There was a trainee student at Edge Hill Liverpool in the 70s. She was silly and stupid and preferred to talk with her friends in the lab while doing a standard chemistry experiment. She and all her friends were training to be chemistry teachers. She'd heard the chat about it being really, vitally important to always put the conc sulphuric, conc nitric, conc hyrochloric etc bottles back in the correct order.
She was so good, she didn't need to check, she just reached out blindly and grabbed what she thought was either nitric or hydrochloric acid - can't remember the experiment now, I qualified in 1979 as a chemist.
Anyway, the correct preparation of oxygen is manganese dioxide, potassium permanganate as a catalyst and I'm tempted to say conc nitric as the acid. They're both monobasic acids, with molarity equivalent to their normality, so not that important. Say nitric, as all nitrates are soluble. I'm feeling sick as I type this.
It is vitally important. The flask she used ended up in the Laboratory of the Liverpool City Analyst at 123 Mount Pleasant. Vitally. The remains of the flask were submitted by the Coroners Court.
If you add Conc Sulphuric acid to Permanganate you get Permanganate anydride, because conc sulphuric will strip the water out of anything, skin, leaving just carbon behind. I had conc sulphuric acid burns on my face that summer, I had black circles on my skin, they peeled off leaving pink skin under. No report, no accident book no nothing. Bigger sigh of relief, there was a public health lab, they had Crown Immunity, so the whole building did, no need to call HSE.
Maybe teacher training colleges like Edge Hill did, probably so. The teacher was sick and tired of explaining until she/he was blue in the face. A burn helps learning whether in the kitchen or elsewhere.
She was blown to pieces in the explosion. Her friend had burns to her eyes, lost the sight of at least one eye, and one hand.
The chemistry lab was completely and utterly destroyed, the block too from memory, and it would have made front page news in the Echo, the Lancashire Evening Post, and the Liverpool Daily Post.
As a 19 year old medical biochem student, with a summer job in the County Analyst's Lab, it certainly made an impression on me. Back at uni I was a pain in the arse insisting that bottles were in the right place in the rack above my head. We each had our own. I told the story, much muttering of Perkin Elmer.
However, maybe lessons were learned at the time, it would have been about 1973, they still had samples from the Liverpool City Coroner in 1975. My lovely sensitive supervisor peered at a blood alcohol Herbie was doing, saying that looks good, what is it? Herbie cut him down to size, RTA, the victim, the driver said he couldn't help but hit him, so he blamed the victim.
I don't know how many young women were killed. I imagine none of them ever entered a chemistry lab again, and if alive are still suffering from PTSD. I hope they got decent counselling, but I doubt it.
So, a lab/block destroyed, I trainee teacher killed with not much to pick up of the remains, her best friend maimed for life, the entire class deeply traumatised.
They never got another chance to go before a class, just as well, they'd have killed them.
But, but, it is nowhere on the Edge Hill website, not on the history, nor where it speaks of its excellence in training chemistry graduates to teach chemistry. My chemistry student was great, I loved organic chemistry, reaction chemistry, and at tech, I had Derek Thorpe, a complete nutter who said organic was just cooking, he's right, but who lay across the front desks - the after lunch beer and butty graveyard shift, asking what was government, leading to a very thorough and painful explanation of the HSE, its origin as an umbrella , applying all previous legislation, Offices, Shops, Railways, Mines, Shipyards, to each and every workplace site. It still does.
I worked at a local research lab, our little group hoped we'd found a new compound. It hinged on melting point. I smuggled samples out to test them on his Koffler block to get a really accurate melting point, with my 2 boss's approval and that of the section manager. It was ground breaking work. He had GC-Mass spec for the next stage. But, it never happened. The project got pulled, and it would have been gross misconduct from a household name to continue.
While working on this maverick team of 3, my then boss, told me to clean some glass tubes for polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis with permanganic anhydride. I just said, "no", might have said Piss off. Bugger off was a normal insult between us, we were a good team. I then pointed out that 2 women and the chemistry block at Edge Hill had been destroyed by the last person I knew to have done this. Thankfully in his latest published paper, the method used to clean them was "appropriate", he probably had nightmares about it for a while. He didn't know, he was a biochemist. He would have known about the accident, thought they were stupid whatever they'd done, and got on with his home brewing, his diy - it was brilliant, or something else. He was right. They were stupid, silly etc but they didn't deserve to die.
They need to be remembered, not whitewashed out of existence on the swanky Edge Hill University website. They deserve their memorial. Without their sacrifice, the chemistry department wouldn't be as good as it is today. If it's just marketing guff, it still needs to be known, as they're just hiding they've had horrendous problems in the past.
Let's just hope, and pray, that their lab supervision is by proper chemists, with real industrial experience, not just someone who's gone from school, to uni, to PGCE, to school and never wanted to work in a lab in the holidays. I never wanted to teach, wanted to work in a lab all my life, but didn't.
I was extremely lucky and fortunate to be taught proper chemistry at an old-fashioned tech by proper qualified FRIC chemists. The head of dept did a 3 year HND, with an endorsement for Part I GRIC, a 3 year PhD at UMIST, and then to the tech as HoD. He was crap, it showed. He was scared stiff of us, each and everyone of the students he taught above HNC level had about 10 times more industrial experience than he had. He did have uses, we had a full-time 6 week exam prep, project part of the course, we argued that as a full time course we were like uni students - might have been my idea - and that as such we deserved to have Weds afternoon free - to play sport (and then go and drink beer). Some times the sport was Crown Green bowls, and beer. Derek was always there, Guy sometimes - he taught physical, the lovely guy who taught synthesis like a foreign language with LRIC. Funnily, the HoD never came. It was better without his "when I was doing my PhD" stories.
Some of the guys had worked on the plant at Shell, lovely guys, but, not to be messed with, looking for the chance to thump him. He'd never worked shifts in an oil refinery. One guy worked in a candle makers, molton wax can do a lot of very nasty damage. So can sugar......I made my own golden syrup, it was a little bit too concentrated....I thought I'd taste some.
It was vicious, it ripped half of the wall of an upper 7 molar away, full of filling, not worth repairing, needs a crown, costs, 550€
What a ......well TIT