3 ms·

Thanks for your story! I am wondering why your teacher would use nitric acid. Wouldn't iron(III) chloride have been much safer in a workshop with children?

• VLM 4y ago
  WRT safety its probably a taste thing. Diluted enough, the nitric could easily be made weaker than your stomach acid but will still eventually dissolve the copper. Its a sort of linear-ish relationship of concentration vs time so you can trade safety for time (as with most industrial processes, LOL) I would think dilute iron chloride would not taste good, but you could probably chug enough to get sick. I believe there would be a similar relationship WRT staining skin and clothes, dilute enough HNO3 would not be TOO much more dangerous than letting kids handle a can of Mt Dew unsupervised, but FeCl in any dilution will stain and damage clothes and skin. If I had to work with maximal concentration solutions of both, I'd agree and definitely prefer the conc FeCl vs fuming nitric.
• Stratoscope 4y ago
  As I recall, it was because I had read up in my chemistry book about what would dissolve copper, and it mentioned nitric acid. So that's what I asked for. Mrs. Spencer's Workshop was a class where you could pick out your own projects. She would get you the materials you needed, let you do your project, and help you if you got stuck. You could say that she was my lab assistant here rather than my teacher. The other safety question for me is why didn't either of us use eye protection!