Fun with chemistry (3)

After leaving school I worked for a short while as a technician in the Chemistry Department of Birmingham University. One of the chaps in the laboratory had been awarded a first class honours degree but was a hopeless practical chemist and had been striving for seven years to accumulate enough results for a Ph.D. One day he was performing a reaction with lithium aluminium hydride, quite a reactive compound, in ether. Trouble is, he turned on the isomantle to heat his flask but forgot to pass water through his condenser, so all the ether boiled away. The reaction temperature was not, therefore, limited by the boiling point of ether (thirty-five degrees Celsius) but by the maximum temperature reached by the heater - maybe a couple of hundred degrees or so. Eventually this high temperature led to runaway reaction and then an explosion. Several small pieces of red-hot reaction mixture shot across the laboratory, missing everyone. We were lucky - because of the hemispherical shape of the heating mantle most of the explosion went upwards. He was, however, conducting his experiment directly beneath one end of a fluorescent tube suspended by two chains from a high ceiling. The explosion cut, with pin-point accuracy, through one end of the tube and the free end swung down, scything its way through a large experiment set up on the bench adjacent to danger man's patch. Although several hundred quid's worth of glass was lost that day, amazingly, although the laboratory was fully occupied, no one was even slightly hurt. Danger man was booted out of the university shortly after this incident. He didn't get his Ph.D.