As a schoolkid many decades ago, my friends and I had a particular fondness for making fireworks. In those days it wasn’t too difficult to obtain small quantities of the necessary ingredients from neighbourhood chemists and we happily experimented making various colours, rocket propellants as well as the usual small bangs.
My family had moved to a house near a factory that made pyrotechnics for military and maritime use… distress flares, parachute flares, Very pistol cartridges, line-throwing rockets and the like. They’d test a percentage of each batch in a field a mile from the production area, which my friends and I found deeply fascinating.
The factory also had possession of another bit of land, a disused and insecure industrial site of sheds and Nissin huts, which they used to store empty drums of various chemicals. Empty was a relative term… we often found quantities left at the bottom that were plenty for our small-scale experiments.
One day we found some red phosphorus. My friends were content with spilling a trail of the powder on the floor of a shed and shuffling through it leaving a weird blue glow as friction ignited the stuff. I decided to see what effect it had when added to a chlorate and sugar mixture.
Normally a thin line of a mixture leading to a dessertspoonful in the open air will give several seconds delay and a gentle flare-up… a small percentage of phosphorus changed this dramatically. The delay was milliseconds and the heap itself combusted fast enough for an audible thump.
As I’d used a cigarette lighter to ignite it my hand was inside the fireball before I could react. I raced to the nearest water, feeling the skin on my fingers shrivelling and cracking as I ran… and dunked them in a decidedly non-sterile puddle. There was hardly any pain as my friends and I surveyed the gory mess of three of my fingers… but it set in a few minutes later as we ran to my home.
Thankfully, the damage wasn’t too deep and after cleaning and dressing at the hospital, a dressing down from my parents and an arsecheek full of penicillin, healing only took a couple of months and I was able to grip a pen in time to do quite badly at my O-levels.
Did OK in Chemistry though.