The Broken Bottle 
2003 Reader Submission
Pending Acceptance
This is another minor mishap from my career as a lab technician.
I've little formal chemistry training, but for various reasons have had to do quite a lot in my job. Mostly I've picked up enough expertise to keep myself safe. Mostly...
One of the chemicals I was asked to provide for an exam was Tollens Reagent, which is basically silver nitrate mixed with ammonia. The recipe is easy enough; unfortunately I got it from an old technical guide which didn't give much safety information. We used it in the exam without problems, then (since silver nitrate is quite expensive) I put the bottles into a cupboard and left them for the next time they were needed.
About four months later I noticed that two out of six bottles were broken, and finally thought to look the stuff up in a safety guide. Guess what - it should never be stored, because it forms an explosive silver compound after a few days.
So I decided I'd better get rid of it, and without thinking picked up one of the intact bottles in my hand - where it exploded.
Amazingly I wasn't hurt. All of the force of the blast went into breaking the neck of the bottle and blowing it (and the contents) up to the ceiling, like a giant party popper. Fortunately I was wearing gloves and goggles, so I only got a little of the stuff on my skin; if I hadn't been wearing the goggles I might have been blinded. As it was it took two or three days to get the stains off the rest of my face. The ceiling still has dark stains, six or seven years later.
The _really_ stupid part was that for some reason I thought this was a one-off accident and picked up a couple of the others without thinking. Both also went bang, fortunately with much less force. I eventually used long tongs to get rid of the rest and the debris... Submitted on 05/17/2002
Submitted by:
Marcus Rowland
Reference:
Personal account
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