I remember using an alcohol lamp with my 1940's Porter Chemistry Set. It had a little blowpipe attachment so you could direct the flame like a little torch.
When I finally got into chemistry in high school for real (late '40s, early '50s) , I was delighted with the Fisher Burner, which had venturi shape and a grill on top so the "blue" part of the flame stayed right by the burner top, with dozens of little blue cones of flame at the top. It was new at the time --by now, I'm sure the patent has expired and they're all built like that.
We had an up-and-down duplex and when my mother decided tenants were too much of a pain, I took over the upstairs kitchen as a lab. I had "all" of the dangerous chemicals including many which would not be allowed in a HS chem lab nowadays -- white phosphorus, elemental iodine, metallic sodium and potassium, the "Big Three" acids, con nitric, sulphuric, and hydrochloric... arsenic trioxide, etc, etc... A lot of this I got from my brother-in-law, who was much older than me and had graduated Fordham University.
But in those days even a kid my age could buy a lot of this stuff from Eimer and Amend or van Waters and Rogers. (Sometimes you had to tell them that you were in the chemistry program at Brooklyn Technical High School.)
I used to duplicate the qualitative analysis experiments in the classroom at home, just for fun and to be doing something "chemical" on my own.
One day I kind of lapsed into stupidity and put some calcium carbide (used in miner's lamps) in an Erlenmeyer flask, stoppered it with a thistle tube in one hole and a jetted glass tube in the other, and poured water down the thistle tube. Acetylene was generated. I had wanted to see if acetylene could be used as a reducing agent for iron oxide for some reason or another.
OK, so just to "prove" it was acetylene, I lighted the gas coming out of the jetted glass tube. "Pop!" and it lit.
But I suddenly noticed that since I hadn't purged the air out of the flask, the flame front started to slowly creep back in the jet tube -- a tiny wall of reddish and blueish and yellowish flame sneaking back down toward the flask. Apparently, the speed of the evolved gases going out through the tube moderated the speed of the flame front going back to the flask so it looked real slow.
It was just making it around the bend in the jet tube when I realized what was going to happen and covered my face.
BLAM!
Glass all over, and the top of the thistle tube stuck in the Celotex ceiling.
All I got was a tiny nick on my pinky from a hunk of glass.
Well, all in all, you couldn't call it smart luck, so it must have been dumb luck.
Terry, 230RN
ETA: I just came across this. Note the remark about broken glass and some other comments about nannyism:
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/2007/December/TheChemistrySetGeneration.asp
