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As a synthetic chemist, it really surprised me to see carbon tetrachloride featured prominently in one of the pictures on kickstarter. The use of this chemical

As a synthetic chemist, it really surprised me to see carbon tetrachloride featured prominently in one of the pictures on kickstarter. The use of this chemical is essentially nonexistent anymore due to its toxicity, carcinogenic properties, and danger to the environment. I'm all for letting kids learn with all manner of chemicals, but why bother with one that both academia and industry have essentially deprecated?

FrankenPC 13y ago
The only thing I saw that would be of any interest is reproducing the Appel reaction. I agree with you, not necessary. I wonder if the inventor is including this simply because it more closely mimics the legacy chemistry sets. You know, for collectors.
- solarmist 13y ago
  Yeah, I think he wants to reproduce the original kit as closely as possible, even if some chemicals have been discarded in modern uses.
  - sanskritabelt 13y ago
    If one weren't going for nostalgia, what chemicals would one put in a modern chemistry kit?
    - solarmist 13y ago
      I think it's would be mostly the same with just a couple substitution. Even though some of the chemicals aren't used anymore and are considered harmful overall that doesn't mean they don't belong in a chemistry set for learning purposes. I'm just thinking of the first time I saw a piece of sodium dropped in water. So I can imagine that just because its a waste at the professional and real world level doesn't mean it's necessarily a waste at the toy level. But as for this specific chemical I have no idea if this is true about it or not.
      - VLM 13y ago
        "a piece of magnesium dropped in water" You probably mean sodium for the first, or vinegar for the second. Although neither are harmful the way carbon tet is. As far as letting noobs play with dangerous stuff for training (or maybe Darwinian selection?) thinking back to my undergrad years the worst stuff we messed with for training purposes was various ionization states of chromium, lead, and mercury. We did at least have multiple marked hazmat buckets, didn't just flush down the drain. That was a long time ago and that kind of stuff might not be acceptable labwork in 2013. If you ever get to work with aqueous chromium some of the ionization states are beautiful. Incredibly toxic, sure, but you can see why people wanted to use them in paints.
        timr 13y ago
        Carbon tet isn't that bad. For generations, it was in everything from refrigerators to cleaning supplies, and we all came out OK. The big risks come when you huff it, which people used to do because it gives you a high. It just also happens to melt your liver. But if your standard for danger is "unsafe when huffed", then most things in this set are pretty nasty. It's all a matter of perspective.
        bitbiter 13y ago
        You make a good point, but there is a faint odor of survivorship bias in "we all came out OK".
    - VLM 13y ago
      It would probably look a heck of a lot like a Thames and Kosmos product. The thing about chemistry, is people who aren't chemists think its all about randomly mixing solutions, so the more chemicals the better. The actual metric for doing interesting reactions is the number of tools, measurement devices, and apparatus you have. The actual chemicals are almost secondary. I really enjoyed my undergrad quant class. So a "kit" that would entertain me would involve a ridiculously precision balance / scale, and a spectrophotometer, and a chemistry desiccant / dehydrator vessel thingy and several burettes and graduated cylinders. And the usual array of glassware. Vacuum sep funnel, distillation set, that kind of thing. Oh and I got a huge kick out of electrochemical machinery, I mean at least a precision pH meter but more advanced stuff would be cool. I'm not asking for an NMR or a FTIR spectrometer but who knows what a devoted makerspace could pull off. Given that kind of gear listed above, I could find chemicals laying around a perfectly normal kitchen or basement to entertain me. Number and type of chemical is a bad metric. Its like saying the best CPU to program on is the one with the largest instruction set, so a IBM360 is precisely exactly 9.1244 times "better" than a PDP-8. Well it just doesn't work that way. On the other hand a metric of tools and apparatus actually is a pretty good metric.
      - solarmist 13y ago
        How much of that is realistic for including in a set designed for beginners who have zero to little formal chemistry experience though and have a budget in line with that.
        VLM 13y ago
        I see you're getting my point that sets designed for beginners are not teaching chemistry. Its like giving a kid who wants to be a chef an easy bake oven and some prepak mixes. It technically involves cooking, so ... Or giving a kid who wants to learn about computers an ipod. It does have a CPU inside, doesn't it? I basically listed what I remember of my lab drawer contents from undergrad quant class. I could see having a lot of fun with less stuff. Another aspect of hacking / startup / makerspace type activities is making a moderately crude instrument. For example a spectrophotometer with bad but usable specs could probably be made as an arduino shield using a light tight box, an incandescent bulb, a log converter feeding the A/D of the arduino, and a glass prism sitting on a servo controlled by the arduino. And some software. Or instead of burrets, a digital model using a syringe (no needle needed) and a screw and nut hooked up to a stepper motor driven by arduino. So given a syringe of 1M vinegar or whatever you can squirt out any precision volume. A PH meter shield for an arduino sounds too simple and obvious to even mention. There are more elaborate potentiometer systems where you measure the voltage required to shove a certain current thru a solution and so forth, stuff I don't remember as well. As far as budget goes, I don't think you can do "real" chemistry without at least a decent scale and some kind of volumetric measurement tool (a grad cylinder if nothing else? A set of volumetric flasks?) If you insist on "chemistry without numbers" you may as well just mix different colors of kool aide powder for all you'll learn.
refurb 13y ago
Agreed. Carbon tetrachloride is commonly used to induce liver injury because it does it so reliably. Also, it's expensive as hell now due to the ozone-depleting regulations. Last I saw it was over $100/L. The rest of the chemicals look pretty innocuous [1]. The KMnO4 has some hazards associated with it, but the risk isn't that high. [1]http://www.hms-beagle.com/PDFs/BenchMark_Legacy_Chemicals.pdf http://www.hms-beagle.com/PDFs/BenchMark_Legacy_Chemicals.pd...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Pxtl 13y ago
... I totally read "Carbon Tetrafluoride" and was really confused for a second since CF4 is awesome.
ballard 13y ago
Yup. As lovable as John is and how cool the product seems at first... The truth is that the business model is extremely vulnerable on many fronts including: liability, copy-ability and efficient manufacturing. The first suburbanite kid that may choose any of these fun adventures including: building a bomb, burns down the house with thermite or just turns their parents backyard into a superfund site will have their lawyers put John throughly out of business with legal costs and damages that no one will ever offer this kind of product again. [1] And that is before the CSPC decides which wheel of punishment to spin today. And, I don't see a fume hood; or solid and liquid waste disposal instructions. The next point is I don't hear about any design patents, so Joe's Evil Scientist Chemistry Set could be produced. Even if someone doesn't personally believe in patents, they still exist and are very much enforced. If John gets thousands of orders how, when and where take on all the growing pains, not just cutting out panels. Unless John is an industrial process engineering genius, Asian manufacturers could do this for 1/10 of cost and in 1/5 the time. Conclusion: All the best. Good luck, John. [1] http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/issues/2007/december/thechemistrysetgeneration.asp http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/issues/2007/december/thech...
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  >If John gets thousands of orders how, when and where take on all the growing pains, not just cutting out panels. Unless John is an industrial process engineering genius, Asian manufacturers could do this for 1/10 of cost and in 1/5 the time. If the point isn't to strike it rich, but rather to spread knowledge; John might consider that a quite satisfactory result.
- CamperBob2 13y ago
  I don't think an ounce of carbon tetrachloride is going to turn anyone's back yard into a Superfund site. And if you understand what he's trying to do here, you'd understand that for other people to duplicate his effort would be seen as success.
- lambda 13y ago
  Why does he need to have a "business model"? This isn't a startup. This appears to be essentially a hobby business; something that can be sustainable for a single person and maybe a few employees but not something that can scale considerably. By using CNC routing to cut out the boxes, it can scale beyond what he could cut by hand, and thus he can offer a Kickstarter, but this doesn't really appear to be something that he's intending to scale up beyond the Kickstarter, just a way for him to be able to sell some of his sets to people who wouldn't be able to go there in person and buy them directly from him. The liability concern is greater. He can personally talk to those who walk into his store about safety; less so those who order this over the internet. No one is going to be building a bomb however; all of these samples are in quantities of 30 ml or less. That's less than the 3 liquid ounces you're allowed to bring on a plane, and that limit was set because you can't actually build anything all that destructive with only a few ounces of material. I'm not sure how you are determining that there are no solid or liquid disposal instructions; did he post the contents of everything that will be included? Who cares about patents here? He's shipping a chemistry set that is identical to one from 1936, plus a couple more that he thinks are useful. How are you going to patent that? It's just a collection of chemicals, and an instruction manual. The patents on producing all of these materials have long since expired. There's nothing patentable here. And sure, other manufacturers could do this for a fraction of what he's doing. As you point out, there is some liability concern; liability concerns are greater for a larger manufacturer than for him, doing this as part of his hobby business, merely because they are a bigger target. Asian manufacturers would probably have a hell of a time getting this past customs. And again, who cares? If someone else produces an awesome chemistry set, great! The whole point is to teach about chemistry, and get kids engaged by allowing them to experiment and explore rather than swaddling them and protecting them. The point is not to get rich. Despite what you may think reading about lots of startups on Hacker News, some people just desire to do a good job, not to build a scalable business that makes them filthy rich. So, the two main concerns I see are liability, and his ability to scale if the Kickstarter is wildly more popular than he anticipated. Even if CNC machining the case cuts down on a lot of the labor, assembly and finishing will take time. However, I don't see this as being particularly more risky than the average Kickstarter; in this case, he's already been making these for a while for sale in person, so it's far past the prototype stage that many products do a Kickstarter at.
dnautics 13y ago
and this whole time I thought it was deprecated because it allows you to cheat with yield since it's undetectable on 1H NMRs.
lambda 13y ago
I think it's because they are being completist, including all of the chemicals from the original A. C. Gilbert chemistry set from the 1930s (plus a few extras that they think are particularly useful). If you take out carbon tetrachloride, where do you stop? Lots of these are considered unsafe, and are well labelled as being poisonous.
Bob_Sheep 13y ago
What would the carbon tet even be used for? I can't think of a time when I ever used it during my chemisty degree, so for most things it could probably be replaced with another more sensible solvent.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  For one thing: It was sold as a fire extinguisher agent both in pressurize-able canisters, and in glass bulbs as "fire grenades" and to be hung from the ceiling by lead or babbit fuses. http://imgur.com/CWpr8Xa http://imgur.com/CWpr8Xa http://www.oldfirestuff.com/FyrFyterCarbonTetSalesmanSampleorTrainingCut-awayAntiquefireExtinguisher.htm http://www.oldfirestuff.com/FyrFyterCarbonTetSalesmanSampleo...
alphaBetaGamma 13y ago
You should raise this issue to the guy doing this kickstarter project, and not only comment about it in HN. In fact, I will email him if you don't do it. I would rather you (or an other chemist) do it as you probably know much more about this than me, and can maybe suggest an alternative.
Florin_Andrei 13y ago
It's a decent solvent. Growing up in the '80s as a chemistry nutcase, I did quite a few experiments with CCl4. My liver is still alive and kicking. :)

FrankenPC 13y ago

The only thing I saw that would be of any interest is reproducing the Appel reaction. I agree with you, not necessary. I wonder if the inventor is including this simply because it more closely mimics the legacy chemistry sets. You know, for collectors.

solarmist 13y ago
Yeah, I think he wants to reproduce the original kit as closely as possible, even if some chemicals have been discarded in modern uses.
- sanskritabelt 13y ago
  If one weren't going for nostalgia, what chemicals would one put in a modern chemistry kit?
  - solarmist 13y ago
    I think it's would be mostly the same with just a couple substitution. Even though some of the chemicals aren't used anymore and are considered harmful overall that doesn't mean they don't belong in a chemistry set for learning purposes. I'm just thinking of the first time I saw a piece of sodium dropped in water. So I can imagine that just because its a waste at the professional and real world level doesn't mean it's necessarily a waste at the toy level. But as for this specific chemical I have no idea if this is true about it or not.
    - VLM 13y ago
      "a piece of magnesium dropped in water" You probably mean sodium for the first, or vinegar for the second. Although neither are harmful the way carbon tet is. As far as letting noobs play with dangerous stuff for training (or maybe Darwinian selection?) thinking back to my undergrad years the worst stuff we messed with for training purposes was various ionization states of chromium, lead, and mercury. We did at least have multiple marked hazmat buckets, didn't just flush down the drain. That was a long time ago and that kind of stuff might not be acceptable labwork in 2013. If you ever get to work with aqueous chromium some of the ionization states are beautiful. Incredibly toxic, sure, but you can see why people wanted to use them in paints.
      - timr 13y ago
        Carbon tet isn't that bad. For generations, it was in everything from refrigerators to cleaning supplies, and we all came out OK. The big risks come when you huff it, which people used to do because it gives you a high. It just also happens to melt your liver. But if your standard for danger is "unsafe when huffed", then most things in this set are pretty nasty. It's all a matter of perspective.
        bitbiter 13y ago
        You make a good point, but there is a faint odor of survivorship bias in "we all came out OK".
  - VLM 13y ago
    It would probably look a heck of a lot like a Thames and Kosmos product. The thing about chemistry, is people who aren't chemists think its all about randomly mixing solutions, so the more chemicals the better. The actual metric for doing interesting reactions is the number of tools, measurement devices, and apparatus you have. The actual chemicals are almost secondary. I really enjoyed my undergrad quant class. So a "kit" that would entertain me would involve a ridiculously precision balance / scale, and a spectrophotometer, and a chemistry desiccant / dehydrator vessel thingy and several burettes and graduated cylinders. And the usual array of glassware. Vacuum sep funnel, distillation set, that kind of thing. Oh and I got a huge kick out of electrochemical machinery, I mean at least a precision pH meter but more advanced stuff would be cool. I'm not asking for an NMR or a FTIR spectrometer but who knows what a devoted makerspace could pull off. Given that kind of gear listed above, I could find chemicals laying around a perfectly normal kitchen or basement to entertain me. Number and type of chemical is a bad metric. Its like saying the best CPU to program on is the one with the largest instruction set, so a IBM360 is precisely exactly 9.1244 times "better" than a PDP-8. Well it just doesn't work that way. On the other hand a metric of tools and apparatus actually is a pretty good metric.
    - solarmist 13y ago
      How much of that is realistic for including in a set designed for beginners who have zero to little formal chemistry experience though and have a budget in line with that.
      - VLM 13y ago
        I see you're getting my point that sets designed for beginners are not teaching chemistry. Its like giving a kid who wants to be a chef an easy bake oven and some prepak mixes. It technically involves cooking, so ... Or giving a kid who wants to learn about computers an ipod. It does have a CPU inside, doesn't it? I basically listed what I remember of my lab drawer contents from undergrad quant class. I could see having a lot of fun with less stuff. Another aspect of hacking / startup / makerspace type activities is making a moderately crude instrument. For example a spectrophotometer with bad but usable specs could probably be made as an arduino shield using a light tight box, an incandescent bulb, a log converter feeding the A/D of the arduino, and a glass prism sitting on a servo controlled by the arduino. And some software. Or instead of burrets, a digital model using a syringe (no needle needed) and a screw and nut hooked up to a stepper motor driven by arduino. So given a syringe of 1M vinegar or whatever you can squirt out any precision volume. A PH meter shield for an arduino sounds too simple and obvious to even mention. There are more elaborate potentiometer systems where you measure the voltage required to shove a certain current thru a solution and so forth, stuff I don't remember as well. As far as budget goes, I don't think you can do "real" chemistry without at least a decent scale and some kind of volumetric measurement tool (a grad cylinder if nothing else? A set of volumetric flasks?) If you insist on "chemistry without numbers" you may as well just mix different colors of kool aide powder for all you'll learn.

refurb 13y ago

Agreed. Carbon tetrachloride is commonly used to induce liver injury because it does it so reliably. Also, it's expensive as hell now due to the ozone-depleting regulations. Last I saw it was over $100/L. The rest of the chemicals look pretty innocuous [1]. The KMnO4 has some hazards associated with it, but the risk isn't that high. [1]http://www.hms-beagle.com/PDFs/BenchMark_Legacy_Chemicals.pdf http://www.hms-beagle.com/PDFs/BenchMark_Legacy_Chemicals.pd...

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

Pxtl 13y ago

... I totally read "Carbon Tetrafluoride" and was really confused for a second since CF4 is awesome.

ballard 13y ago

Yup. As lovable as John is and how cool the product seems at first... The truth is that the business model is extremely vulnerable on many fronts including: liability, copy-ability and efficient manufacturing. The first suburbanite kid that may choose any of these fun adventures including: building a bomb, burns down the house with thermite or just turns their parents backyard into a superfund site will have their lawyers put John throughly out of business with legal costs and damages that no one will ever offer this kind of product again. [1] And that is before the CSPC decides which wheel of punishment to spin today. And, I don't see a fume hood; or solid and liquid waste disposal instructions. The next point is I don't hear about any design patents, so Joe's Evil Scientist Chemistry Set could be produced. Even if someone doesn't personally believe in patents, they still exist and are very much enforced. If John gets thousands of orders how, when and where take on all the growing pains, not just cutting out panels. Unless John is an industrial process engineering genius, Asian manufacturers could do this for 1/10 of cost and in 1/5 the time. Conclusion: All the best. Good luck, John. [1] http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/issues/2007/december/thechemistrysetgeneration.asp http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/issues/2007/december/thech...

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
>If John gets thousands of orders how, when and where take on all the growing pains, not just cutting out panels. Unless John is an industrial process engineering genius, Asian manufacturers could do this for 1/10 of cost and in 1/5 the time. If the point isn't to strike it rich, but rather to spread knowledge; John might consider that a quite satisfactory result.
CamperBob2 13y ago
I don't think an ounce of carbon tetrachloride is going to turn anyone's back yard into a Superfund site. And if you understand what he's trying to do here, you'd understand that for other people to duplicate his effort would be seen as success.
lambda 13y ago
Why does he need to have a "business model"? This isn't a startup. This appears to be essentially a hobby business; something that can be sustainable for a single person and maybe a few employees but not something that can scale considerably. By using CNC routing to cut out the boxes, it can scale beyond what he could cut by hand, and thus he can offer a Kickstarter, but this doesn't really appear to be something that he's intending to scale up beyond the Kickstarter, just a way for him to be able to sell some of his sets to people who wouldn't be able to go there in person and buy them directly from him. The liability concern is greater. He can personally talk to those who walk into his store about safety; less so those who order this over the internet. No one is going to be building a bomb however; all of these samples are in quantities of 30 ml or less. That's less than the 3 liquid ounces you're allowed to bring on a plane, and that limit was set because you can't actually build anything all that destructive with only a few ounces of material. I'm not sure how you are determining that there are no solid or liquid disposal instructions; did he post the contents of everything that will be included? Who cares about patents here? He's shipping a chemistry set that is identical to one from 1936, plus a couple more that he thinks are useful. How are you going to patent that? It's just a collection of chemicals, and an instruction manual. The patents on producing all of these materials have long since expired. There's nothing patentable here. And sure, other manufacturers could do this for a fraction of what he's doing. As you point out, there is some liability concern; liability concerns are greater for a larger manufacturer than for him, doing this as part of his hobby business, merely because they are a bigger target. Asian manufacturers would probably have a hell of a time getting this past customs. And again, who cares? If someone else produces an awesome chemistry set, great! The whole point is to teach about chemistry, and get kids engaged by allowing them to experiment and explore rather than swaddling them and protecting them. The point is not to get rich. Despite what you may think reading about lots of startups on Hacker News, some people just desire to do a good job, not to build a scalable business that makes them filthy rich. So, the two main concerns I see are liability, and his ability to scale if the Kickstarter is wildly more popular than he anticipated. Even if CNC machining the case cuts down on a lot of the labor, assembly and finishing will take time. However, I don't see this as being particularly more risky than the average Kickstarter; in this case, he's already been making these for a while for sale in person, so it's far past the prototype stage that many products do a Kickstarter at.

dnautics 13y ago

and this whole time I thought it was deprecated because it allows you to cheat with yield since it's undetectable on 1H NMRs.

lambda 13y ago

I think it's because they are being completist, including all of the chemicals from the original A. C. Gilbert chemistry set from the 1930s (plus a few extras that they think are particularly useful). If you take out carbon tetrachloride, where do you stop? Lots of these are considered unsafe, and are well labelled as being poisonous.

Bob_Sheep 13y ago

What would the carbon tet even be used for? I can't think of a time when I ever used it during my chemisty degree, so for most things it could probably be replaced with another more sensible solvent.

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
For one thing: It was sold as a fire extinguisher agent both in pressurize-able canisters, and in glass bulbs as "fire grenades" and to be hung from the ceiling by lead or babbit fuses. http://imgur.com/CWpr8Xa http://imgur.com/CWpr8Xa http://www.oldfirestuff.com/FyrFyterCarbonTetSalesmanSampleorTrainingCut-awayAntiquefireExtinguisher.htm http://www.oldfirestuff.com/FyrFyterCarbonTetSalesmanSampleo...

alphaBetaGamma 13y ago

You should raise this issue to the guy doing this kickstarter project, and not only comment about it in HN. In fact, I will email him if you don't do it. I would rather you (or an other chemist) do it as you probably know much more about this than me, and can maybe suggest an alternative.

Florin_Andrei 13y ago

It's a decent solvent. Growing up in the '80s as a chemistry nutcase, I did quite a few experiments with CCl4. My liver is still alive and kicking. :)