Safety Video Diaries: Mike

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Oh, I am so tired. I think I’m beginning to, the high altitude’s beginning to get to me I think. It’s been a good programme, this one, a good challenge there to make a fire extinguisher, and we did it. We did it. And my job was to make an acid, and I’d got several ideas. We could have just gone to a car battery and got the sulphuric acid from that but Jonathan and I decided that we should accept the challenge and we should make our own sulphuric acid for once. It’s the first time we have ever made it in Rough Science, and it’s not that difficult. You have to go out and find some iron pyrites, and you have to heat the pyrites to quite a high temperature, and a good supply of air containing oxygen.

And Jonathan built this wonderful aspirator which sucked air through the apparatus. Now it has to be sucked through at an appropriate rate. If you don’t suck enough air through it, if there’s not enough oxygen in the system, in the reaction, then you’ll get sulphur produced and that’s, we found that was a complicating feature which we had to work round eventually. We did get some yellow solid particles and sulphur vapour produced, but that told us that all we had to do was to increase the flow of oxygen or air through the apparatus and once we’d done that then the reaction went magnificently.

And all we’re doing is the opposite, oddly. It’s a nice complementary exercise to the one that Ellen and Hermione are involved with where they’re trying to, they’re taking the acid in a mine and trying to get rid of it, to neutralise it, whereas I am trying to take iron pyrites and make acid which will then react with the sodium carbonate or bicarbonate, the baking soda, to produce carbon dioxide gas for the fire extinguisher. And they worked like a treat, they really did. I mean it’s, most of the work for me was in the first two days and the third day was fairly easy, I’ve just been sitting around. But it was no doubt a triumph, our fire extinguisher was a triumph and it was very, very funny as well.