I should add that the etchant is toxic, like the electrolyte. You
don't want unsupervised kids working with it.
For that matter, I have doubts about the wisdom of letting certain
70-year-old electrochemists work with this stuff. Mizuno & I watched
Ohmori work with boiling electrolyte in a nonchalant manner, and
listened to Fisher's lecture, and I am not sure they should allowed
to do these things unsupervised. As Mizuno said -- while edging his
way out of the room -- "this experiment scares the hell out of me."
That's coming from a guy who almost cut his carotid artery in an
explosion, and who has been working with a 1-cm thick stainless steel
pressurized cell for years, at pressures and temperature experts told
him is "close to performance limits." In other words, it might blow
your head off.
McKubre said that Fleischmann is famous for designing elaborate,
large experimental apparatus which were not well grounded and tend to
shock people and burn up. When he first visited, there were grad
students in the hall shooting arrows at a target as part of an
experiment. Safety last.
- Jed
