Wherein the author relates the Tale of the Exploding Pen.
Everyone who's taken high school chemistry probably has some entertaining stories of experiments not included in the syllabus, myself included. A friend and I did a great deal of spontaneous research in our class involving myriad flame tests and chemical combinations "Mother Nature never intended." I recall one time when the teacher left the room, and my friend dashed into the storeroom in the back to see what he could filch. He returned with a heaping handful of silver nitrate powder, which isn't exactly recommended handling procedure for this chemical. When rapid discomfort made him dispose of this material, the rest of us observed to our amazement that his entire hand had turned silver. By the end of the day it had turned purple. But all this, of course, is peripheral to the Tale of the Exploding Pen.
One day in Chemistry class we were using calcium metal, which reacts with water to give off hydrogen gas and heat. This was definitely Nifty, and I saved several pieces. It became a source of amusement to drop it in a puddle of water and watch it bubble and sputter, then quickly hand it to someone during a quiet class to provoke an alarmed bellow (the stuff got pretty hot). By the afternoon I had one piece left, which I, based on thought processes that now entirely elude me, stored, along with some water, in my pen, one of those Bic Biros with the large white barrel and detachable endcap. It soon slipped my mind that I'd done this, and I went on my way to Biology class. Midway through class, we were wrapping up an experiment, with the teacher giving a lecture and the class taking notes. I was standing in the back of the room, writing down final data from our petri dishes of E. Coli, when my pen exploded. It was very loud, louder than a firecracker, and I looked up to see every face in the class staring at me and the remnant of my pen with great alarm. The resulting silence was finally broken when someone muttered "his pen exploded!" I tried to play it cool, giving my pen as cursory an inspection as possible, as if this were a frequent occurence of little concern, and returned to an extroadinarily studious job of note-taking. The teacher just smiled and continued the lecture in a bit; I guess he was used to this sort of thing.
We had some other interesting experiences in this biology course, including the development of Live Chicken Bowling, and the concealment of chickens in people's personal belongings. In one class I remember, one of the kids wadded up paper towels into a foot-wide ball, and for reasons I don't fathom arrived at the decision to set it on fire when the teacher left the room. Too late it occcurred to him that a large ball of fire is fairly conspicuous in a classroom setting, so he stuffed it into the lab drawer beside his desk just before the teacher returned. The sudden earnest interest in the lecture he tried to demonstrate was not enough to distract from the smoke rising from his desk, however, and he got in a significant amount of trouble.
But let me return once again to Chemistry class. In all, it was a fairly boring class, and we even had to pursue non- flammable entertainment. I programmed a Blackjack game on my pocket computer, and we would pass it around the class for all to play. A lively betting pool would sometimes start when the score got high. One day we managed to play a full game of Risk in the back of the room during lecture. Some of us would spend a half an hour at a stretch duplicating Muppet noises from Sesame Street episodes: "Tiiiick Tooooock BrrrrrrrRING! Yupyupyupyup". Others would interupt any rare quiet moments by yanking leg hairs from other guys wearing shorts. None of this infantilism, however, can compare to the mayhem related to me by one of my roommates that went on in his own high school chemistry class.
He had a particularly anarchic chem class that seemed to involve an impressive amount of pyrotechnics. On one occassion, someone threw a fist-sized chunk of potassium metal in a sink full of water, which destroyed it (both sink and water) with a great shower of sparks. Another time his classmates covered an entire desktop with infamous nitrogren tri-iodide, an unstable compound made from ammonia and iodine that explodes when touched, leaving purple stains. They detonated it by throwing a paper airplane, blowing the top off the desk. In an act of tremendous stupidity, they filled an entire liter beaker with the gray incendiary material from sparklers, and when some fool tossed in a match, the resulting column of fire burned holes in both the table and ceiling. In an extra-curriculur adventure, they piled a mound of thermite they'd prepared in class on a particularly despised person's driveway. When ignited, it blasted a foot wide hole through the concrete and down to the dirt. Their most notable "achievement", however, was placing in someone's locker in a dish of water a large chunk of some unknown material that gives off noxious odors when moist. He said that the resulting nauseating stench spread through the entire school. One girl barfed in mid-sprint to the bathroom, and the school had to evacuate the building and cancel classes for the rest of the day. In an entire semester of Chemistry class, his only remotely educational experience was learning to make soap, and he had to repeat the subject here at Purdue, minus the pyrotechnics.