[robocat]

PDF of the book Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants:

https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...

Snippet:

  Came the day of the first trial. The propellants were hydrazine and WENA. We were all gathered around waiting for the balloon to go up, when Uncle Milty warned, "Hold it- the acid valve is leaking!"

  "Go ahead - fire anyway!" Paul ordered.

  I looked around and signaled to my own gang, and we started backing gently away, like so many cats with wet feet.

  Howard Streim opened his mouth to protest, but as he said later, "I saw that dog-eating grin on Doc's face and shut it again," and somebody pushed the button. There was a little flicker of yellow flame, and then a brilliant blue-white flash and an ear-splitting crack. The lid to the chamber went through the ceiling (we found it in the attic some weeks later), the viewports vanished, and some forty pounds of high-grade optical glass was reduced to a fine powder before I could blink.

  I clasped both hands over my mouth and staggered out of the lab, lo collapse on the lawn and laugh myself sick, and Paul stalked out in a huff. 

  When I tottered weakly back into the lab some hours later I found that my gang had sawed out, carried away, and carefully lost, some four feet from the middle of the table on which the gadget had rested, so that Paul's STIDA could never, never, never be reassembled, in our lab.