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title: The Match-Head Bomb
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On another occasion when we lived in the flat-roofed house, Tom and I
were home alone and itching for some mischief. We set up a card table in
the living room to serve as our chemistry lab. I cut the heads off of a
bunch of common matches and put them into a small glass Christmas
ornament. It was the kind that you hang on the tree with a little wire
hook. We simply removed the little wire loop and the thingy that covered
the hole in the glass globe so we could fill the inside of the ball with
the match heads. I didn\'t have any real goal with this dangerous stunt,
so I started doing some crazy stupid experimenting with this little
bomb. We had a candle mounted on a small plate that was on the card
table. I lit the candle and held the phosphorous filled ball with my
bare hand. I can\'t imagine what ever came over me to do such a crazy
thing, but I then proceeded to hold the Christmas ball over the flame to
see what would happen.\
\
Well, you can guess what happened next. Pow! The glass ball exploded
with a nice poof noise. Fortunately, the glass of the ornament was so
thin that it didn\'t create a very strong containment for the energetic
combustion reaction that started inside it. Thus, the explosion was more
of a poof than a big nasty bang you would expect from a well-built bomb.
Unfortunately, the consequence of this poof caused burning bits of match
heads and broken glass to be propelled all over the living room. My
mother\'s living room curtains took the worst of the explosion because
many of the burning match heads landed in the lacy folds of the curtains
and ended up as a bunch of ugly black-ringed holes.\
\
To this day, I don\'t understand how I avoided a month of being grounded
over this episode. Obviously, my mother was not pleased that I ruined
her living room curtains, but perhaps she and dad were just glad the
whole house didn\'t catch fire. I must have at least learned a lesson
because there were no more near disasters with explosives in my
remaining early years.
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