Up in smoke
Nothing to do with cigarettes, but lots to do with smoke. I will take you back to the mid nineties, and the heady days of (highly) experimental chemistry sessions.... (academic chemistry, not the mind-altering substance type!)

I had recently finished my PhD and was embarking on my first post-doc contract, and my mate M was doing his PhD with me on the same project. We had to use a bit of benzene in a particular preparation, which was a bit of an issue, as we had to sign out what we needed etc what with it being a bit dangerous.

However, once we'd finished with it we then had a disposal problem. Just what do you do with 100ml of carcinogenic hydrocarbon? Well, the official line is to bottle it up, label it and phone up the safety office to have them collect it. But this was too much hassle and not enough fun, and we were young and stupid.

We reasoned that we could effect our own benzene disposal by pyrolytic means...benzene's a flammable hydrocarbon after all. So we poured some into a shallow vessel in the (new!) fume cupboard which we used in the lab, and set light to it.

The disposal of the benzene was a success, insofar as it burned it all away. What we had failed to take into account though was the very high carbon concentration of the molecule (it's C₆H₆) which results in incomplete combustion. In layman's terms, it produces one hell of a lot of thick, black, sticky, sooty smoke.

Which deposited itself all over the nice white interior of our fume cupboard.

We spent the next hour cleaning it off with solvents and soapy rags, and probably exposed ourselves to more noxious and carcinogenic compounds from the soot than we would have if we'd snorted the benzene.

We didn't try it again.

Apologies for length and whatever else. I'm at work today, and bored because no-one is posting on b3ta! I'd post the one about my sodium/ether fire, but there was no smoke from it....
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Mon 24 Mar 2008, 11:23, 1 reply)

Ahh, the memories...
One of our Spanish postgrads decided to dump several grams of LiAlH4 into ether in one go. Stupid enough, but then he tried to put it out with a fire blanket.
The cock burnt hands somewhat.
( Colonel Boris "...a desperate Buzzfeed imitation...", Mon 24 Mar 2008, 19:47, closed)