The Shed and the Chemistry Lesson

As long as I can remember there was a shed at the bottom of our garden. The picture here is the only one I could find in the photo albums of my parents and grandparents. It must be from the late 1930s. As with our bungalow this was built by my Grandfather (see Constructing go-carts and other toys).
This shed was taboo when growing up, no explanation why, just strictly out of bounds. Although raised on bricks it would still get its feet wet when the river on the other side of the field at the bottom of the garden would flood. Sometimes all the way up to the porch steps of the house which meant a third of the shed was under water.
This was great for me and my friends having a swimming pool in the garden, but it took its toll on the shed and a disused chicken house in the garden.

Maybe the ‘out of bounds’ status was more a ‘about to fall down’ status and therefore not for a kid to ‘play’ around, in or on. Still it made me nosy of course but I respected what me Dad asked of me. If I knew he was home but couldn’t find him, he was usually in the shed doing something ‘dangerous’. Well my logic said it must be dangerous, why else wasn’t I allowed to at least watch what he was doing.
With anything else I was roped in to watch him build or repair things around the house and garden, all strictly look but not touch. Sometimes if it was with electrical appliances I would look on but I had to keep my distance, as my mother would go into a tiswas if she found out I was anywhere in the near of exposed, possibly live wires.

While playing in the garden I would walk around the shed trying to peer through the gaps in the woodwork to get an idea of what it looked like inside. It was gloomy inside, the only light was from a very dirty window. I saw only dim out lines of typical garden implements but also a bench with what looked like bottles on it. They were not your typical milk bottle type or what one would find in a kitchen. They were dark and mostly brown where the dim light reflected off or with difficulty through them. They were more like the ones I had seen when going to the chemist with Mum to get my regular eye drops.

I got to thinking maybe Dad was a hobby chemist!
Maybe doing secret experiments!!
Even a mad scientist in his spare time!!!
My speculations went rampant. I suspect from reading too many ‘Eagle’ comics instead of my ‘Beano’, although to come to think about it ‘Dennis the Menace’ was my favourite character.

Of course speculation of what Dad was getting up to got me even more curious after a glimpse into his twilight zone. Alone I would have probably left it at that, but I wasn’t. Although an only child I had a good friend living next door. D is a year younger than me and also an only child which meant we spent a lot of time together growing up. A sort of brother that lived next door.

One day, we must have been about ten or eleven, after another bout of speculation about the shed and edging each other on, we tried to find a way in. The door was always locked so that was out. At the back of the shed towards the field and out of sight to the bungalow we found a couple of loose boards that we could swivel to the side and squeeze through.

We had of course no intention of doing anything in the shed, just look around and then leave keeping the adventure to ourselves. What’s the harm in that we thought!?
After a lot of effort scraping our way through (we were both on the chubby side) we just stood there giving our eyes the chance to adjust to the gloom. It must have been a sunny day outside because we could see quite well.

There was dust and cobwebs everywhere. Whatever Dad got up to in there it didn’t including keeping the place clean and tidy! Secured to the bench, which took up half the space in the shed, was a massive vice and a miniature lathe which I still have in the cellar. Mum told me that the lathe was made by Dad for turning new parts for repairing clocks and watches.
Lying around where boxes full of little paper packets with spare watch parts and there at the back against the wall the dusty grime covered bottles (like the ones on the right) that I had seen through the worm holed woodwork.

Now I’m not sure (it’s almost 60 years ago) when the passive looking around went over to active boyish stupidity but it did. And Fortuna fortunately had nothing drastically planned for us except for two kids being scared to death of what they experienced and the awaited wrath of my Dad who knew that a ton of bricks would fall on ‘him’ when Mum found out what had happen.

But I’m jumping the gun here, so back inside the shed.

There was two largish bottles not so grime covered as the rest standing on their own both, by the look of it, half full. On the one there was a hand written label saying ‘oil of vitriol’, the other I can’t remember. Even if the label had said, as with the bottle similar to the one here on the right, just ‘Sulphuric acid’ we still wouldn’t have been any the wiser.

Chemistry lessons were a few years in the future. Maybe we would have backed off with a modern yellow hazard warning but there wasn’t and so we didn’t. And what do mad scientist apprentices do? They mix things together! And thats what we did. We opened both bottles and started to pour the contents of one bottle into the other.

Now I have no idea how much we poured in but all I know is the bottle we were pouring into was getting very very hot! Also adding to the stuffy air in the shed there was an increasing smell of rotten eggs!!
We didn't expect this to happen and panicked. Well, as we had no idea of what we expected to happen, we left as fast as possible the way we came in. If we closed the bottles I have no recollection, probably not.

I’m not sure if I confessed or Dad found out about it when he came home from work. Maybe it was the smell issuing from the shed that gave the game away. What I do remember vaguely is being told off but not from whom, probably from both my parents in turn. I think they were more relieved that nothing serious had happened. I was pretty shaken up from the whole experience and kept a low profile for quite some time.

I don’t recollect what the consequences where for Dad, but I expect the chemicals were either stored correctly or disposed of. I’m not sure but I think the shed was demolished not long after the incident. It was falling apart anyway and our spontaneous chemistry experiment was a good excuse to have it removed.
Looking back with hindsight there was a 50 50 chance that we could have decided to pour the other liquid (no idea what it was, probably water based) into the bottle of sulphuric acid and the consequences could have been catastrophic as we could have burnt ourselves quite badly or even worse.

Here some background to our ‘chemistry lesson’, and a lesson it was, all those years ago:

When you mix concentrated sulfuric acid and water, you should pour the acid into a larger volume of water. Mixing the chemicals the other way round can present a safety hazard. This is because sulphuric acid (H2SO4) reacts very vigorously with water in a highly exothermic reaction. If you add water to concentrated sulfuric acid, it can boil and spit and could coarse serious acid burns.
To give you an idea of the temperature change, mixing 100 ml of concentrated sulfuric acid and 100 ml of water initially at 19 degrees C reaches a temperature over 131 degrees C within a minute. The spitting or splashing of acid that results from mixing them in the incorrect order is from the intense heat.