yeah so this is a bit of a blast from
the past so some time ago one of my
colleagues uh made a comment about zinc
being boring and I thought we'd take
that comment and examine it in a little
bit more detail and what I could show
that was actually zinc is quite exciting
because you can use it as a basis for
what is basically a pocket flamethrower
woo now when we did this experiment
there was a beautiful yellow flame came
out of this but I'm told and I know from
Reading around that actually this flame
should be blue and we think that it's
yellow because I did it with this
syringe here which has we think sodium
contaminants that get into the flame and
hence make it yellow and we'd really
like to see this blue color because this
was the description of it the very first
time this compound was made over a 100
years ago and so today we're going to
try this with this syringe now this
syringe is made out of plastic and the
idea is that there shouldn't be any
contamination from this in the flame and
together with some of the new very high
speed cameras that we've got access to
we're hoping we can get a glimpse of
this blue flash in the
flame this is dial zinc in this syringe
and as you can see it looks harmless
yeah it looks could be water for anyone
would know okay here we
go I'd say we got some blue
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so up to about 9 00 oh here we go
awesome yeah you can see bits of blue
well we could see blue so that's the
most important thing what are you doing
now I'm going to do it again my passion
for dialc comes from the the the phrase
we use is pyrophoric pyrophoric means it
spontaneously catches fire in
air
nice there we go there's a bit of blue
just a few drops yeah you see when the
oxygen exposure to the droplets is
maximized the blue color is maximized
yeah my guess is as we see more and more
material it look whiter and whiter yes
which it does and you course you see
blue right on the
edges this compound was first discovered
by Franklin it describes in his original
notes how he had a glass vial full of
this compound and he cut the top off and
put a few drops of water in and he says
at that point I observed a spontaneous
blue flame about a yard long um in fact
actually that's not true because I've
rerun Franklin's experiment and what
happens is that you generate a massive
cloud of steam so what I think happened
is that Franklin bottled it he put a
couple of drops in saw this huge
quantity of White Steam Vapor coming out
and at that point he just threw the
flask away from him and as you've seen
it's the contact with the air that
generates the blue frame so he suddenly
got a massive increase in surface area I
think and that's what led to the the the
beautiful blue flame now I think it's
time for the control experiment where we
go back to the original glass syringe
and see if there's a genuine difference
or
not well I never blue in that one as
well
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I'm a little surprised by that and I'm
starting to wonder if the last time I
did it simply squirted it out too
quickly cuz I think what we've
definitely seen today is the slower you
release this material out into the world
the better the chance of seeing the blue
scientist in me thinks we need to do
some more experiments Bray come back
Zink come back perhaps a disco or
something like that so you can see that
again a discharge a high potential
discharge is going across this basically
your body can't metabolize copper
properly it's actually inherited disease