Ah...
fond memories of
AP Chemistry from
junior year in
high school. One of the more
enjoyable experiments that I did (besides making
ice cream and playing with the
centrifuge) was creating touch
explosives. The actual
chemical that we formed was
nitrogen tri-iodide (NI
3). This is
stable when it's in a
solution, but when it
dries, the
activation energy is
extremely low, making this
compound very
unstable. There is a great deal of
exothermic energy released, as well as the
formation of two gases (
nitrogen and
iodine), which creates the
explosion. The
purple gas from the explosion is the iodine.
The
memory I have is of
Mrs. Green (the chemistry
teacher) lending us a
blue feather to set off the explosion. This feather has been with her for many
years, almost as many as she's been
teaching. We wanted to show the low
activation energy for this reaction, so we figured the
feather would be
best suited to show this. We attached the feather to the end of a
meterstick and
gently touched the feather to the dried nitrogen tri-iodide.
Bang!
People
jumped. Mrs. Green looked
upset. As she should have.
There were pieces of blue feather
floating around in the purplish gas.