Excerpts from Joseph's Fragmented Biography

by Joseph Nathan Hall

-First published in "Joseph's Fragmented Biography" in June 2002 (at http://www.5sigma.com/joseph/bio/)

Fun with Water

I guess the best way to go about this will be in a fragmentary way, just kind of wandering from anecdote to anecdote. Here's one.

In my junior year I lived on the second floor of Wyche House. This was a weathered, slightly cockroach-infested two-story dorm (with a basement) at the corner of the campus. Wyche (rhymes with "Robert Reich") was inhabited for another year or two but then was condemned, and later renovated (I think). Anyway, my room was one of the larger ones, in the center of the building facing into the campus. My room faced Hill House, actually, the girls dorm, but it was so far away that I would have needed a pretty good telescope to do any serious peeking. Never got around to it myself but some other folks did.

Anyway, I digress. The room overlooked a sidewalk which wound around an air conditioning unit (I'm not sure what it cooled?) and toward the outside entrance of the basement. In my first days on campus I discovered that water thrown out the window onto the AC fan made a very gratifying sound and 360 degree spraying effect. You know what they say, when the shit hits the fan. I'd go dump a pint or so into the fan periodically just for jollies. The water would go in all directions with considerable force, maybe 30-40 feet horizontally.

So one day I found a bigger container. I don't remember what size it was but I'd guess a couple of quarts. I carted it over to the window and dumped it out the side directly into the fan. Wow. That considerable dose of water almost stopped the fan--I could hear/see it slow down. Biiiiggg splash. Cool.

Pretty quickly there was a knock on the door. There stood my downstairs "neighbor", Bart. He had the room directly below mine. Bart was wet. His face had a few drops clinging to it and his shirt had damp splotches. Bart had been doing his homework next to his open window just a few moments ago. He heard a sound, looked up, and a small wall of water came tsunami-like through his window. It doused him, his desk, his papers and other things lying nearby. After the initial shock, things clicked for him. He had noticed some minor weirdness with the fan earlier, sounds and the odd drop of water, but this was the first incident that clued him in.

That might have been the first time I met Bart, but fortunately he seemed more amused than wrathful. He turned out to be a great guy. We roomed together senior year and have kept loosely in touch off and on through the years.

The Shaving Cream Bomb

During junior year there was a period where you could find shaving cream on various odd parts of the dormitory, on doorhandles, underneath stair railings, and the like. Might as well find some alternative uses for it, since most of us didn't really need to shave all that often. I don't recall what the inspiration was but I eventually started experimenting with filling balloons with shaving cream.

I found out that if you just filled the balloon with shaving cream and burst it, not much happened. You just got a "cowflop" of shaving cream. On the other hand, if you partially filled a balloon with shaving cream, filled it the rest of the way with air, then shook it to distribute the shaving cream across the interior of the inflated balloon, then it made a really nice mess when it burst.

I further don't recall what the inspiration was for the next step, but three of us, myself, Chancellor and a fellow I'll identify as R.L., plotted to make a device, a shaving cream bomb if you will, that would be placed in some unsuspecting fellow's dorm room.

I came up with the idea of using a model rocket igniter to burst the balloon. Off we went to the mall to purchase a 9 volt battery and a packet of Estes model rocket igniters (the pyrotechnic kind that were easy to ignite, not the nichrome sparklers). We also purchased the most repulsive shaving cream we could find. I think it was lime scented.

Then we assembled a "cradle" of wire that held the battery, and taped the igniter and a loop of wire to the balloon. The cradle was to be placed on the floor, and the balloon was to be placed atop the cradle. When picked up, the wire on the balloon would touch wires in the cradle and complete the circuit, setting off the igniter, and hopefully, covering our victim with shaving cream and probably scaring him to death in the process.

The device was constructed. Chancellor had managed to figure out how to modify his room key so that it was actually a master key (and furthermore had removed the master tumbler from his room's lock so that the master key didn't work on it), and he was assigned the task of gaining entry into the victim's room and placing the balloon a couple yards from the door, with a towel wrapped around the base to conceal the, ahem, hardware.

When the device was in place, R.L. got the victim to go to his room. We heard the details later.

Unfortunately the balloon hadn't burst. :-( :-( Everything else went perfectly though. The victim opened his door, saw this balloon lying on the floor, scratched his head, and picked it up. The igniter lit but since it was completely taped to the side of the balloon (a last minute design change that I have always regretted) what happened was that air and shaving cream spurted out of a small hole in the tape. Well, at least it startled the daylights out of him.

I suppose he was also impressed that his dorm-mates would go to so much trouble to play a prank on him. I might have been worried ....

My Michael Collins Story: "Dyunnastannat?"

During my junior year I was reasonably well behaved. At least to the point where I didn't do much that they had a rule against. Later on in my senior year my life started to go a little sideways, and toward the middle of my final semester, a small but growing rebellious streak, intense disinterest in my classes and curriculum, and some extremely weird interpersonal things all converged to make me a somewhat less than ideal member of the student body. There were two separate incidents that led to my encounter with Michael Collins.

The first was when my R.A., "Menace," came to confiscate my speakers one evening. I don't remember whether we (Bart and I) were playing the stereo loudly at the time or not but we certainly had played it loudly in the past. Of course so had everyone else with a capable system. Anyway, we were very recalcitrant. Menace wound up banging on the door while we just ignored him. He was righteously pissed. Pretty level headed guy but that was the first time I ever heard him yelling. I guess we were pissed too.

The second was around that same time, when my friend Ward and I were wandering the halls late one night. We noticed a ceiling tile ajar and Ward wanted to see what was up there, just for the heck of it. Ward stood on a chair and looked into the ceiling. At that very moment one of the RAs turned the corner and inquired as to what we were doing. We said, "Just looking in the ceiling." Apparently we weren't believed. This was probably because Ward's hacker callings were somewhat strong at the time and the tile happened to be somewhat near a collection of modem lines and other stuff leading into the machine room that held our precious VAX-11/750. Not a bad piece of hardware for a high school to have in 1982.

Anyway, as things turned out I had not one but two appointments scheduled with Mr. Student Affairs, Michael Collins, on the same day. First in the morning with Steve Davis (head of the math department and "god" of the computer system), and then that same afternoon with Bart and Menace. I remember nothing of either except that when Collins was rendering his final thoughts/judgment/verdict/whatever he would punctuate the end of each sentence with "Dyunnastannat?" -- slurring his words together in the finest American tradition. Bart and I emerged a little shaken but we both had fun saying "Dyunnastannat?" "Dyunnastannat?" to each other for the next few days.

The result of these grim encounters was a letter sent to my parents. I had been "phased," in the disciplinary lingo of the time. I received a copy of the letter and noticed that it was full, or grammatical and speling er.ros

As one of the better English students on campus, what was I to do? Naturally I proofread the letter, marked it up, and taped it to the outside of my dorm room door.

A scenario repeated itself over the following 2-3 days. From inside my room I would hear someone stop by my door. He would mutter something like "hey, what's this?" Then there would be a minute or so of pause, a chuckle, then finally uncontrollable guffaws.

Eventually someone took it down.

Fun with Acid

Back to junior year. For a month or two one of my primary recreational activities was "windowsill chemistry." R.L., who introduced me to the notion, had a few little bottles of sulfuric and nitric acid, acetone, methanol, the like. He even had a little plastic squeeze bottle of hydrofluoric acid.

Oh, you're thinking, that kind of acid. What did you think? I've never been a serious illegal drug user, although it probably would have been more fun and possibly more enlightening than some of my more miserable adolescent/early adult experiences.

I digress. Again. That will be a pattern. Anyway, we would meet in my dorm room, select chemicals, and mix them in little beakers on my windowsill in the afternoon or early evening. I don't remember the combinations very well now. Not that it matters. We would try various things in various proportions. In general, if you mix nitric and sulfuric acid with something else, you get a cloud of either nitrogen tetroxide (the brown stuff) or nitrous oxide (clear stuff), or, generally, some of both. The reaction can be fairly vigorous, and of course, nitrogen tetroxide is fairly poisonous, hence the improvised fumehood.

It was fun to watch.

By the way, this is a good place to insert a disclaimer. If you try any of what I'm describing here, I won't be held responsible for any damage, injury, dismemberment, death, or whatever. Hell, I may not even remember what I did accurately. Caveat chemist.

We also got hold of a quart or two of technical grade hydrochloric acid that was used in some cleaning project (drains maybe?). Ahh, the wonder of seeing HCl poured into a beaker of aluminum foil strips for the first time.

I learned some other things. If you pour concentrated sulfuric acid on your skin, just hurry up, wipe it off and rinse. (It's syrupy.) No harm done so long as your skin's dry and you're fast. Nitric acid makes a yellow stain. "People nitrate." Hydrochloric is nasty. Exposing skin to the concentrated vapors can give you a terrible case of the itchies an hour or three later. Neither of us was stupid enough to accidentally or otherwise expose ourselves to hydrofluoric acid. We did bum a small piece of raw meat from the cafeteria to see what various chemicals would do to it. I remember being impressed that a drop or two of hydrofluoric acid seeped into a sample like it was a sponge and turned it a lifeless gray all the way through.

On to the specific anecdotes. Two come to mind. First, as you may or may not know, the recipe for nitroglycerine is a mixture of sulfuric acid, nitric acid and glycerine. You may also know that the process is very exothermic (liberates heat) and that unless great care is taken when mixing to keep things ice cold, the reaction will "run away" and just produce a brown cloud. (Of course you know that if you succeed in making the stuff you may just blow yourself up, but see the disclaimer above.) Well, we knew all this, but decided to mix up a little with warm ingredients anyway, to see what would happen. We retired to the parking lot behind Wyche one quiet afternoon, and into a tiny (10ml) beaker we poured a dab of each. Things started bubbling, then bubbled furiously, and suddenly there was a POOF and a van-sized cloud of nitrogen tetroxide was liberated. It drifted with the wind across the parking lot into the woods. Cool.

Good thing we didn't try that on the windowsill. It would be such a bummer to be the cause of a building evacuation.

The second that comes to mind is that one evening just after we had got the hydrochloric acid, we were experimenting with applying it to the stucco outside my window. I decided that it was better when somewhat diluted, down to maybe 5-8 percent. So anyway we were doing our thing, a little dab here, a little squirt there, and suddenly a head appeared out the window right below where I had just been dropping acid (so to speak) on the sidewalk.

It's Bart. Again.

He says, "Hey, something just dripped in my ear."

Oh shit! I say, "Rinse it out, man!"

"Huh?"

"Rinse it out! Then come on up here."

Bart survived the experience. He claimed his ear burned and itched the next day. Meanwhile he joined us as we created increasingly complex cocktails. We got punchy and were throwing very weird mixtures of stuff out the window onto the sidewalk late that night. One created a strange multicolored stain that lasted for years.

(that's all for now...)