Mike Holderness remembers salad days of recreational chemistry, and asks where we'd be without rebel-geeks

Teenage chemists from hell

Do you remember the Atlanta logic-bomb? The physical blast in the Olympic city killed two and maimed more; and it marked pandemic status for a bug in newspaper systems. It seemed that whenever a reporter typed "bomb", the phrase "bomb, constructed using information readily available on the Internet" appeared in print. This is more likely to be a bug in wetware than in software -- but, pace Richard Dawkins's infectious idea of infectious "memes", it scarcely matters how it is spread.

Information on how to make bombs is indeed readily available through the internet. It's also available by post, and from your local public library.

As it happens, it was on the day of the Atlanta bomb that this author stumbled across bomb-making manuals on the net for the first time -- after ten years of intensive use of the internet and its predecessors. I did not download the offered file. I already know how to make a bomb -- as do, I would guess, a significant proportion of you reading this. I worked it out for myself, with a little help from my friends.

That was long enough ago that the phrase "boys will be boys" comes to mind as explanation. Things are better now. Combine Riot Grrrls with the successes of Women into Science and Engineering, and today's male adolescent rebel-geek is, bless 'im, likely to have a wider range of conversations with The Opposite Sex.

And where would we be without adolescent rebel-geeks? Not here, in many cases. Maybe well-adjusted, law-abiding and working bitterly in advertising -- but with rather fewer innovations to advertise.

If you think about it, adolescence without rebellion is faintly spooky -- and adolescence without curiosity about the forbidden is frankly terrifying.

Way back then, the Oxford & Cambridge chemistry syllabus was, to four or five of us, unchallenging. As nasty fourteen-year-olds, H2S became tedious. We looked up The World's Smelliest Chemical in the Guinness Book of Records, and worked out how to make it in the milligram quantities needed to be stinky three classrooms away. Then we made a stab at industrial-scale production of ethyl mercaptan.

We were unaware that the internet was being born that same year, in then-faraway California. (We did, just a little later, discover packet switching, while exploring the theoretical possibility of pirate television.) The moral panics of our time were about the Little Red Schoolbook (yes, we had illegal copies -- we could hardly hold our heads up in public without) and anarchist pamphlets "readily available" from a post office box in Orkney.

Our Bibles, though, were the Chemical Rubber Handbook, and whatever we could find on toxicology in the public library.

We had a passing, and mostly theoretical, interest in how to make things go bang. Nitrogen tri-iodide was fun -- and a genuine oral tradition, passed down the generations at a school whose window-sills crackled in the summer sunlight.

At fifteen, we were frustrated by a teacher who assured our geek gang, en bloc, that we were too young to be told what "reduction" and "oxidation" really meant to a chemist. So we re-invented the IRA's "Co-op mix". Nitroglycerine was boring, text-book stuff. Fortunately, there wasn't anything around that made us quite angry enough to go through the ethical and organisational hassle of blowing it up -- much harder work than the chemistry.

Our tour de force came after we read Huxley's Doors of Perception -- then compulsory for 16-year-olds. We looked at the mescaline molecule, and systematically worked backwards until we found a precursor with an industrial use -- one, in fact, that we could reasonably buy in litre quantities -- listed in the faithful Chemical Rubber Handbook. We came up with a plausible, and reasonably direct, synthetic route. We couldn't work out the yield or an assay, though, so we never made any. It should go without saying that we learned more about organic chemistry through this collaboration than we could possibly have done from official lessons.

How dangerous were we? The less-pathologically-curious of our chemical cohort were having snowball fights with loose asbestos fibres -- then standard issue in the lab. It fell to the aspiring teenage chemists from hell to demand to be let out of the room, now, because it was dangerous... and then to leave unilaterally in the face of adult disbelief.

To my knowledge, none of us grew up into terrorists or drug barons. One pupated into a fully-fledged nerd, with a conscience, and spent years networking Nicaragua. Another set out to become an Egyptologist.

We were unusual, but not that exceptional. Other readers may well have stories to tell -- but not in front of their teenagers, obviously. Is responsible adulthood defined by the invention of an innocent childhood?

Many fewer journalists than New Scientist readers have the faintest recognition that paper exercises in chemistry could be fun. This may be sufficient explanation for the widespread belief that whichever psychopath bombed Atlanta must have been acting on instructions from the wicked internet. It's the only possible rational explanation for the tabloids' sporadic "evil genius" obsession.

Whenever terrorists come up with anything more technically challenging than off-the-shelf mayhem, there has to be a professor-gone-bad lurking in the wings. Take the wonderment over the use of video-recorder timers in bombs... and get real. Anyone who built anything from a Clive Sinclair kit can say to themselves "I want to make something happen in eight days' time. What do I see around me that does that? Oh look, the lid's come off the video... this wire goes to the tape-head servo..." The hardest part is working out how to set it.

And much the hardest and most interesting question is not how people think such things, but why a few do them.

The biggest problem, then, with dangerous information being "readily available" is that it might deprive adolescents of the educational benefits of working it out for themselves.