Indigo Blues

Today is the birthday of nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford (b. 1871) and chemist Jacobus Henricus van't Hoff (b. 1852), and that is all the occasion I need to launch into my own chemistry memories. In my senior year of a high school, a friend and I registered to be chemistry lab aides. Much like library aides, the lab aides were to ease a teacher’s burden by handling some routine tasks, mostly setting up student labs in this case. The first lab we helped prepare involved measuring the density of sugar. The teacher did not want anyone to taste the sugar, so she had us add indigo powered dye she found in the chemical storeroom. Five minutes of vigorous stirring gave the mixture a pale, purple hue, and so we figured our first assignment completed and washed our hands. When the water from the faucet touched our hands, the whole stream of water instantly turned bright purple. We soon found that the potent, purple powder had dyed a disturbing assortment of our body fluids. I think it was then that we realized that our first period class would be far from routine.

We gained respect and responsibility by diligently doing mundane tasks, like washing the labware. We kept that responsibility by not telling anyone how many close calls we survived. Once we struggled to open a giant bottle of hydrochloric acid sealed much too tightly with a glass stopper. Finally my colleague made an effectual yank, which pulled off the stem of the bottle as well as the stopper. Providentially, none of the strong acid spilled.

Most of the adventures took place in the chemical storeroom, a small room linked by special passageway to the chemistry rooms. One day we noticed a vinegary odor and a white crust in the acid section and were alarmed to notice the corroded remnants of a lid still smoking atop a bottle of glacial acetic acid. Our teacher supervised as we cleaned the area very carefully.

The scariest corner of the storeroom was the fireproof cabinet in which the organics were stashed. The cabinet housed a smell that would lodge for hours as a taste in the back of the throat of whoever opened the cabinet. To minimize our exposure, my friend and I would have one person open the cabinet, the other would find what we needed with all possible speed, and the doorman would close the cabinet as soon as his comrade’s digits were safe. Once we opened the door to find a jar of chloroform tottering on the edge of the top shelf, but some quick hands secured the bottle before the next pulse beat.

We acquired experience with lab equipment and lab skills as well as a healthy fear of concentrated acids. I think we were helpful; we organized the labware, recovered lost artifacts from forgotten storage areas, reshelved the chemicals in the storeroom in a safer and more organized layout, and prepared every student lab.

The school board should be pleased to know that we also learned life lessons, though the water district might be annoyed to discover how. Our school had a manual listing dozens of disposal techniques and a list of chemicals and the proper disposal technique for each. Two of the techniques were simple: technique 21a was to seal the chemical in a bag and place in the trash, 21b was to pour the chemical down the drain. The rest of the techniques were far more complicated, usually involving prolonged treatment with other chemicals. Actual practice for such chemicals, we learned, was to leave the substances by a sink until someone else unwittingly dumped them down the drain. I since have seen analogous situations in accounting and administration, and every time I recall a room with a vinegary scent.