Hydrogen bomb

“ A bomb dropped from a reasonable height, say 500 feet, would be almost certain to strike some part of the building, and a Zeppelin is an easy vessel to destroy. The firing of one balloon is sufficient to detonate the whole, for the simple reason that hydrogen gas is continuously oozing through the bags in which it is contained. According to a recent statement the Germans are said to be utilising an inert or non-inflammable gas, equal in lifting power to hydrogen, for the inflation of military craft, but scientific thought does not entertain this statement with any degree of seriousness. ”

“ All the energy in that Nevada explosion was not quite sufficient to evaporate the water droplets in a cloud one mile broad, one mile wide, and one mile deep. This is not a very big rain cloud. Such a cloud would give about one third of an inch of rain water over one square mile—not an impressive amount. Even the biggest hydrogen bomb would give only energy enough to evaporate a cloud ten miles by ten miles and towering to the top of the “boiling” portion of our air, which we call the troposphere. ”

“ Consider that the science of the intelligences in the domain that spawned this thing could not destroy it. What chance has our feeble science and powers against such a force? Hydrogen bombs would probably serve only to feed it the energy for which it is starved. ”

“ General O'Donnell was given permission to use hydrogen bombs, contingent on the approval of his scientists.
"What have the bright boys decided?" O'Donnell wanted to know.
He and Micheals were in the living room of an evacuated Schroon Lake house. O'Donnell had made it his new command post.
"Why are they hedging?" O'Donnell demanded impatiently. "The leech has to be blown up quick. What are they fooling around for?"
"They're afraid of a chain reaction," Micheals told him. "A concentration of hydrogen bombs might set one up in the Earth's crust or in the atmosphere. ”

“ The world that had gone on stockpiling hydrogen bombs. The world that had put those bombs in cobalt shells, although it had promised it wouldn't, because the cobalt made them much more terrible and cost no more. The world that had started throwing those bombs, always telling itself that it hadn't thrown enough of them yet to make the air really dangerous with the deadly radioactive dust that came from the cobalt. Thrown them and kept on throwing until the danger point, where air and ground would become fatal to all human life, was approached. ”

“ Original footnotes ↑ According to Supervisory Special Agent J. Stephen Veyera, Chief of the FBI Bomb Data Center, hydrogen peroxide is a key component in homemade explosives because it is easy to obtain and very sensitive to heat, shock and friction. Specifically, hydrogen peroxide in combination with acetone and acid forms triacetone triperoxide ("TATP") , a very volatile explosive chemical. ”

“ This danger proceeds from fire-damp, as one unlucky stroke of the pick may bring forth a stream of carbureted hydrogen gas, inexplosive of itself, but if mixed with eight times its bulk of air, more dangerous than gunpowder, and which, if by chance it comes in contact with the flame of a candle, is sure to explode, and certain death is the result—not always from the explosion itself, but from the after-damp or carbonic acid gas which follows it. ”

“ The heat produced by the flame of hydrogen is thus most intense; substances which are inattackable by the strongest furnaces melt like wax in the jet of oxygen and hydrogen, and in the Drummond light the lime appears gradually to evaporate.
A mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, or of hydrogen and air, may be thus set fire to by a candle; and when previously mixed, a terrific explosion is produced. Persons should therefore be very cautious how they perform experiments with hydrogen, as even skilful chemists have occasionally suffered severely from accidents of this kind. ”

“ Further, since hydrogen is highly explosive, and when mixed in certain proportions with air becomes very dangerous, care must be taken to prevent fire or electric sparks from coming into contact with escaping gas. But the gas escapes of its own accord when the cells are deflated - when in rising the limit of elasticity of the cells is reached, and when the cells are injured, either by pieces of ice or by hostile projectiles. ”

“ A tissue which, when red-hot, will not interrupt the flame of hydrogen, will still intercept that of olefiant gas; and a heated tissue, which would communicate explosion from a mixture of olefiant gas and air, will stop an explosion of fire-damp. Fortunately for the success of the Safety-lamp, carburetted hydrogen requires so high a temperature to carry on its combustion, that even metal, when white-hot, is far below it; and hence red-hot gauze, 147 in sufficient quantity, and of the proper degree of fineness, will abstract heat enough from the flame to extinguish it. ”

“ The result of this is that in a few seconds so much gas, mainly and hydrogen, is driven out of it that the pressure gets too high for the cathode rays to be formed, and unless some precautions to lower the pressure were taken the bombardment would stop. To avoid this, a tube containing charcoal cooled by liquid air is connected with A, and this absorbs the and enough of the hydrogen to keep the vacuum in the cathode ray state. To see what new gases are given off in consequence of the bombardment, a photograph is taken while the connection between A and B is cut off. ”

“ A burst of flame within the gas-bag would not set the gas on fire, because there would be no air inside to feed the fire, but surrounding the gas-bag there was always a certain leakage of hydrogen which would mix with the air in the compartment and this would produce an explosive mixture which needed but the touch of fire to set it off. ”

“ Thus, phosphorus at 150°, and sulphur at 550°, are said to take fire, and two acid products are formed; at 800°, hydrogen gas explodes with oxygen, and produces water; and, according to Ure's view, the flame of combustible bodies may in all cases be considered as the combustion of an explosive mixture of inflammable gas, or vapour, with air; and as to the change of quiescent into distributable heat, and the causes that modify combustion and flame, the facts on these heads are numerous and very important. ”

“ In the preceding section, it was shown that an explosion is simply the rapid oxidation of carbon and hydrogen. To form an explosive agent, the problem is, how to bring together in a convenient form the combustible, carbon or hydrogen, and the oxygen required to oxidize it. Carbon may be obtained pure, or nearly pure, in the solid form. As wood charcoal, for example, that substance may be readily procured in any needful abundance; but pure oxygen does not exist in that state, and it is hardly necessary to point out that only the solid form is available in the composition of an explosive agent. ”

“ When a young person makes hydrogen for the first time, he is naturally curious, and hastens to satisfy himself by seeing that it burns: he applies the candle before all the common air has been expelled from the apparatus, and the mixture inside being still explosive, the flame passes back, and the whole is shattered into pieces with the noise and violence of a bombshell. ”

“ He had a hunch that Ferguson and Metty had been building Mercury 203 from Hafnium 179 by the process of successive fusions with Hydrogen 3 and that something had gone wrong with the H-3 production. It appeared that the explosion had been a simple chemical blast caused by the air oxidation of H-2. But the bleeder vent at the other end of the reactor had apparently kicked at the same time. An enormous amount of unused energy had been released, blowing the entire emergency bleeder system out. ”

“ It is very probable that water is decomposed during the deflagration of gun-powder, and that part of the oxygen furnished to the nascent carbonic acid gas is produced from it. If so, a considerable quantity of hydrogen gas must be disengaged in the instant of deflagration, which expands, and contributes to the force of the explosion. It may readily be conceived how greatly this circumstance must increase the effect of powder, if we consider that a pint of hydrogen [Pg 455] gas weighs only one grain and two thirds ”

“ If carburetted hydrogen be mixed with a sufficient quantity of oxygen gas or common air and fired by the electric spark, or by any other method, an explosion takes place more or less violent according to the quantity of carbonaceous matter condensed in the hydrocarbonat; and the remaining gas consists of carbonic acid, together with any unconsumed gas, or excess of oxygen, whilst the water condenses in drops on the sides of the vessel. A few cubic inches of the mixed airs is as much as can be conveniently managed at a single explosion ”

“ The choke-damp is a mixture of the above, with a little carbonic acid gas, and variable proportions of atmospheric air. As the pure subcarburetted hydrogen requires twice its bulk of oxygen to consume it completely, it will take for the same effect about 10 times its bulk of atmospheric air, since this volume of air contains about two volumes of oxygen. Ten volumes of air, therefore, mixed with one volume of subcarburetted hydrogen, form the most powerfully explosive mixture. If either less or more air be intermixed, the explosive force will be impaired ”

“ As many persons have been seriously wounded, and some have been killed, by these explosions, the utmost precautions should be taken, especially by young chemists, in its preparation. This violent phenomenon is caused by the sudden production of water and nitrogen, at the instant when the metallic oxide is reduced. The quiescent and [1135] divellent affinities seem to be so nicely balanced in this curious compound, that the slightest disturbance is sufficient to incite the hydrogen of the ammonia to snatch the oxygen from the silver. ”

“ It is a very sensible idea to keep spectators away from the generator, as they are very apt to strike matches or tread on the tubes, in spite of warnings to be cautious, for if there should be a leak, even so slight as to be hardly detected, it would cause a violent explosion, and as hydrogen 17is both odorless and colorless, this could easily happen without being noticed. ”

“ Pure hydrogen is a colorless, odorless, transparent and tasteless gas, and has never been liquefied. It is very slightly soluble in water. It is the lightest of all known bodies and is not poisonous, although it cannot support life, and if mixed with a certain proportion of oxygen it can be breathed for a considerable length of time without inconvenience. It is highly inflammable, and burns in the air with an almost colorless, nonluminous flame, forming water. A burning taper is extinguished when plunged into hydrogen, and all bodies which burn in the air are incapable of burning in hydrogen. ”

“ Hydrogen does not spontaneously enter into reaction with any of the elements, although it has a powerful affinity for several of them. Thus, when hydrogen and oxygen are mixed nothing occurs, but if a lighted splint is introduced a violent explosion ensues, water being produced. Similarly chlorine and hydrogen are without action upon each other in the dark, but if the mixture is exposed to a bright light, or if heated by the passage of an electric spark, the gases are at once combined with explosive violence, forming hydrochloric acid. ”

“ It is evident that not only hydrogen, but every other combustible gas, will give an explosive mixture with oxygen. For this reason coal-gas mixed with air explodes when the mixture is ignited. The pressure obtained in the explosions serves as the motive power of gas engines. In this case advantage is taken, not only of the pressure produced by the explosion, but also of that contraction which takes place after the explosion. ”

“ Even the most explosive mixture will not take fire from well burned charcoal, nor by iron heated to any degree short of actual combustion. But on the contrary, hydrogen whether simple or sulphuretted, olefiant gas, or carbonic oxide, may each be set on fire very readily by all these means ”

“ If, therefore, a gun barrel be laid across a fire, and heated to bright redness, and a little water be poured into it at one end by means of a tun-dish with a stop-cock soldered to it, hydrogen gas will issue from the other end, and may be burned, or collected for various purposes. ”

“ To those who are striving to harness and apply the forces of nature to man’s uses, these [105] experiments are dedicated and bequeathed. In the knowledge that hydrogen gas in its free and pure state is the most powerful force known, I herein propound, theoretically, the practicability of using it as a motive power. The inefficiency of coal, as transformed into steam, and the known high efficiency of hydrogen as an explosive force being recognized, placing it first in the list of potentialities, I suggest the introduction of hydrogen gas into engine cylinders. ”

“ THE NATURE OF AN ATOMIC EXPLOSION The most striking difference between the explosion of an atomic bomb and that of an ordinary T.N.T. bomb is of course in magnitude; as the President announced after the Hiroshima attack, the explosive energy of each of the atomic bombs was equivalent to about 20,000 tons of T.N.T.
But in addition to its vastly greater power, an atomic explosion has several other very special characteristics. Ordinary explosion is a chemical reaction in which energy is released by the rearrangement of the atoms of the explosive material. ”