On I ramble when I should be sleeping
Okay what follows is what passes for my version of sentimental musings and the description of how I improvised a chemical compound I was missing this evening; if this doesn't sound interesting to you, you will be no worse off if you just keep moving.
There are times I am really happy to be me. Just as I am thankful that I was raised by people who must have still believed in doing there part for the Darwinian manner of making a stronger planet (ergo I am happy I've been “fit” enough to make it this far). As far back as I can remember I was allowed to play or work with any tool or chemical I wanted, with instruction for a few moments and then usually after a very short amount of time in a completely unsupervised manner. Often left to my own devices in the basement, to...well...build new devices. Failed experiments, pain and “having to go back to the drawing board” (often more literally then figuratively) was just as much part of my childhood as the successes. From what I have gathered since the coping skills I learned were unusual as well, the common ones being that if something annoyed me: swear with out raising my voice and when (not if) I got hurt: laugh about it because crying wasn't going to make it feel any better and all it did was annoy the hell out of everyone else. I was the only kid in the second grade who brought in his acid burn for show and tell. But aside from that the response to almost any question I had generally wasn't the answer so much as being handed a book and told that it was somewhere in it and if I ever thought that I didn't have the necessary (or at least what I thought to be) tool or component I was usually told to find the wrong tool and make it the right one. By the time I was four I could load shells for pistol or shotgun and read basic charts, at five I had a rudimentary skill in stick welding and bench work, six I could perform titrations and soil compositions and so forth. I feel safe in saying that all of that was thanks to my family.
I was reminded of the fact that I grew up in a family where being a mad scientist wasn't tolerated so much as encouraged. The there was an something a little earlier tonight that reminded me of a time when I was having metal-acid reactions explained to me by my grandfather.
While setting up to develop some photos for a friend tonight I realized that all of my paper developer had been used, and it was too late to buy new chemistry tonight (Phoenix with it damnedable lack of 24 hour pro-photo shops). So after going through my all of my raw chemicals I find that I have no metol, no hydroquinone, nor Phenidone and the only sodium sulfite I had had apparently gotten damp and turned into a lump I really had no desire to attempt to chip apart. So I after a few moments of lamenting the fact I wouldn't be able to print I decided to check through the MSDSs of my what I did have and see if I could find something else, after a few moments of seeing the same few ingredients I came across one for Kodak Xytol, the main developer of which was ascorbic acid! I have plenty of vitamin C around and being water soluble it was easy enough to work with. As for the preservative/accelerant component the only suitable thing that I could think of as sodium carbonate (Arm & Hammer Washing Soda). So after simmering and filtering about 40 Trader Joe's 1000mg Vit C caps and a few try with fully exposed paper to get a decent proportion of the two I made up about a litter of developer (which BTW is roughly 3g Vit C:2 tsp washing soda:100ml water) and it worked perfectly until I ran out of paper with no signs of exhaustion. It had nice highlights, cool tone, deep black, a slightly steeper gamma then I am used to but not bad and it exhausts the stop bath exponentially faster then any of the other developers that I have used.
So I guess the moral is if you let your child play unsupervised with an arch welder and he is smart enough to survive then someday he may be able to figure out a random chemical formula years later... maybe... I don't know but I really had a lot of fun this evening.
(PS sorry I've been bad about getting back to people leaving comments)