I did not like this Far Side cartoon for obvious reasons.
This could do real harm, burning the victim’s neck, and if I caught anyone doing this they would be immediately expelled from the lab. Not funny.
Additionally, I have a personal memory of my first year in general chemistry. I had a lab partner who was a total klutz — I carried her through that lab, in spite of her inability to titrate anything. She was a danger with a pipette, and every week I’d go back to the dorm to discover that somehow the back of my pants and shirt had been spattered with acids — when I’d do my laundry I’d discover all these holes in my clothes, which was also not funny.
I’ve wondered for years if my lab partner really disliked me, or if she was trying to get my attention because she liked me, or she was just ridiculously incompetent in the lab. It happened so often that I suspect the first possibility.
There is the possibility that Gary Larson – not being a chemist – was confusing hydrochloric acid with some milder acid. We have all been there – I used to beleive lagomorphs were a subset of rodentia. And I did not know marsupials were mammals.
It depends on the strength. When pipetting by mouth was still normal I got a mouthful of 0.1M HCl when someone tapped me on the shoulder unexpectedly.
I should have added that I immediately washed out my mouth with water and had a rough feel to my teeth for a couple of days.
I should have added that I immediately washed out my mouth with water and had a rough feel to my teeth for a couple of days.
Sorry, I did it again!
I used to get silver nitrate stains on my hands. I recall my chemistry teacher in university mentioning that any clothing he wore to lecture on demo days would get small holes in it, even with his lab coat and safety protocols.
I was the klutz, but I only had one chemistry class in university. Going slow and focusing helped, and I was never so comfortable that I stopped doing that. In physics labs, I’d just make friends with the engineers so we could partner up: they appreciated someone who really knew her theory and the math, and I got someone with steady hands who liked running the equipment. (Apparently my final project for my circuits lab had the teacher still talking about it the year after — it was a cool project but I was NOT the one working the soldering iron for building the apparatus.)
I’ve seen worse. A lot worse.
Not immediately in person, but I knew people who were there.
Among them, two females attacked by radioactive isotopes.
They found out about it by walking past a Geiger counter and setting it off.
One was radioactive iodine, the other was a large dose of P32.
Then there was the attempted murder by acrylamide poisoning.
Acrylamide is a common laboratory chemical, used to make acrylamide gels for electrophoresis.
I’ll redact his name.
He had his problems but this poisoning by acrylamide was taking things way too far.
Isn’t the punch founded exactly on the extremity of the “prank?”
That’s a warning sign of a psychopath.
When I was studying petrology one of the practicals involved staining rock slices to distinguish between Potassium and Sodium and Calcium feldspars. This involved etching them with hydrofluoric acid. For safety we used latex surgical gloves underneath heavy vinyl gauntlets and only handled the slices with tongs. The acid was neutralised and everything multiply washed at the end of the practical. The last thing was to take off the latex gloves which by now were very sweaty. I washed the gloves then peeled them off my sweaty hands. As I did so a drop of sweat flicked off a glove and git the lecturer in the neck. He of course went into a mad panic and despite my reassurances threw himself under the lab shower. I actually spent several years using the acid for various tests and was rigidly cautious with it. The only near miss I had with it was when a geologist used some in the same fume cupboard and spilled some and walked off without telling anyone. Fortunately I was clued up enough to test the spill and realised what it was. The geologist was banned from the lab.
I once rested my arm in a tiny drop of acetic acid on a lab table. At glacial purity, it was enough to cause intense pain and raised quite a big blister. So “weaker” acids than HCl are still pretty dangerous. Now, a drop of HF acid on the skin would be a particularly unpleasant method of murder.
Given The Far Side’s penchant for morbid humor, I’m sure that Gary used HCl on purpose. I’m sure most people here remember the one where a scientist is looking under a microscope and saying “Hey, this is lemonade! Where’s my amoebic dysentery?” while another scientist is drinking something in the background.
In Biochem lab in the 1970s we used trichloroacetic acid to precipitate proteins. My jeans were full of tiny holes.
microraptor @ 12
I stand corrected!
HCl? bah. don’t get it in your eyes. rinse it off. sure, might make your skin red or put holes in your pants. walk it off.
HF though…that is scary. used it in a MBE lab to etch wafers and clean molybdenum sample holders. it doesn’t hurt when it gets on you, so you might not notice when it spills on you. gets absorbed into your skin, then starts to dissolve your bones and spreads and does other unpleasant stuff. and it doesn’t get “used up” meaning it will stop after it reacts completely. Just keeps dissolving. not pleasant. seek MEDICAL help immediately.
We also used Aqua Regia occasionally. That stuff looks scary when you make it. dissolves gold…
just remembered, when we etched InP wafers, we had to be careful because the reaction could produce phosgene gas.
then there was that time health and safety discovered a bottle of nerve agent while cleaning out the lab of a recently retired employee.
fun times.
@10: Interesting. In her final year of a EE degree, my wife took a course on silicon fab, which uses HF as an etchant. The protocol was not to wear gloves on the grounds that you needed to know if you got HF on your skin, which you wouldn’t know if you were sweating in your gloves and some HF leaked in. Practices may have changed in 45 years.
If you want scary acids, try oleum (fuming sulfuric acid). Spills are actually easy to handle as both the spill and the paper just disappears in a puff of smoke when you try to wipe it up :-O
HF is scary stuff. When I moved into an old lab at Temple U full of 50 years accumulated junk, I found a bottle of HF in the fume hood that was a creepy crystalling stalagmite, and another antique bottle of picric acid, all in the same cabinet. I didn’t touch them. I next found puddles — literal puddles — of mercury on the floor. I just called Health & Safety and a couple of guys showed up in hazmat suits and spent a week scouring the place out.
wasn’t Puddle of Mercury, Puddle of Mudd’s first band name?