LabCoatz

ARCHIVE: LABCOATZ FORMATIVE DAYS

Added 2025-08-23 23:09:20 +0000 UTC

I was cleaning out some old SD cards, and found this little clip. This was filmed back in February 2021 in the early days of LabCoatz, before I had a half-acceptable camera and before I really got into home chemistry...you might be able to tell, since I had "never actually smelled ether", which is a common solvent that I now have a few liters of, lol. I was kinda experimenting with a handheld "Explosions&Fire" video format, which was easy and minimal effort, but obviously not the style I went for. I think my logic was "there's already a lot of low-effort chemistry channels out there, and they tend to get poor views, so I might as well try a more professional, NileRed-like format".

In this clip, I was attempting to produce ethyl chloride from ethanol, sulfuric acid, and salt, in a similar manner as my first real YouTube synthesis, which was for the similar alkyl halide, isopropyl chloride. I think my end goal was to react it with magnesium or aluminum to get a pyrophoric organometallic compound, but I ran into several issues at the time. For one, I lacked a real condenser, so the extremely volatile ethyl chloride mostly escaped. Second, I was very new to chemistry and wasn't following an existing procedure...I procedure that probably would've told me that everything needed to be RIGOROUSLY dried beforehand, possibly mixed with an ether-type solvent, and that the metal would need to be activated with something like iodine. Oh, the things you learn from five years of experience! Maybe one day I'll make a pyrophoric liquid, but for now, I need to get back to finishing my other projects.