There were three of us in the class. We were lads, 12, 13 and 14 years old. They called us the alchemists. We were friends. We shared the excitement of chemical reactions, color, bubbling smelly fluids, smoke and fire.  We loved to detonate flashlight powder, launch rockets and ignite all kinds of home-made explosives.

Norbert was a small fellow, cautious, somewhat inhibited, and by far the smartest. He understood a great deal of chemistry, but got little pocket money from his dad. That’s why he sold old Mickey Mouse papers at the railway station to earn money to buy chemicals. I understood a bit of chemistry, too, and had a well-equipped lab in our cellar. Grandma helped me a bit with her money.

Yet I felt jealous for the third of us, a lad we called Sepp. His understanding of chemistry was not as highly sophisticated as it might have been, but he was the tallest of us and had the best business connections. He found a way to steal chemicals from a company warehouse, where his dad worked as an accountant. That’s why his lab had large stocks of chemicals.  Some were fit for our light and fire experiments. He also had all kinds of other poisonous stuff hidden, some chemicals he managed to put his hands on. One of our favorite explosives’ ingredients was Potassium Chlorate. Sepp loved to do things the big way, and had the means to do it. He always had a few big jars of ready-to-use gun powder and flashlight mix stored in his cellar den.

Norbert and I produced our own Potassium Chlorate. It was a painful and time-consuming process. We obtained the chemical through a reaction called selective crystallization. It required cooking a saturated brine of weed killer, which contained Sodium Chlorate, salt and other stuff, together with (expensive) Potassium Hydroxyde.

Carefully controlled cooling of the fluid led to several generations of crystals dropping out of the brine, and with a bit of luck we managed to separate per-chlorate from chlorate, and from chloride. Quite often, the process went wrong, and never yielded more than an ounce even on a good day. 

Once I almost killed my cat ‘Tiger’. She gave me always company in my chaotic cellar lab, and sat purring between arrays of glass tubes and chemical bottles. Then, one day, an experiment went sour. Hot, boiling liquid ignited and shot out of a glass tube, burning the cat’s tail. She jumped from the burning table angrily meowing, and left a trail of smoldering havoc behind.

Grandma, who happened to be in the cellar, came by and told me with a bad, and yet empathic, voice: “What have you done again!”

Having obtained the chlorate, we mixed it with other ingredients such as charcoal, sulfur, and magnesium powder. We stored the explosives in our cellar labs.

For a while, our chemical friendship went fine. We competed in making the finest bombs and rockets, and detonated them after school in the large forest to the west of our village. Then, one day, things changed.  Sepp felt he needed more pocket money and sold his stolen chemicals to Norbert and me. As we were always short of supply we bought from Sepp. He put up a marketing smile and charged us a high price.  We protested, but he wouldn’t give us   discount. No wonder he ended up bank manager.

Soon purchases dented my pocket money and squabbling began. Norbert and I formed a new team. Sepp was cooking his stuff alone in his lab. Our old friendship was over.

On a summer day, Sepp appeared late in class. Everybody’s eyes were on him. He looked truly miserable. Then rumors spread. Explosives had blown his cellar lab.  Poisoned fumes had exterminated mom’s home-made jam stock, and fatally corroded dad’s fitness spa.

Norbert and I couldn’t hide our evil satisfaction. How could one be so foolish to store five pound of ready-to-ignite explosives in one’s lab!

But the next day, Norbert came to school with an unusually bitter face. There had been an explosion in his lab, too – a mere 50 grams, but still the explosion had smashed precious glass equipment. 

I started to wonder… I also had some of the same notorious mix in my lab, yet somehow felt nothing bad would ever happen. Days passed. On a Monday morning, Mom said: “There was a lot of smelly smoke in the house, at night time. What have you been doing?” “Don’t worry Mom”, I replied. “Probably some smoke rose from yesterday’s tests.” Still, there was a nagging doubt in my stomach.

When I entered the cellar there was smoke everywhere. A thick layer of biting smog hit my face, as I staggered down the staircase. I hardly could breeze. My lab table and arrays of glass bottles were completely incinerated. Molten glass debris and coaly remnants smoldered and sizzled in the corner of the room. In panic, I opened the windows. I extinguished glimpses of fire and hid the damage under a sheet of canvas, hoping that Dad wouldn’t find out. With that idea I jumped on my bike and uneasily went to school. The late afternoon was reserved for a profound cleanup. I fixed my lab as well as I could, and got away without being caught & punished.

However, this minor disaster had given me a chill. After these eventful days we had learnt a bitter safety lesson: from now on we would store ready-mixed explosives in sealed bottles, and bury them in the garden.

© 2004 by Franz L Kessler