I found a book I'd never before heard of, entitled "Henley's Formulas: For Home and Workshop".
It's perhaps the most amazing thing that has come into my possession in the last half decade. It has recipes for the creation of mercury fulminate, horse laxatives, iridescent paper, antiseptics, shampoos, alloys I've never heard of, ink, enamel, jewelers solders and glues, cheese, ceramics of a thousand kinds, razor paste, blasting powder, perfume, analgesics (though not by that name), electroplating directions and acid formulas, dyes, metallic cements, preparation of dissolving catgut sutures, imitation diamonds, and a thousand other things.
It... It's like a book that's been filled with everything that modern people have forgotten how to do in the last 104 years. It's an alchemist's grimoire.
Granted, some of it is wrong, and some of it is dangerously wrong. Red lead is used in their wound ointment. Directions for the metallic cement involve mixing a powdered mixture of a prepared cadmium-tin alloy with 3 times its weight of mercury IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND. It has a recipe for a type of plaster cast that's designed to cause irritated sores in the skin, so that, once the plaster is removed, the sores can be wiped of their tears and "internal maladies" cleansed by "bringing the toxins to surface". Their recipe for red enamel uses oxide of uranium. It's an amazing book, but it's also occasionally frightening. It gives directions for making a mercury fulminate, but neglects to mention exactly how explosively unstable the product is. It notes a recipe for fulminating copper crystals using a mixture of prepared copper and fulminating silver (The recipe for which is, mercifully, absent from the text) or fulminating mercury, but fails to mention that fulminating silver is so unstable that it is more likely to explode when touched than to mix. It does, occasionally, give warnings like "Always bear in mind that sulphur and chlorate of potassium explode violently if rubbed together", but that's it as far as warnings go.
It's one of the most frighteningly joyful things I've ever owned, and it fills me with the need to build a laboratory/workshop.
EDIT: Actually, I found a better example of the kind of warning found in the book, on its section on pyrotechnic magic. "If the lighted material shows a tendency to burn the mouth, do not attempt to drag it out quickly, but simply shut the lips tight and breathe through the nose, and the fire must go out instantly. In the Human Gas Trick, where a flame 10 to 15 inches long is blown from the mouth, be careful after lighting the gas, to continue to exhale the breath. When you desire the gas to go out, simply shut the lips tight and hold the breath for a few seconds. In this trick, until the gas is well out, any inhalation is likely to be attended with the most serious results."
Yes, book, I quite agree that painful fiery severe internal burns/death does qualify as a 'most serious result'. I think, however, that you might be understating things.
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Topic: [MILK] There were 12 eggs here what did you do with them? (Happy thread?!) (Read 16184366 times)