The book Ignition!, mentioned in the article/comments, is soon back to print[0]. After reading these articles I think the book is a must read. Too bad the Kindle version is quite bad quality.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Ignition-Informal-History-Liquid-Prop...

Cody's Lab is also a very accessable series where the guy somewhat casually handles various acids to dissolve gold and such. He's got a series showing various ways to extract gold from other metals (or more commonly, the other metals from gold). Just in his home, maybe with an amateur extractor.

Despite failing chemistry in high school (and never looking at it again afterward), I loved Derek Lowe's "Things I Won't Work With" column.

He did an excellent job of describing some truly terrifying chemical substances in a lighthearted and engaging way.

It reminded me of this gem from the same author -- http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/thi...

There is a great rundown of the history of fluorine by Isaac Asimov in _Galileo's Commandment: 2,500 Years of Great Science Writing_ (it might be excerpted from his book _The Noble Gases_, I'm not sure. I couldn't find an online version of the text)

A link to "things I won't work with"? Well there goes my entire day!

The best part is perhaps the quote at the end from Ignition!.

This video covers that story rather well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ7M01jV058

It's kind of scary how easy it is to make too; much easier than e.g. sarin and almost as toxic.

It actually reminded me of the aftermath of an arc flash ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_flash ) which while the original arc is visible (and may temporarily blind any that see it) the plasma that comes out after it is not and is extremely scary because it's potentially several times hotter than the surface of the sun. The linked article has a video in it that describes the results.

I was looking for a comment that mentioned this! Pit crew methanol fire is also what I first thought this article was about when I read the title!

Alcohol fires in general, for that matter - ethanol fires are also just about invisible.

Phenol... ah, the nostalgia. As a teenager, I once added a drop of fuming nitric acid to some phenol. I understood that I may be able to make picric acid that way. I just didn't appreciate quite how unstable the resulting compound would be until the instant the acid hit the phenol and the glass beaker disappeared in the resulting detonation. I was not wearing googles (of course), and to this day I am thankful no glass hit my eyes. I'm also extremely thankful I only added a single drop of acid. Scary substances indeed!

We had a tanker truck full of the stuff overturn a couple weeks ago in a remote area and I got a call from the hazmat guys about running a calcium gluconate line if the stuff escaped containment. (I work for the health department.) They usually use oral tape, but they were worried it wouldn't work fast enough and they couldn't get medical aid fast enough since the nearest hospital to the truck was about 80 miles away.

Fortunately they were able to right the truck without any spilling.

That one you probably _do_ want a Prop 65 notification for ...

That's what you get when you mix a highly electronegative element with anything else!

Yep, I've seen these videos before and am aghast at how nonchalantly they work with nasty stuff.

Me - I use PPE when working with pretty much any solvent or etchant. And that includes gloves and goggles at a minimum. And if the stuff is not nice, I'm using a stick of sorts to apply (wood, metal, glass; whichever's less reactive).

And if I were dealing with things like HF, you can bet your ass that I'm building some sort of automated setup. HF spattering on a webcam lens means a loss of $50. HF spattering on me means I possibly will die or suffer horrendously. Same with lasers as well. Telepresence is so much safer, and failure means a few hundred dollars of equipment replacement.

Armour Etch doesn't have HF, but it does have other fluorides https://www.msdsdigital.com/armour-etch-glass-etchant-msds

They were worried because they thought the margin you normally have did not exist in this case, and they tried to avoid any drop in circulation, which would reduce the amount of fresh calcium brought into the hand, which might not be compensated by the additional artificial supply if the radial artery's flow dropped. In those other procedures that you mention you have a bit more room because normally the tissues are not at their limit of how much of the various molecules supplied by blood they use.

For those unfamiliar with how blood supplies various molecules, some of it solved in blood directly, some of it bound to carriers, most famous probably being oxygen: It's not like in a human supply chain where an empty truck or a train is loaded to capacity and then again emptied completely when it reaches a destination point. Instead, it's an equilibrium that changes based on things like partial pressure or acidity (pH is very slightly more basic in the lungs, slightly more acidic in the periphery, because of CO2 - also see "Bohr effect") and a lot of other variables. There is no 0% or a 100%. Here is an example for a curve for oxygen: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wm-biology2/chapter/transp...

Not to mention the millions of people who don’t have a radical artery because it has been harvested to use as a coronary artery for coronary artery bypass grafts

This is a good little interesting video on fluorine here (previously linked by someone else), and the ending is the best description of tin fluoride for teeth I've ever seen -- well worth the ~6min

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtWp45Eewtw&feature=youtu.be

(edit: added link)

I recommend not just any chemistry course but specifically this one:

MITx 3.091 "Introduction to Solid State Chemistry"

https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-solid-state-chemistr...

It's "archived" - good enough, everything is accessible, you just won't be able to get a "grade".

It's the gateway to "materials science" too. It is more at the edge of chemistry, towards physics and engineering. Not to mention that the teaching in this course is pretty good. Also, it is not dumbed down, you can go to MIT, take the same course and feel right at home. It's about properties of materials as a consequence of the chemical/physical properties of the components (atoms/molecules) and how they are structured (example: diamond and graphite are both made of carbon, then why are they so different).

If you want to get up to speed on "just chemistry" try Khan Academy, their explanations are pretty good and you can easily select what interests you because it is broken down into many small pieces.

You could try this: http://www.geekityourself.com/files/The-Golden-Book-Of-Chemi... it was written a bit before health and safety became and thing though.

One of the labs where I first had those (also chip fabs have them) attached to a high flow water supply - normally triggered by standing inside them.

Our top H&S guy decided that as he was responsible he should be the one to test it he did cheat a bit by wearing swimming goggles to protect his eyes. He commented it was like being sand blasted with small ball bearings and "fracking hurt"

When I was a school kid, a friend and I were into blowing stuff up and general chemical mayhem (those innocent pre-9/11 days!). We used to synthesize fuming nitric acid and mix it with oleum and potassium permanganate. The resulting fuming, purple mix would cause pretty much anything it came into contact with to immediately combust.

But that sounds - if you'll pardon the pun - like child's play compared to your boiling(!) nitric, HF and perchloric acid. I cannot image how you'd even contain such an evil substance? And what was it used for?

"Commercial" just implies commerce; that it was a product that could be purchased. It was not a consumer product. In the article it says the title was "Industrial Laundry Rust Remover".

There are certainly much nastier chemicals used that this in industry. As an example, I'm reminded of a quote by Gordon Moore about Intel having melted their sewer pipe, in this article:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-06-15/american-...

I'm guessing it came from "another era" where you could buy stuff like this without an issue?

But even few years ago I visited a wolfram mine in Portugal on a job, and was told by the guy I worked with at the time that the miners are using stuff "banned long time ago in UK" to clean the tips of the guiding ropes which we were replacing. I was never told what it was, but nowadays I suspect it was HF.

Key word is "commercial". The commercial world is full of dangerous substances (when you leave the safety of an office and go into the dirty world of production :-)), out of necessity, but you are assumed to have received proper training and be in possession of proper safety equipment.

Concentration has a lot to do with it. More dilute solutions of HF may cause burns, but t it's unlikely to kill you.

Concentrated HF is another beast entirely.