[hilbert42]

Yeah, the Anarchist Cookbook used to be a must-have file for nerds in the early days of the internet, it used to turn up in collections of hacks and even in floppy disk/CD collections attached to computer mag covers.

I don't think most ever took it seriously, it was just an antiauthoritarian status symbol of the early internet. It was a badly-written compendium of nefarious bits and pieces collected by the likes of youngish teenage boys. I suppose the powers that be would now consider it dangerous material and its possession deemed suspicious. That said, go to the chemistry section of any library and you'll find much more subversive info therein.

BTW, when I was at school a part of the chemistry curriculum was to make and prepare black powder then test it. Moreover, the complete chemical equation of the reaction was in our textbooks and we had to understand it. Not only was the explosive reaction presented as just one equation but also it was subdivided into its constituent parts, sub-reactions etc., so that one fully understood the chemistry. That's to say we had to know how to calculate proportions for full combustion, etc.

Being allowed to officially make black powder under the auspices of the chemistry teacher made chemistry fun. Oh, how times have changed. Boring!

[wil421]

Myth busters did a show about something called guncotton and I always wondered if I could make it but I’m not really into that kinda stuff any longer. Pretty cool you were able to do it in a controlled environment.

[hilbert42]

Yeah, the novelty with making chemicals that go bang pretty much wore off in my teenage years although for a time in my 20s I had Miner's Right permit which allowed me to buy and possess Gelignite for said purposes of mining - but I wasn't making the stuff, just using it. Not thought much about it lately but I know that gaining such a permit today is immensely more difficult than when I obtained mine.

Making guncotton/nitrocellulose, picric acid, etc. isn't that hard. In fact, as I've mentioned elsewhere in these posts, I made nitroglycerin in the school lab. (note I'd strongly advise those tempted not to do so - even if you're a good and careful chemist, as such acts are frowned upon with much greater severity than when I did it decades ago).

The fact is that with the type of training we students had had, by the time we'd finished five years of high school chemistry we could make most of those chemicals by following the procedures for doing so. It was only at university we eventually got to understand the underlying theory behind why those procedures were formulated the way they were.

BTW, about the only chemistry I do these days is to figure out what's the best prepackaged cleaner to use in the kitchen. :-)