If you’re a certain age you can remember toys that were, well, pretty damn dangerous. Tell us what you survived. I won’t go first because I had a bunch of them. You folks first. Then I’ll add ones that you probably don’t remember.
Oh, and I don’t mean lawn darts or the like. All of these plugged in to the wall.
Oh lordy. Lots, at very young ages.
Chemistry sets, BB and pellet guns of all sorts, wood burning kits, lots of (pretty large) knives. Definitely the aforementioned lawn darts. The chemistry stuff is probably what I’m most amazed didn’t result in serious damage. My dad taught me how to make gunpowder with it when I was around 5 or so.
Not toys, but I pretty much had access to a full woodshop from 8 to 18. Also guns, knives, etc. Can’t really recall any mishaps worth mentioning.
Lawn darts aren’t dangerous? I landed one in the neighbor kids shoulder and he had to go to the ER to get stitches. Not my finest moment. I also shot his brother in the eye with a roman candle during firework wars. Other than the eye thing that was a lot of fun. We were like wizards shooting fireballs!
In terms of dangerous stuff, I got a chemistry set that I suppose I could have poisoned someone with. Other than that the bikes I got through childhood that I managed to harm myself on.
Of course they were. I meant things that you plugged in to the wall socket. I might as well tell you of mine.
The Lollipop Maker was my first.
It had a heating element something like the Thing Maker heater. You would mix sugar and corn syrup in a metal pot. Until it boiled. Boiling sugar. Think about it. Then you would mix in color and flavor. Then you would put sticks n a mold and pour in the molten sugar.
Ultimately you would have shitty, sticky globs on a stick. If you didn’t give yourself third degree burns.
That kind of a thing.
Not something I had (I somehow came across it when finishing up my PhD thesis), but the Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments from 1960 is quite the thing. Page 34: Make some chlorine gas! Just in case there’s trench warfare in your future.
My parents only bought me socks and Christmas ornaments. I hate my childhood and hope to never return.
Pretty sure our Slip and Slide had a lot less padding than they do today, lots of grass burns and rocks were found and none of the trampolines had nets.
Wait… they put padding on a slip and slide these days? Really? That’s cheating!
Rich, the lollipop thing reminds me of a few different “heat things up and they do weird stuff” toys I had, but I don’t remember the names of them at all. :(
My chemistry set had chemicals that would be illegal to own now. My favorite thing was using the alcohol lamp to heat up glass tubes and stretch them like taffy. Or the one where you would mix sulfur and iron filings to make ‘fools gold’. I mixed it in the cover of a jar. It had plastic in it. Luckily I made it in the back yard. The smoke was horrible.
Ha ha. I could make stink gas with mine, but I don’t think it told me how to make actual poison gas!
In sixth grade I was best friends with a guy who is now a NASA scientist working on the next Mars Rover. He and I and another friend did our damndest to make nitroglycerine. All we wanted to do was make a small amount and ignite it because…we were kids! What we were missing was hydrosulfuric acid, H2SO4. We had sulfuris acid, H2SO3, and tried to bind that last oxygen molecule, but could never do it.
You win.
It was a pretty boring childhood, but one thing I did toy with once were the tiny papper wrappers filled with gunpowder that you threw on the ground to make noise.
After scaring (but not scarring) myself by blowing one in my hand, it didn’t surprise me to find out they were banned a few years later.
A friend of mine did get a bit too much into chemistry (of which I now very little) and made smokebombs, which weren’t all that dangerous (but very smoky), but he screwed up once making them on the stove and someone called the fire department - no actual fire, though. (I wasn’t there at the time. Seriously, not just for legal purposes).
Bang snaps consist of a small amount of gravel or coarse sand impregnated with a minute quantity (~0.2 milligrams)[2] of silver fulminate high explosive
I once took several boxes of them and wrapped them in paper from a shoe box. The sucker was about the size of a cherry. I threw it at my feet. I ended up with a bunch of stone fragments in my legs.
We were in a liberal school in grade school and we had the run of the lab in sixth grade, including fucking around in it after school. The teacher didn’t care, trusted us completely because we were smart kids.
That’s where we tried to make the nitro and tried to blow it up after we wondered if indeed we had made it. We had the Bunsen Burner on and a little teaspoon of the stuff clamped over it, and we were huddling behind a desk, wondering it it would explode as it heated up.
Very stupid in retrospect but a fun memory. We were hoping for a bang and a small mushroom-shaped cloud. We got neither. :)
Oh. I got it. All our stuff on the playground in the 80/90s was made out of metal. It got hot as hell and if it wasn’t maintained properly, which it rarely was, it would cut you. I see the playgrounds today are very, very different, and it’s all plastic or resin, something like that. I imagine the groups before me had even “worse” toys.
I also assume some of the things we played on are just not okay because I don’t see the same things when I join my nephews at these places.
Kids in the 1950s had all the fun.
My dad brewed up a vial of some fairly potent acid in chemistry that he tried to sneak home in his pocket with a rubber stopper. . . which melted during the bus ride home, spilling the acid all over his leg, causing some fantastic burning and enough bleeding to freak everyone around out.
My 90s-era candy maker playset had a tragic lack of heating elements, but it was super high concept.
It wasn’t just the guys! My mom had an antique wood burning kitchen stove meant for kids complete with miniature tea kettle, pots and pans. Not sure anyone ever used it however. I guess it was meant to teach various womanly chores at a young age. She also had antique miniature clothes irons, tea service sets, etc.
Wait, those are banned? I have some in my room at school!