Theodore Gray's Completely Mad Science by Theodore Gray

Author:Theodore Gray
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2016-09-12T16:00:00+00:00

HOW I DID IT

Creating sodium explosions has been a favorite pastime of mine for years. The trick to getting these photographs was to control the process as much as possible, while dealing with the degree to which it really can’t be controlled.

I started by building a small device with a metal cup (about the size of a shot glass) on a hinge with a rod holding it upright, and a block of wood holding the rod in place. When I pulled the block of wood away using a long string, the rod dropped down, allowing the cup to flip over, dropping the sodium into a bowl of cold water underneath it. (See photo of contraption at right.) Cold water works better than hot water, which tends to cause the reaction to happen too fast, resulting, surprisingly, in smaller explosions.

When you drop sodium into water, it first sits for some time fizzling as it generates hydrogen gas. Then, a completely unpredictable number of seconds later, that hydrogen explodes violently. There is absolutely no way to know how long it’s going to take before exploding, and the explosion only lasts a few milliseconds. This makes it tricky to capture the light of the explosion: A standard camera shutter is not fast enough to open fully before the explosion is finished, even if you trigger it the instant the explosion starts.

My solution was to do the photography at night, and set up an optical trigger (which detects the light of the explosion) in such a way that it closed, rather than opened the shutter. After turning off all the lights, I opened the camera shutter, then pulled the string which dropped the sodium into the water. A few seconds later it exploded. A few milliseconds after that the optical trigger fired the flashes, which let you see the bowl and smoke just the right amount of time after the explosion had set them in motion, and a few milliseconds after that the shutter closed, capturing the shot.

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