7/28/10

Things I learned from my teacher -

How a type of element combination in the universe mates
(mustard gas working this way)


It was not until the battle of Mesines in July, 1917, that the Germans introduced their blue cross and yellow cross shells containing... dichloroethyl sulphide (mustard gas) with variants as incapacitating and deadly... in 1918 the British had a mustard gas of their own make. - MR. CHURCHILL ON POISON GAS. New York Times 10 Oct. 1923
This is pretty interesting and yet scary.

Basically some molecules in the world have a bromine, iodine, or chlorine on them – and this 'class' have particular ways they can react (mustard gas among them). Their secret ways of mating is to either have a) part of the molecule just ‘jump off’ (mustard gas does this way – called Sn2) or have part just get bumped off after a fight (called Sn1) . The class are haloalkanes, and this are 'addiction' mechanisms.

Well mustard gas – get this – reacts with water – (the water from the person’s eye) and do all sorts of crap. The chlorine on the molecule will jump ship and the water will have it’s way with the sulfur center to the horror of the person the reaction is performed upon.

What a disaster.
(Edit: so I found this later.. a New York Times article suggesting that 'only 1 or 2%' of mustard gas victims died.. whereas 24% die when 'hit by bullets' ... "bullets are responsible for 25 times as many blinded as gas. Out of over 70,000 gas casualties, there were just twenty-nine men blinded in one or both eyes" - I don't know how realistic that is. When you think about a cloud of gas and 1 bullet, you would assume a cloud hits a wider volume?- GAS WARFARE IS CALLED HUMANE :Puts More Men Out of Action With Less Hurt Than Any Other Method. New York Times Mar. 1924

No comments:

Post a Comment