In this piece for WHYY's Newsworks about updates to the classic kids chemistry set, Chemistry Professor Michelle Francl recalls her childhood experiments.
Any chemist worth her lab coat has a good story of singed eyebrows.
"So my brother was two years younger, he was also a bit of a science nerd, and we read things in Boys' Life and various magazines that would describe experiments, and then we'd try to repeat them," recalls Michelle Francl, a professor at Bryn Mawr College.
"And one of the things we really wanted to do was separate water into hydrogen and oxygen."
So Francl and her brother set up an experiment in their homemade lab--the downstairs bathroom--passing an electric current through the water, then capturing the hydrogen gas in a test tube.
To see if it worked, they stuck a burning ember into the tube.
"It tested positive, and explosively positive, and there was kind of this big whoosh of flame, and my brothers' eyebrows and his little crew cut got singed," she says.
The budding scientists cleaned up their mess, and slunk back upstairs.
"I lived in fear that my mother would notice the singed eyebrows, but with six kids, as long as no one was bleeding, apparently, she didn't notice."
Read more from Francl on her blog The Culture of Chemistry.