As freshmen in high school my friend Bob Miller and I discovered that sodium hydroxide obtainable as lye and aluminum would generate hydrogen. We developed a rather elaborate hydrogen generator which cooled the gas before blowing up balloons with it. If we filled them with the hot gas it just cooled and the balloons weren't as inflated.

We sent up hundreds of small balloons with notes attached, and got one reply. A fellow found it 400 miles away 36 hours later in his pasture. And when we could get the money we'd fill larger balloons, surplus weather balloons which came in any number of sizes.

We'd send those up over the town of 20,000 in which we lived with dynamite fuse tied to them. I don't remember where we got that fuse material, but we had a bunch. It burned at the rate of 6" a minute.

The first balloons would just go "Phhiitt", with a weak flame. We were crestfallen, as we'd imagined something much more dramatic. We realized we had to inflate them a bit with air, and O2, first, then add enough hydrogen to make them bouyant. Those had a bigger flame and a more satisfactory "Pop", enough to keep us doing it for a while.

One afternoon I was filling a couple of balloons for the night's "operations". I was in Bob's back yard while he was off trying to detonate some guncotton we'd made. (That stuff never did go off, or even burn.) There were alleys in that town, and I was next to the garage when I heard a "blub blub blub" which sounded like a diesel engine slowly approaching. I was a bit curious, but busy with a balloon which was about 2 1/2 feet in diameter.

Around the corner of the garage came a fire engine. It stopped, and the occupants looked at me for a short while. And I looked at them, like a deer caught in headlights.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you", the driver said finally.

"No. No."

They looked at me a bit longer, then slowly moved down the alley, a bit faster than they came.

And that was the end of that particular exercise. I can't help but think we would have been busted for some terrorist active if that were now.

I moved on to pipe bombs. Even very small ones were so powerful they scared me, so that didn't last long. Then rocket cars, but they always blew up. That didn't last long, either.

Arf