"I was old enough to realize I had won a dice roll and never played with "I was old enough to realize I had won a dice roll and never played with gunpowder again."

Right, fortunately most of us survive such experiences a little the wiser. If you read my post below then you'll see we officially made black powder as part of our school chemistry curriculum. I've often thought that the reason for its inclusion was twofold, the first being that it made chemistry fun as bangs and pops amuse most kids, but second that it was an excuse to control the environment in an era when kids had much more ready access to dangerous chemicals than nowadays.

By explaining the dangers of making black powder such as ensuring one mixes components in a mortar and pestle of a type that cannot generate sparks, mixing one's ingredients slightly damp then drying later and preparation in small batches, etc. then kids get the safety message early on.

The safety message was never lost on me. As I mentioned in a HN post ages ago, I unofficially made nitroglycerin in the school lab one lunchtime - right, that was never on the curriculum - but I reckon I did so safely. First I was careful to inform myself of the facts. Not only was I scrupulosity careful with the temperatures and the ratios of the critical ingredients but the quantity that I made was just sufficient to prove that I could actually make it. To this end, with the exception of acid-neutralizing sodium carbonate soln., I measured the crucial chemicals out strictly in eyedropper amounts - as that was the practical minimum I could make, so I ended up with only a drop or so of the product (which, I did eventually make go bang).

Nothing went wrong because we were constantly drilled in safety. The point is safety was always stressed in our chemistry classes by our teachers. Such instruction wasn't only done when making black powder but also with any dangerous process and or production of dangerous chemicals, for example, poisonous hydrogen sulfide had to be prepared in a Kipp generator in the fume cupboard - with no exceptions whatsoever. Essentially, good lab practice was an essential part of our coursework.

We had access to many dangerous chemicals that you'd never see in school labs today, mercury - pints of it, carcinogenic benzene, hydrofluoric acid, metallic sodium and potassium, uranium (as disks about twice as thick as quarter), radioactive alpha and beta sources and we prepared fuming aqua regia to dissolve tiny bits of gold leaf and so on but we were always taught safety measures before we handled them.

(What horrifies me these days is that the modern approach to safety is to simply remove or ban these dangerous substances altogether, especially so from classrooms.

By not exposing kids and even university students to them under safe, strictly controlled conditions, we're breeding a race of people that are fearful of anything that's classified as a chemical. We've now a population that's disproportionately fearful of all chemicals and this is not helpful when it comes to having to distinguish between what's truly dangerous and what requires, say, careful handling/disposal.

For example, these days, the very mention of mercury or any of its compounds to the GP and you'll get almost the same reaction or level of horror no matter what form or chemical formulation that the element comes in. I cannot think of a better example of how potentially dangerous this fear without a sense of proportion can be than with mercury. At one end of the spectrum we've metallic mercury, a comparatively dangerous metal, but not so dangerous in that we've used it in amalgam form in our teeth for centuries and the population is still here alive and kicking but at the other extreme we've dimethylmercury which is just about the most grotesque and dangerous of chemicals known.

Overly isolating the population from chemicals and stopping students from having early hands on experience to potentially dangerous ones (no, not that one) at school and university under safe controlled conditions leads to this loss of a sense of proportionality. In my opinion, this is not a helpful state for society to be in.)