Napalm, Nitroglycerin and More: Exploring the Chemistry of Fight Club
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 20 พ.ค. 2024
- Technically, chemistry is the study of matter, but I prefer to see it as the study of change. It is growth, then decay, then transformation. It is fascinating, really. Chemistry is at the center of the movie Fight Club: the chemistry of a man and society, the chemistry between a man and woman, but most importantly, the chemistry of chemicals. How accurate is the chemistry of Fight Club? Can you make napalm from orange juice? Will natural gas blow up an apartment? Can you use soap as explosives? Today, we will answer those questions. Most likely with a lot of fire and lots of booms.
Links:
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Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:36 Disclaimer
00:46 Orange Juice Napalm
07:34 Natural Gas Explosion
10:45 Soap Explosives
19:03 Conclusion
Thanks for watching!
P.S. Did you get the Intro Breaking Bad reference?
The problem with the chemistry in fight club is that there are just way easier ways make explosives then this with household items
Yeah, but the *symbolism* of blowing up fat cat's money with their own fat! Or that's what I'm guessing.
Styrofoam is much better than orange juice.
than*
Definitely do not mix aluminum foil with toilet bowl cleaner in a water bottle.
Definitely do not hold onto it if you do. It's a self detonating mixture.
@@kulled happy now...
"The acid mix is often referred to as mixed acid" This one is gold.
No, aqua regia dissolves gold, lol
@@justinbremer2281 Glad someone said it
Well, at least he's not calling Us idiots
Welcome to the watch list boys
We love it here what you talking about
i like the way you showed the chemical structures, most chemistry channels just show a blank black model for a few seconds if we're luckly the atoms will be colored
"I will not give details" on nitroglycerin production ... a de-hydrating-acid... proceed show show which one on the next slide... 👌
you can literally google it. its not that hard or complicated to figure out with chemistry knowledge.
I love when he said "it's science time" then scienced all over the place
fr
“It’s chemistry time!” -Walt Whitman, better call Saul 2001
No.
I'm still trying to wash it out of my hair...
He scienced all over my back
I used to demonstrate napalm in the armed forces here in Denmark, and the stuff is very flexible in terms of efficiency. It doesn't need much air to reignite and never try to put it out by clapping the burning area. You will only spread the substance. You actually have to cut the natural way to combat the heat, and that is the other factor because military grade napalm is full of aluminium and magnesium, and this makes it burn very hot.
*The problem with FIGHT CLUB is that all of those companies have backups to quickly regain any lost information.* It's a nice plot though.
Yeah that's not actually the plot of fight club though
@@tractordude234
I never stated the plot. I complimented the plot.
Don't forget Tyler had people everywhere He probably had some people in IT departments that were making sure those backups were completely annihilated as well. Don't forget this movie came out back in 1999. backups and cloud servers weren't exactly a thing back then I mean don't get me wrong they were but not as much as they are today. So I find it totally conceivable that when the buildings were destroyed probably infiltrators in the IT departments that were in charge of the off site backups probably simultaneously destroyed those as well.
@@highlander723
I'm talking about the bunker backups which are fully automated. And the movie doesn't show it, so I wouldn't infer it.
@@thomasg4324 You know I've had some time to think about it and I don't think he would have had to destroy the backups at all. remember what happened after 9/11 How much the stock market fell How much citizens were traumatized How much companies were trying to secure themselves. If Tyler pulled off what I think he pulled off this is 9/11 * 100 lots of buildings went down not just the twin towers. It would have happened in every city in America. What good are backups if the The companies that use those backups are in such poor condition they're unable to enforce anything true given enough time you might bring back most of them.... But it's during that time I wonder what's going to happen
You and Nile are carrying the chemistry/alchemy side of youtube
Check out Explosions and Fire (and Extractions and Ire)
@@jab9109 beat me to it
@@jab9109 If you need some Azidoazide Azide that is!
Also thought emporium
Also NightHawkinLight
I love detailed step-by-step guides for things like this. Videos like this actually keep me from fucking around and finding out, now that I know what's gonna happen if I mix gas with soap I'm much less inclined to finally try it
Gay
As a young person many decades ago, a friend who was much older and experienced in the military from World War II gave me an education in chemistry with household and industrial sources of chemicals that I remember mostly today.
With the soaps of today and yesterday, some chemicals have been removed that were quite common yesterday. One is Phosphorus, because it caused algal bloom in lakes and rivers, as well as too much water plant growth. Phosphorus is what makes soap cut through grease and oil. Even by using trisodium phosphate, the growth problem is still bad, so substitutes were made, yet don't work as well as the phosphorus of yesterday. And is why we don't see the Dawn dish soap saying it works to remove oil from wildlife or dishes, like ducklings and filthy dishes, but they still show the old recordings of the ducklings being washed in old Dawn.
But you can find soaps and detergents that have phosphorous in them, if you look in the automotive sections of certain stores. I use such soaps and detergents for cleaning cars and stuff with lots of grease and oil contamination, otherwise I use the phosphorous free for other uses without oils and grease, altho I don't have to worry about water contamination with the phosphorous, as my location does not have any routes to the rivers or lakes, and the phosphorous makes the grass grow greener!
As far as napalm and explosives, making them without using substitutes or even bad substitutes, like OJ, you get a better product, and a safer product, if you follow the modern process to make them. And yes, plastic labware is very important, when working with chemicals that could cause rapid deflagration or detonation!
It’s good that your location isn’t right next to a river but you are mislead by that fact, you should still worry about water contamination. If it touches grass, it will touch groundwater and groundwater pollution is actually a big global problem. Your single case won’t make that much of a difference but the big picture is important and you should still be cautious about the effluence you produce reaching soil. In China for example, insufficient groundwater protection has led to 60% of all of China’s groundwater being unusable for human consumption. Also, polluted groundwater is significantly more hard to clean up than surface water like rivers and lakes.
@@tomschick2002 I don't worry about contamination, as it has already been contaminated by gasoline additives and industrial waste which was mishandled for 50 years or more in the area. Even my deep well is contaminated!
2:18 you were propably looking for a picture of a guy with a flamethrower, but the pic is actually a mill worker with an oxygen lance, which is, in itself, a very interesting tool
Exactly. Oxygen lances are amazing.
I know, I used it due to me liking the fire colors and it being a free use stock image, did not find a flame picture I liked that was a free use stock.
@@WheelerScientific Ah ok 👌 Great video btw 👍🏻
Your channel just gets better and better!
Really good vid. Where you suggested leaving soap for a few days, in general home made soap is left for a few weeks as most people don’t have laboratory heated stirring. Commercially the logistics and distribution chain allows the soap to ‘mature’.
look if the soaps age is on the clock.......
We used to make the styrofoam/gas type back in the day. The scary part about that compound is, to put it out you have to smother it completely. Pouring water on it just causes the burning mixture to break off into smaller, separate burning puddles
The military napalm burns better because the military adds magnesium which will ignite and even burns even under water. I can't remember off hand what temp magnesium burns at but I believe it's 1800 degrees making water not able to put it out. It burns so hot it actually separates the hydrogen and oxygen giving it fuel to keep burning. I know this because of my WW2 veteran grandfather.
Also Magnesium will consume the oxygen from CO2, so dont even try to put out burning Mg with a CO2 extinguisher
"Military" napalm is better than this guy's because there is coordination with chemists and technicians in the area.
Napalm does not contain magnesium, you must be mistaken with the other incendiary agents.
The best description: if there is an unintended dissimulation of glass ware. Yes, I know very well about intended and unintended dissimulation of glassware.
i love how the start is quoted from breaking bad
One of my favorite movies! Good job man!
A little paint thinner fixes styrene getting too thick.👍
Def do more or these types of videos. You made it quite easy to follow/understand everything as well as getting people interested in watching.
Only reason I clicked on this was because I love the movie fight club, but I stayed for the science haha
Glad you enjoyed!
Good video. Keep them coming. You hit just the right amount of knowledge without going full chemist 😂
Thanks for the tutorials!
This video earned a sub. Well done.
Nice video,
From what I remind from my search onto the subject as a teenager was that "Napalm" comes from "Na palmitate" or what is the same "sodium palmitate"... thus a mix of a gooi soap and gasoline. :o)
I like the idea of Al-palm (aluminium (3+) palmitate); but it could work with Ca-palm (calcium (2+) palmitate). ;o)
Regards,
PHZ
(Philou Zrealone from the Science Madness forum)
Awesome video! Great mix of nerd and bro teehee. Thank you ❤
Glad you enjoyed it!
This is really thorough and well explained, great work! I always chuckle a little at them making THAT MUCH dynamite using human fat in Fight Club. I think the orange juice recipe was probably the producer trying to not quite tell people how to make napalm, but still be kinda close. Btw, there are several different napalm varieties, some of which do involve polystyrene. The original aluminum palmitate one is my favorite though, it’s not quite as bad for the environment.
oh so the aluminium naphthenate and aluminium palmitate can be used separately to thicken gasoline, I thought they were used together 🤔
@@Polkem1 with the first napalm formulation napthenic acid and aluminum palmitate were used together to my understanding. There are just a bunch of forms that all get lumped under the name “napalm” because they’re all jellied fuel incendiaries.
@@chemistryofquestionablequa6252 oh I see, it’s quite difficult to find any ratios/percentages online which were industrialised.
Oh yes
Good that a incendiary weapon inst that dangerous to the ecosystem
@@anonimoqualquer5503 In the words of Hank Hill: "That's a clean burning hell I tell you hwhat"
So good subbed!
Great job, this is the closest video describing actual napalm as compared with folks making improvised gelled fuels.
I happen to have experience with flamethrower operation. Here's a few tips.
The improvised gelled fuels using ivory soap or similar (sodium palmitate) type soaps is thixotropic; meaning it will thicken over time. Due to this, the shelf life of the flamethrower fuel, when loaded, will eventually thicken to the point of being like mud, and will render the flamethrower inoperable.
Your aluminum palmitate based soap will work much better; notice the viscosity is better and it is less "chunky", plus, it will not overly thicken when stored.
I happen to have a patent document describing the production of napalm and your method is very close; there are a few differences, such as the fatty acid mix being composed of palmitate, oleic acid, and napthenic acid, that later of which is hard to come by ;)
Regarding polymeric napalm, using Styrofoam or polystyrene, what we see kids making only will not function in a flamethrower, because gasoline only contains about 2% BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene/xyline) however, it can be made into the proper viscosity for a flamethrower by the following procedure: First, mix toluene and gasoline (approximately 25% toluene and 75% gasoline), then, add to it the Styrofoam until a syrup-like viscosity is achieved. This is a great flamethrower fuel with good range, I got 110 feet in my tests. That being said, any variations in viscosity can cause poor ignition or conversely, if it is too thin it will affect range.
Generally I would prefer the real stuff as it is less contamination to the environment than all that toluene and plastic spewing everywhere.
Also, the plastic based napalm, if left to sit several years, will harden into basically a solid plastic putty, again, that could be a real pain to get out of the flamethrower.
Probably the simplest, cheapest, and quickest flamethrower fuel is approximately equal parts of used motor oil 33%, gasoline 33%, and diesel 34%. It doesn't have the range or staying power of napalm, but it is cheap, fast, and won't clog the device.
Thanks this will really help
Palmoil has 12% mystricin oil in it ❤❤❤❤❤
Wow
Awesome vid muh dude. Since we're all on a watch list i say go for breaking bad.
Will do!
love the wise cracks. however the advice to use plastic and the reason why was the funniest thing ive heard all month. but its serious advice at the same time. we all know there are those who find things out the hard way. by the way glycerin can be found on the shelf in some wallgreenes you dont have to bother with soap unless you like to use it for your laundry to keep things white
Not to be pedantic, but did you use 100% gasoline or e90 which is 10% ethanol?
If you made biodiesel instead, you would have gotten a better glycerin yield. That's what they should have done in the movie instead. Heck they could have made "green" ANFO! Also just think of the pucker factor involved with demolishing a building with just nitroglycerin!
Wheeler: This napalm just isn't that effective
Also Wheeler: Here's how you make REAL NAPALM
*Bonded? Bound?* nice work again go to your happy place!
Rapid unplanned disassembly! Lol
DIY napalm is wild
Cool. Never really gave it too much thought. I was interested in plastics and sulfas, as strange as that sounds. You can make cars with plastics, and paint, and save lives with sulfas. A lot of chemistry in those two ideas. Liked the presentation.
Well, the first rule of fight club. Is never talk about fight club. Since we broke rule number one already. I guess, this guy is right and it's just easier to make nitroglycerin...
The things you find on TH-cam, pretty sure I was on a list already but now I am for sure.
Eh, there are worse lists to be on.
I would love to see The Walking Dead, there is a particular episode where they are in an underground lab and they use nitric acid to sterelize the zombie remains, also i feel like you can find something else
Also would love to see (probably wont happen becuase long synthesis) Saving Private Ryan, specifically the Sulfa drugs (sulfur antibiotics) I think Sulfanilamide is doable
Also love your vids
Welcome back to the FBI watchlist boys! Also, 6:06 looks a bit sus 😅
Great Video. Of course we're focused on the chemistry of using the glycerine byproduct in the Saponification process which turns out isn't the easiest byproduct to extract. Going outside of the scope of the movie and focusing on the isolation of glycerine from animal fats, it seems like the Transesterification process used in biodiesel production would give you much better yield of glycerine which is already separated. And you get biodiesel which also has its own place in energetic chemistry.
Wouldn't it be easier to just buy the glycerin? It's not like it's very expensive.
@@WinXPsp.3Yes it would be.
Well done, sir!
Glad you liked it!
Nowadays it's probably way easier to get copious amounts of glycerol by opening a vape store and nobody would care. But then, and now, it probably would be far more troublesome to get the barrels of nitric and sulphuric acid needed to perform this feat for the private citizen. If you can get those in large quantities, you won't have any trouble getting the glycerol far easier and cheaper.
Yeah, the nitric acid was really where that movie fell apart lol
Please do Oppenheimer next, I found this video to be very useful
The movie "blown away" has some interesting kabooms 🤯
Point of clarification during the conflicts in Viet Nam and Korea, the US switched over to polystyrene and deisel. It was vastly cheaper and worked just as well or better. There weren't as many flame-throwers as boms using the stuff. So maybe they used polystyrene for dropped ordiance, and soap for the flame-throwers.
Gotta watch
So they turned meatloaf into soap...just put that one together...
Between Tyler and Frank N Furter they're really using every part of the rock star
Great video! Here's a question; in the original Terminator movie from 1984 Sarah Conner and Kyle Reese make explosives using moth balls, corn syrup, ammonia - can you make any real explosive using these ingredients?
I worked at a soap making company for years, you can buy glycerin from soap making companies and skip many of those steps with the salt and filtering.
Also nitroglycerin is one of the major ingredients in modern smokeless powder or so I'm lead to believe, but as for modern explosives it's all rdx or something cooler.
Well if in the movie they bought glycerin I would have.
Making soap is one way of doing it however you could instead use Methanol making biodiesel which has applications elsewhere and glycerol whilst also making it easier to seperate by distillation
14:54 Probably the craziest thing you said during the entire video 😭
Take notes!
Jokes aside, this is a really neat video!
i just watched through the orange juice napalm section and have a few things to point out, + i am just an amateur chemist, i might get this wrong, but the orange juice mixture isn't really "napalm" its just likely a super quick equivalent to the sugar rocket mix where you mix sugar with a oxidizer, the sugar is naturally present in the orange juice, and this keeps the mixture burning while the other counterpart produces oxygen consistently to create a flame that it hotter than usual and combusts better, i might be wrong, i am just assuming that something in gasoline is a oxidizer, i don't know, and i have another thing to ask instead of point out, theoretically if you creating a formulation of thermite (Al + Fe2O3) and your napalm mixture, wouldn't this create a napalm with a superior heat?, the only 2 downsides i can think of are solubility, where the thermite mixture does not dissolve in the napalm mixture, which due to both of the ingredient of the most common mixture of thermite being powders, they probably wont, and another is that because it is burning hotter, it will consume the fuel more quickly, and hence negate the point of making napalm anyway, what do you think?
The storyfoam thing been known for a long time yeah.. I am already a middle aged man, but I used to play with that stuff as a kid in our yard
I thought Napalm was short for napthalene which is a mix of naptha and styrene which the military then adds magnesium and what all other accelerants
You can also make napalm with laundry detergent liquid
"A rapid unplanned disassembly of glassware" holy hell I'm using that with my colleagues
One of my favorites, besides "Preforming Percussive Maintenance" aka hit it with something.
Glycerin isn't the big deal to get. It's the nitric and sulfric acid in the needed concentrations, that are hard to get even if you would try to make them from all day products with a chemistry setup. Also you could make something that explodes from many organic compounds, if you pass it through a reaction with the two acids. So yes, you can make explosives from soap but also paper, sugar and a bunch of other things.
And if you read this and ever stumble across these acids, don't try to make explosives. What you get is mostly dangerous and unstable.
Anyway, thank you for this interesting video.
Dude, what would be a good solvent for the white deodorant stains ?
It would have helped if you nitrated the frozen oj before mixing with gasoline 😜
Better to dissolve in water and than add isopropyl and (additional) salt out. Isopropyl is the easiest solvent to recover as its azeotrope is barely evident.
The original script for the book had true recipes for napalm etc, but it was strongly recommended that he change them slightly for the final version.
Was the recipe to make napalm really necessary?
Bro theres no reason to censor nitroglycerin production. The recipe is on wikipedia for anyone who never took chemistry, and anyone who took basic chemistry already knows how to make it. It's not really possible to transport any dangerous amount because of how sensitive it is, so its actually not very likely to be used nefariously. The larger the quantity, the more sensitive it becomes to shock, so its pretty self limiting.
you can make napalm b with petrol and expanded polystyrene
in the book they talk about making plastic explosives and the reason there's no explosion at the end of the book is because Tyler used a method which the narrator says has never worked for them
Does anyone know's if it works with vegetal glicerin ?
Glycerin is glycerin
A friend in high school tried to make nitro in his parents' basement 35 years ago. All he got was a cloud of yellow smoke/gas which might have been chlorine gas--not good
Yellow smoke is typically nitrous fumes. NOx starts coming off the reaction if you mess up, if it starts turning orange and red that means RUN because it can spontaneously blow.
Try polystyrene and zippo fluid, or diesel and Laundry liquid.
That reminds me the MythBusters did an episode on the natural gas exploding a house
The "candle" was a bit close to ... everything, did your cam survive that? But seriously: A funny and interesting video. I love such things, because sometimes they are pretty exact in films and other times - some "fantasies" seem to be part of the hollywood way of making a film, but I have to admit that I just love good old Hollywood, I came to the conclusion, that it's just not necessary to criticize All I can, I prefer to respect it the way it's done ... but however, a nice more professional cheap and simple tool for igniting things at a distance wouldn't be too much high-tech at once - but no critique!
Famously the recipes in the book and movie were censored. The OJ replaced the Styrofoam (a crude form of napalm, much easier to make), and for the other one, lets just say there are easier way to make that using typically lye, and salt peter.
In the next episode, I will show you how to optimize the jet of your homemade heat warhead to achieve maximum penetration.
That's at lease four episodes away.
@@WheelerScientific in that case i cant wait for future episodes 🤣
The burning test should have had just gasoline on the block of wood as a control.
Not really, it was a comparison between both types of napalm not them and gasoline.
Sorry, minor pyromaniac/nerd here.... the "Napalm" that *_others,_* not myself, played with back in the day was a mix of Styrofoam cups and gasoline. Just kept adding cups to a folgers coffee can of gasoline... is what *_they_* did, so I *_heard..._* anyways. After letting the mixture sit for a day and separating the pure gasoline on top, the VERY sticky goo on the bottom was... quite interesting. If you took a metal table spoon of it and lit it on fire, it would burn for just under 5mins. Not sure Modern Styrofoam cups are made from the same materials as in the past though.
I used to do this same exact thing when I was a kid lol. I used the styrofoam cups and packing peanuts to make mine.
That's what everyone heard. But it's still not actually napalm
Good film about enlightenment. Spiritual war, like he said.
I don't know about the orange juice, but the gas is a most likely and the soap is a definitely.
To obtain the glycerol starting from tallow, wouldn't be easier with a transesterification with methanol and sodium hydroxide as catalyzer? the extraction would be with a better yeld...
Well yeah, but the Fight club premise is with soap so I did chemistry around soap.
If stlll relevant there's an movie from 1994, "Blown Away" about some Irish bomber in Boston i think
Do something about Dr. Stone
Dissolving polystyrene into gasoline also makes kickass napalm, also called gangsters napalm due to its use in firebombing rival clubs
Hold up… 14:35 now you made soap…
Now you can make some more napalm
I’ll put this TH-cam channel in the good half of my manifesto.
How About Making Molecular Acid The Creature From ALIEN Used As Blood ??? ?
BTW You've Got A New Subscriber From Aberystwyth , Wales
Bless Up
did you quote walter at the start of
It took longer than expected for someone to get that reference.
😂 OH shit the table is on fire! 😂
Holy fuck and this is where i start
The fact that you specify “legally” implies that you have a plug
Breaking Bad!? Sweet, I'm _finally_ gonna get to learn how to make... Awww... Nevermind. You really had us going there, too.
...napalm has other delivery methods than a flamethrower. Thicker, heavier material is advantageous for some other delivery methods
"Anyone with high school chemistry knowledge could figure it out"
This was part of a test I wrote in high school lol
this seems a bit easy to make
my cats LOVE beef tallow. they go insane when they smell it and start growling lol
Did i just learn how to make a better fight clup napalm
Dude I've always wanted to see red powder in a cotton candy machine potassium nitrate sugar and iron oxide so you would have gun cotton candy lol
we used aluminium octoate in the army back in the day