Word: nitric
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...done before a group of us in Madras a few years ago. The particular performer was not fully of the holy man type of the person concerned in the levitation. However, he did something which was fairly a test of his capacity, for he drank a teaspoonful of undiluted nitric acid. It was not his nitric acid, but some supplied from our college laboratory. He drank first about a wineglassful of water and then poured down his throat the nitric acid (our own students on all sides of him) and then washed it down with another wineglassful of water. This...
Explosive from Corn, Professor Edward Bartow, president of the American Chemical Society, has 25 lb. of inositol which he keeps locked in a safe at University of Iowa. Inositol is an alcohol which occurs exiguously in the seeds of certain plants. Treated with nitric acid it forms a solid substance about twice as explosive as dynamite. Inositol has been so difficult to extract that only about 5 lb. are produced annually and the price is $500 per lb. Professor Bartow and his able associate, Dr. W. W. Walker, found a way to extract inositol from the water in which corn...
...mixing sulphuric acid and glycerin to make an electrolyte for plating. Already in the tank were 75 gal. of acid and 2 gal. of glycerin. Thinking to add more acid, Wallace Foreman picked up a 3-gal. container, dumped in the contents. Unluckily the container held not sulphuric but nitric acid. Nitric acid plus sulphuric acid plus glycerin makes nitroglycerin...
Everyone knows that an etching is made by scratching lines through the wax "ground" on a copper plate with a needle, then biting the exposed lines into the plate by dipping it in a bath of nitric acid. Few people know that the etcher's needle should never scratch the plate itself (unless he is making a drypoint). Depth of line for increased blackness is all done by action of the acid. A goose feather is the best possible tool for brushing away microscopic gas bubbles while the plate is in the bath. Much of the effect of Whistler...
...Rangoon last fortnight, Narasingha Swami, Indian mystic, ate a handful of ground glass, drank half a drachma of nitric acid, some sulfuric acid, also swallowed a grain of strychnine and a grain of potassium cyanide.. He died in agony. His friends explained it was because he had been kept from doing his yatayoga (breath-control and autosuggestion exercises) by swarms of visitors at his house...