Word: nitrous
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...decade they were used for exactly that by moonshiners. Almost every male over 14 shyly admits to a little informal dark-of-night racing experience. California teen-agers get high on laughing gas; their peers in North Carolina prefer the 150 h.p. bursts of acceleration that a bottle of nitrous oxide delivers when attached to a sedan's air filter...
...Physicist Louise B. Young gives one possible reason: the discharge of high voltages into the air can produce ozone, a form of oxygen with three (rather than two) atoms in its molecular makeup, and oxides of nitrogen. Ozone can oxidize or "burn" healthy tissue, and nitrogen oxides form nitrous acid and one of the major components of smog. All of these might well affect people and plants that live near the lines...
Right away, Paul goes upstairs and drags down a big blue tank, like a balloon seller's tank of helium, and a bag of balloons. It's a tank of nitrous oxide. NO2, what dentists use, laughing gas. He offers me the first balloonful. I've never been to a dentist who used gas but it seems like fun, and he doesn't have to persuade me to take it. As I suck in the gas, cooler than the air in the living room. I feel giddy but not dizzy, and I laugh a little. It feels like the moment...
Paul is sprawled back over his chair, rolling his head backwards and around, rolling it with his eyes closed, not drunkenly, enjoying the feeling of the music. Susan is puffing on a balloon. Her lips look a little blue. Maybe from the nitrous oxide. But I don't remember whether they were a little bluish anyway before Paul got the tank old and it might be my vision and not her lips. I really can tell...
...What is it? "A pasteurized blend of water, hydrogenated vegetable oil, sugar, starch, sodium-phosphate, derivatives of mono-and diglycerides, sodium caseinate, polyoxyethylene (20), sorbitan tristearate. salt, cellulose gum, calcium chloride, vanilla and artificial flavor. Charged with nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide." It goes well with pumpkin pie. Answer: a dessert topping. Makes you wonder, doesn...