[hlehmann]

My father was a physicist, working for Westinghouse for many years when they did R&D in phosphors & other lighting. When I was a kid in the 60's he had a combination darkroom and chemistry lab in our basement. Every Sunday afternoon was dedicated to a chemistry demonstration. We kids were mostly interested in the experiments that went boom, of course. He had a shelf of chemicals of all sorts; liquid mercury, various acids, you name it. I guess he just "borrowed" them from his lab at the office. We would make hydrogen balloons by mixing zinc with hydrochloric acid in an empty coke bottle. We would grew walnut sized crystals of copper sulphate and other molecules. He bought a giant Fresnel lens from Edmund Scientific that we would use to melt lead using just the sun. When I became a father I would do things like the ammonium dichromate volcano for my kids; now you can't even buy that stuff anymore without being suspected of terrorism.