I first decided I wanted to be a scientist. I wasn’t exactly sure what kind of scientist, but I knew that I wanted to work with things that could go “BOOM!”, and technology that could do amazing things. I wanted to be the first to invent the flying car (Hey, it’s 2009, where is my flying car, anyway?), and I had dreams of going in to space or creating a cure for cancer.
It all seems pretty ridiculous now, but that’s what makes being a kid so wonderful; there’s no limit to our imagination and we never question whether or not we can accomplish something. We just assume we can do it.
This naivety is not only a marvelous byproduct of being a kid, but it’s also why I just barely survived childhood in the first place. Since I was always convinced that I could do anything, I tried to do everything. Swap out an engine block from a car? No problem! I’ve seen my dad do that a hundred times, why can’t I? Well, in that case no. Let’s just say that there are certain things you tend to overlook when you’re ten. Like gravity for instance.
Thankfully my reflexes were good enough that I was able to dive out from under the car before the engine block fell on me. And that was only one in a long series of fairly stupid mistakes when I was a child.
But back to the point, though: I wanted to be a scientist.
In the back of my Popular Mechanics magazine there were articles for chemistry sets and prices and the things to look for. I researched and finally found the exact set I wanted and gave the information to my parents.
When my birthday finally arrived when I turned eleven, I finally got my chemistry set and my microscope. This was surely proof that this was all I needed to become a scientist. I mean, even Louis Pasteur didn’t have most of what was in my arsenal. Surely it made me more qualified than he.
My parents–in what I assumed was their ignorance of my brilliance– encouraged me to work through some of the lab sheets and problems in the booklet. “Bah!” I say. No matter what I do, it’ll all work out great. I am Andy Attebery, brilliance incarnate.
My first experiment was to create my own formula for super human strength. Now, as I’m sure you’ve already deduced, I was planning on ingesting whatever concoction I came up with. I imagine that I made sure that whatever I came up with was safe to ingest, but that’s assuming a lot. And geez, c’mon, I was only eleven. Give me a break.
I don’t remember everything that went in to the “formula”, but I do remember a few kitchen ingredients– vanilla extract (hey kids, it doesn’t taste as good as it smells), baking powder, sugar (to fix the taste, blech), and of course methylene blue (from the chemistry set).
The end result was that I didn’t get the super human strength I was hoping for. Instead, I got an extremely upset stomach, and one super ability, or at least, what I perceived as a super ability: my urine turned blue. I wasn’t sure how useful that ability was going to be, but you never know. Maybe I could use it as some kind of glow in the dark guide if I ever got lost in a cave. Who knew!
My “ability” did eventually fade, and I didn’t have the guts (or the stomach) to take another drink of my formula. Interestingly enough, as I was writing this and looking up the chemicals that I’d used, I’ve found that my concoction would have been good as an antidote for potassium cyanide poisoning, carbon monoxide poisoning, as well as a treatment for ifosfamide neurotoxicity. How about that?
Anyway, so my Dr. Jekyll scheme didn’t pan out quite the way I wanted to. I decided I’d read through some of the lab book. You know, just to get some ideas. I wasn’t stuck or anything.
I ended up skipping any page that didn’t include the word “fire” or “smoke”. I ended up on an interesting article about heating sulfur in a test tube and watching the chemical turn from one color to another. I thought that that sounded like a good place to start, but overall pretty boring. So my next brilliant idea, of course, was “What if I combine sulfur and about seven other chemicals in to a beaker and hold it over a flame?”
Ladies and gentlemen, if your child ever receives a chemistry set from you or someone you know, make sure they don’t have any aspirations of world domination and/or scientific discovery. I had both, as I’m sure you’ve probably realized by now.
Most of the labs in the chemistry book described the chemical reactions as “subtle”. I wasn’t interested in “subtle”. I was interested in “BOOM!”. The reaction of those eight random chemicals together, heated in a beaker, and over a flame was not what I would call “subtle”.
To this day, I often wonder what my mom must have thought when she heard my experiment go awry. She was in the kitchen just one room over, cleaning the dishes, when she heard the “BOOM!” from my secret laboratory (the closet). Her eleven year old (me)– terrified and covered in glass, chemicals, and various bits of drywall– came running toward the kitchen with his eyebrows and a few parts of his hair on fire. The chemicals were all over me, and a good portion of them were on fire. And more of them were catching on fire. I was afraid I was about to go up like a match.
In what I’m sure was simply an act of mercy, my mom picked up the tub of dirty dish water, and flung it on me.
I was no longer on fire, but now I was covered in two day old food, water, and grime. If that wasn’t bad enough, I was still shaking and scared, and my mom was standing there laughing.
Now to be fair, she was probably nervous and relieved, but c’mon mom! SHE WAS LAUGHING!
Honestly, that wasn’t the last time I caught myself or the house on fire, but it was the first and the only time I was surprised when it actually happened.