Posted on 10/25/2011 6:38:17 PM PDT by OL Hickory
These days, if a stuffed animal's plastic eye so much as wiggles, that toy is recalled faster than you can say "class action lawsuit." Back in the day, though, child safety consisted of just getting out of the way and letting natural selection do its thing. If a kid was too dumb to play with a toy the right way, well, he'd just have to learn to get along with one less eye.
That meant molten glass, molten metal, hazardous chemicals -- all were included in toys back then ... on purpose.
(Excerpt) Read more at cracked.com ...
Late to the party, but I wonder how many of the people involved in our space programs started with A. C. Gilbert sets.
Things Of Science was another great introduction. Though on a much less grandiose scale, they reached many.
The Johnny Reb Cannon by Remco—when you needed artillery to get the job done!
I had a Creepy Crawler maker as a kid. We even had the edible goo to make Incredible Edibles.
Man O Man...when we came to town on Saturday I used to make it a point to stop at the Willis Shoe Bar on west main st and stick my feet in the x-ray machine they had there. Quite the shoe store!
LOL! When I was about 12-13 I was mail ordering chemicals for my basement lab. Stuff like hydrocloric acid and concentrated sulfuric acid! I’ve always wondered if the folks who bought our house had to overhaul the basement sink plumbing...lots of acid and other stuff was poured down that sink.
I made the same sad discovery. I haven't trusted TV advertising ever since. Remember when everything was touted as "the best"? Even as a kid, I wondered how *everything* could be "the best". Clearly, someone was lying.
BTW, I survived several chemistry sets, exceeded the recommended portions for homemade gunpowder (by pounds), and had a lead casting outfit. The lead casting skills still come in handy to cast big .45 and .58 caliber slugs.
It’s a good thing that radium emits alpha particles when it decays that are easily blocked by the watches.
We used to buy kits for making M80 firecrackers. We could buy them through the mail.
We also had carbide cannons, which I see are still available. They sure look expensive now, but at least they’re safe.
Once, when carbide and gunpowder weren’t available we took sparklers and filled a long aluminum tube with them. We plugged the back end with a cork and attached the sparkler-filled tube to a block of wood.
Then we lit one the one sparkler that we used as a fuse, it stuck out a couple of inches ahead of the others.
It sparkled. We expected a really cool shower of sparkles when the rest of the bunch lit up.
What we got was a loud ROAR as a six foot long flame blasted out the front of the tube. It looked and sounded like a miniature Saturn rocket engine.
We stood there bug-eyed with our little hearts beating a mile a minute as we stared at a cherry red aluminum tube on a smoking wooden mount on a scorched sidewalk.
While this is funny to remember I wouldn’t recommend anyone try it. It wasn’t the show that we expected and it turned out to be really dangerous. It’s a miracle no one got severely burned.
Iodine was always fun too.
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