NOTES ON
http://comp.uark.edu/~dsears/photos/1966%20chemastron/
I fell in love with chemistry when I was about 14, after astronomy, and space. These have been my life companions for longer than I have been married. I think that the Periodic Table is one of humanities greatest accomplishments. When I started playing with chemicals, it was in the cellar of 12 Hart Street by the light of a paraffin lamp. It was a dark dirty place, the walls covered in white wash and coal dust everywhere. When smoke came through the floorboards of our front room, Mum and Dad made a trip to Paddock Wood and bought me a garden shed for 70 pounds. It came in six or seven pieces a few days later and was quickly assembled. The prefabrication also made it easy to move, and we moved it many times.
That garden shed was one of my favorite places to be. It was my space, and it was independence. It had a wonderful smell of pine that it never really lost. I collected glassware and chemicals, I made displays, I worked some of the reactions described in the chemistry class. I loved to make esters because of their smells. I loved to make transition metal salts because of their colors. I made gunpowder and mock rocket fuels. I studied for O levels, and then A levels, in that shed. I applied for admission to university in that shed. It was a comfortable place to be at a time of stress.
When we entered the sixth form, we decided to build a telescope. It was a labor of love, but it was an enormous labor. It never worked very well, but it put to work our many diverse skills, some learned for the purpose, wood work for the structure, optics for the mirror grinding, metal work for the mirror and lens mounts, chemistry for the silvering. We wrote to Patrick Moore who wrote a hand-written reply referring us to a friend who was more knowledgeable. TV personalities do not write hand-written replies these days. After we left I took the telescope with me intending to work on it more. I bumped into the physics teacher a year or two later who asked for it back, or at least the cost of materials, but I never responded. It seemed to me that our love and labor for the project gave us greater rights than his, and he had never been especially helpful.
Go to photos on an early interest in space