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My best friend in high school was Griff. The following is a recounting of one of our many misadventures. This occurred in Monroe , Louisiana .
In 1957, the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik. It was a little basketball-sized satellite that orbited the Earth and sent back beeps by radio. It was pretty much useless other than that, but it stirred this country into a frenzy of playing catch-up. Suddenly rockets were the In Thing. Science education of the youth became a number-one priority.
A group of geeks at my high school organized the Monroe Amateur Rocket Society which had a highly appropriate space-age acronym (M.A.R.S.). They were engaged in building rockets fueled by powdered aluminum, most likely the same stuff that went into many firecrackers, and announced to the newspaper that they would be launching their creation in the near future.
We were a rather rebellious pair of geeks. We were left out of all the excitement of rocket-building and launching, but not for long!
Griff told me one day that he had discovered the formula for making gunpowder. I think it was hardly a secret and was probably no more difficult to locate than looking into the unabridged dictionary that resided in the school library, but Griff was the one who looked for it and found it. He told me about this momentous discovery. It was a rather simple formula: Potassium nitrate (saltpeter), sulfur and charcoal - all in specific proportions.
The ingredients were readily available. I had no problem finding the sulfur and charcoal and Griff came up with a source for potassium nitrate. We were in business! We'd soon be constructing our own rocket, powered by our newly-produced gunpowder and launching ourselves into the intellectual spotlight.
We assembled all the constituents and went to Griff's father's radio shop to combine them into the magic elixir. Well, we knew the ingredients alright, but little else about how to combine them or how to measure the three substances correctly. In our teen-inspired haste, we just decided to put the formula together by guesswork and hope for the best.
I think the real problem was mainly the charcoal. It was just out of the bag of stuff used for cook-outs. We bashed it into a powder form as best we could, but it was still rather chunky. The sulfur that went into the concoction was also somewhat shy of being in a perfectly pulverized form.
Once we had the stuff prepared, it was time to test it. We made a little pile of the mixture on the floor or some other place equally impossible to destroy and then tossed a lit match into the heap. There was a sputtering and some smoke and a red flame. It wasn't exactly an unbridled success, but we were filled with optimism.
Maybe the powder would work more efficiently if it were confined in a tube like a real rocket. There were aluminum antenna tubes everywhere in the shop and we appropriated one about an inch in diameter and a couple of feet in length.
One end was fairly easy to seal. It was simply hammered shut. Then, in went to powder, crude and poorly mixed as it was. We packed that aluminum tube to the top. Next came the problem of sealing the business end of our "rocket". It too was hammered shut, then Griff decided to seal it even better by soldering. Solder doesn't work very well with aluminum, but the thing was closed well enough.
All the time the soldering was going on, I kept imagining the newspaper headlines, "Two Teens Killed in Homemade Gunpowder Explosion". The mixture didn't explode however. It hardly burned with any of the rapidity expected of gunpowder.
Next Griff took a power drill and bored a hole into the end of the contraption. Once again, I cringed, but luck was with us. We survived the whole experience with no mishaps and no scars.
It was finally time to test our marvelous invention. We took some fuse from a firecracker or cherry bomb and transported the thing out to the deserted part of the local airport. (During the war years, Selman Field was a school for Army Air Force Navigators. It was slowly disassembled over the years, but many large concrete cubes remained - the one we chose was probably once a part of the base for an enormous fuel tank.)
We laid the tube atop the huge block of cement, then lit the fuse and watched excitedly. A small red flame spewed from the open hole briefly, but it was hardly enough thrust to power a rocket into the air - just smoke and sizzle, then fizzle.
Undeterred, we went back to the "drawing board". What if we combined our powder with some that was in a Roman Candle? Wouldn't that be a sight? Popping out colored balls as it traveled upward. That was a spectacle not to be missed.
Back to the shop, dismantle a Roman Candle, mix that powder with our own and seal the results in another aluminum tube.
We gleefully returned to the airport, leaned our "rocket" against the concrete block and lit the fuse. Just to be on the "safe" side this time, we ran to the other side of the barrier to watch our invention take to the skies in its colorful debut.
It was a good thing that we had that mass of cement between us and the tube. A rather loud explosion occurred and bits of shredded aluminum tube flew into the air. A closer inspection after the debacle revealed that the tube had been turned inside-out by the explosion. We had almost literally dodged a bullet by the dumbest of luck.
Thus ended the brief existence of the Monroe Amateur Rocket Club and its experiments into the world of space exploration with our ill-fated and even worse-conceived M.A.R.C. 1 and M.A.R.C. 2 whatevers.
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