I don't know how old this is, but it came up in a discussion I was having elsewhere today. A truly sad commentary on our nation today:

Quote :

"In 1999, Restoration Hardware founder Stephen Gordon teamed up with Renee Whitney, general manager of a toy company called Wild Goose, to try to re-create the chemistry set Herbert marketed almost 50 years ago. “Don was so sweet,” Whitney recalls. “He invited us to his home to have dinner with him and his wife. Then he pulled his old chemistry set out of the garage. It was amazing – a real metal cabinet, like a little closet, filled with dozens of light-resistant bottles.” Gordon and Whitney soon learned that few of the items in Mr. Wizard’s cabinet could be included in the product. “Unfortunately, we found that more than half the chemicals were illegal to sell to children because they’re considered dangerous,” Whitney explains. By the time the Mr. Wizard Science Set appeared in stores, it came with balloons, clay, Super Balls, and just five chemicals, including laundry starch, which was tagged with an ominous warning: HANDLE CAREFULLY. NOT EXPECTED TO BE A HEALTH HAZARD."

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/chemistry_pr.html

And we wonder why we're falling behind in science and math...

10/26/2011 7:05:22 PM

i swear to God kids aren't interested in science until you show them how to hurt themselves with it.

boys at least. girls apparently like electric cars. go figure.

10/26/2011 7:22:35 PM

The solution to falling science & math scores is to give kids little glass bottles of nitro-glycerin?

I guess they cant fail Biology if they're dead.

10/27/2011 1:41:00 AM

Don't you know, the real terrorists are Climate Scientists.

Ok, enough of that. I had a chemistry set when I was a kid and it didn't have anything overtly dangerous in it. I think the worst it had was magnesium. It actually required learning how to use it if you wanted to hurt yourself.

Yes, I think we've lost that with kids now. Even my set wasn't a fully fleshed out as I'm guessing they were ten years prior.

That's why I tend to buy the "easy science experiment" style books when I see them. Ultimately the science kits my sons will have available will be failures (although the Star Wars line looks fun, but not explosively fun).

10/27/2011 9:39:18 AM

I agree that kids should be getting their hands on this stuff early, and the crazier the final product is the more interested the kids are going to be, but the flip side is that kids also used to break thermometers and play with the mercury in the 1950s.

Obviously, there is some happy middle ground. I blame shitty parents and our litigious society.

10/27/2011 9:51:45 AM

Quote :

"Don't you know, the real terrorists are Climate Scientists."

10/27/2011 10:17:30 AM

There are people who believe that.

It makes me sad.

They should be given chemistry sets.

10/27/2011 10:21:03 AM

You want kids to learn science make a video game about it. This isn't the fucking 50's.

10/28/2011 10:00:33 AM

Like literally that article is just about old people trying to recreate their youth then being depressed when it doesn't work out. Even if they put the full chemistry set together the kids would just be bored with it and they'd cope with that sense of alienation by blaming the kids themselves.

GUH GUH I GOT MY KID A STICK-AND-A-WHEEL TO LEARN PHYSICS BUT THEY JUST SIT INSIDE PLAYING POKEMON I SWEAR THIS WORLD IS GOIN DOWN THE TUBES

[Edited on October 28, 2011 at 10:03 AM. Reason : .]

10/28/2011 10:02:00 AM

Absolutely untrue. I grew up playing the hell out of electronics kits, even though video games were readily available. I'd be shocked if no kid anywhere wanted to play with an honest to god chemistry set.

10/28/2011 10:06:04 AM

Quote :

"kids also used to break thermometers and play with the mercury in the 1950s. "

shit they were still around, at least at jamestown middle school, in the late 80s.

(guilty of playing with mercury)

[Edited on October 28, 2011 at 10:31 AM. Reason : .]

10/28/2011 10:27:34 AM

Yes because kids today clearly have the same baseline access and exposure to video games that you did. And video games surely haven't changed in their quality or range of appeal. You're going to be the old man handing out Werthers Originals to little kids because your mind is incapable of processing that times change.

edit: Why am I even bothering to state this, you're of a political ideology that hasn't moved past the 18th century.

[Edited on October 28, 2011 at 10:43 AM. Reason : .]

10/28/2011 10:29:08 AM

Yes kids need chemistry! When I have kids I'm getting them their own miniature oil refinery.

10/28/2011 10:32:14 AM

I seriously doubt even in the 50's that anything near a majority of kids were playing with chemistry sets. It was a smaller, geekier subset of kids that were into it, and I would guess that today the same relative portion of kids have that same geek factor.

But instead of chemistry sets, they're playing with Arduinos, or DDOSing random websites for lulz.

There are plenty of sad commentaries on our nation today, but methinks this is a false dilemma.

10/28/2011 10:35:09 AM

There's more to the article than just the chemistry sets. It talks of declines in science labs at schools and a general decline in hands on learning due to litigation fears. The ultimate point of the article is that we are literally making the tools of discovery illegal. And don't think that we won't be doing the same thing with modern electronic tools as well, all it takes is someone using an Arudino in an explosive device or something like that and we'll see breathless news stories and congressional testimony about how these devices which enable you to construct explosives are just freely available to anyone, after all they did it for simple flasks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_flask#Legal_issues).

10/28/2011 1:18:09 PM

^

Quote :

"Like many other common pieces of glassware, Erlenmeyer flasks could potentially be used in the production of drugs. In an effort to restrict such production, some U.S. states (including Texas) have made possession of common flasks illegal without permit, including Erlenmeyer flasks, as well as chemicals identified as common starting materials."

Perry just got my vote.

10/28/2011 2:25:06 PM

Makes about as much sense as the rigmarole I have to go through to get cold medicine.

10/28/2011 2:34:05 PM

Quote :

"And we wonder why we're falling behind in science and math..."

Couldn't be at all because of people exactly like you

10/28/2011 10:23:52 PM

I had a chemistry set as a kid until I set the carpet on fire in my bedroom. It was awesome & totally worth the verbal lashing I got. Way better than video games.

10/28/2011 11:36:14 PM

Quote :

"I seriously doubt even in the 50's that anything near a majority of kids were playing with chemistry sets. It was a smaller, geekier subset of kids that were into it, and I would guess that today the same relative portion of kids have that same geek factor."

wanna know what happens when that geeky subset gets thwarted from such tools of discovery

our nation goes into decline

10/29/2011 12:16:49 AM

Or they all go to 4chan.

Either way, it's pretty much the same result.

10/29/2011 10:35:00 AM

I had a pretty decent chemistry set that had probably 50 different chemicals, so likely a wide variety, and it had a long booklet of all the experiments you could do. I played with it for a bit, but the experiments were pretty boring or complicated and I lost interest. I also had Lego Mindstorms, an electronics bread board kit, those steel electronic/mechanical play sets...but I just played with my Legos and FPS video games mostly

Now I'm in R&D working with nanotechnology and do chemistry every day, and I love it.

Probably what piqued my interest much more was my parents force feeding my Bill Nye episodes (which were awesome), BattleBots, and Mythbusters. Those gave me the interest in science and I followed my own path, liked Chemistry class in high school, and figured out I wanted to do nanotech (the other path being stem cell research).

The article is sad, sure, but its not exactly the end of science in America.

10/31/2011 10:24:30 AM

The old guy specifically mentions creating nitro-glycerine, and how fun it was to make explosives. This whole nostalgia is about blowing things up, not about playing junior scientist.

11/1/2011 3:01:42 AM

Quote :

"wanna know what happens when that geeky subset gets thwarted from such tools of discovery our nation goes into decline"

Did you even bother to read the rest of my post?

don't be stupid.

11/1/2011 9:57:10 AM

Quote :

"More than half of the suggested experiments in a multimedia package for schools called “You Be the Chemist,” created in 2004 by the Chemical Educational Foundation, are to be performed by the teacher alone, leaving students to blow up balloons (with safety goggles in place) or answer questions like “How many pretzels can you eat in a minute?”"

I'm pretty sure Mr. Wizard did the "How many pretzels can you eat in a minute" experiment.

Quote :

"but the flip side is that kids also used to break thermometers and play with the mercury in the 1950s."

My mom had a vial of mercury made from a ton of thermometers she got when the hospital she was working at shut down. My brother and I used to play with it as kids. It was so fun to roll it around in the palm of your hand.

11/1/2011 10:49:46 AM

yep, and today we're all like, CALL IN THE HAZMAT CREW if a CFL breaks with it's tiny amount of mercury.

11/1/2011 5:21:22 PM