Experiments in Failure
A friend once told me that MIT, unlike other colleges such as Harvard, sets its students up to be accepting of failure. Whether intentional or not, classes are always difficult and the workload is very high. It is extremely difficult to achieve straight A’s throughout your entire MIT career, and to some, a B is failure. Yet even after the failure, MIT asks you to perform just as well or better on the next test, problem set, or final. I think MIT’s reason for doing this is neither to produce better engineers – in the sense of more capable – or to bring students down to earth – which it tends to do anyway – but to force students to learn to get right back into the fray when failure strikes. I think the biggest lesson learned from the ‘forced failure’ experience here is to go down kicking and come back up with the past behind you. Lessons from the failure are remembered, but not dwelt upon. You don’t get a chance to sit down and take a break. This is an extremely useful habit to foster, especially since many students are used to constant success they experienced in grade school before they came to MIT. In my case, grade school did not offer a laminar stream of success. Instead, there was some turbulence along the way that forced me to learn to fight on after failure a bit early.
While I had been entering projects in the science fair since eighth grade, at my high school we were only eligible for the senior division in grades ten through twelve. I won the grand champion award in both the school and county fairs every possible year in the senior division, something that no one had done in over thirty years. After the first two years of winning, most would be encouraged to continue to win science fairs, and I was as well, but not for the same reasons. I had set a standard for myself now – winning. To drop below the standard was to fail, so while others were encouraged by the lure of the happiness from success, I was encouraged by the distaste of the depression from failure.
By my senior year, the experimental work behind science projects had become fairly easy for me, since I had determined which methods of experimenting and ways of presenting data resulted in the best responses from the judges. I was taking both AP physics and chemistry that year, and one requirement of each class was that I do a project which focused on their curriculum. Luckily my junior project was in engineering, which counted as physics, so I could use it to fulfill the physics requirement. That left me with a choice of either a chemistry project or a chemistry project. The only problem was that I really didn’t enjoy chemistry as much as physics. The class was fun – even though all I wanted to do was learn how to make explosives – but I rarely paid attention or took notes, and I paid for my lack of attention with solid B’s in the class and I didn’t care.
My teacher, a cool grown up hippie who fermented wine in his basement, even commented to me, “You know, you could get A’s in this class if you wanted.”
“I know.” was my simple reply. The conversation was over, but I think my chemistry teacher’s sentiments led him to assume I would exhibit a similar lack of intensity in my other endeavors. I knew by then that I would need a particularly crazy idea in order to win the science fair, and I wasn’t about to lose. All my friends were already goading me about winning, not about getting A’s.
I thought about the project for about three months, which seems like a long time, but in my experience with high school and research projects alike, the idea contributes to about seventy percent of the project’s success. I came upon my idea while trying to think of new ways to solve the oil shortage problem. Bacteria powered batteries didn’t interest me all that much, but high voltage did. What could I do in chemistry that involved high voltage aside from ionize things? That’s it! I wrote up my proposal and submitted all of the safety forms that I would need for the project titled “Hydrocarbon Formation through Electrical Ionization.”
The idea was simple enough. Get some solid carbon, ionize it, mix it with hydrogen that is also ionized and the two should condense into different random hydrocarbons that could be discovered even in trace amounts with a gas chromatograph. I ran some preliminary calculations on the entropy of the chemical reaction and the equations said it would work, mainly because the reaction of generic hydrocarbon synthesis appeared to be slightly exothermic. Soon I had a complicated maze of tubes and expensive organic glassware that did absolutely nothing. It seemed that my mad scientist’s lab setup was getting too much air into the system. I would need a chamber that was sealed in order to get a good atmosphere of hydrogen – as well as a high energy spark – for any significant reaction to happen.
My first idea for the chamber seemed great until the chamber didn’t exist anymore. It consisted of a five liter used acid jug common around chemistry labs. The idea was to suspend two nearly-touching carbon rods inside with the electrical wires sticking through a rubber cork. A tube also penetrated the cork, which allowed for evacuation of the jug so that I could fill it with hydrogen gas.
I remember the sequence of events that day extremely well. I set up the vacuum pump and a series of tubes, valves, and more organic glassware in order to have a hydrogen-producing chemical reaction that would feed the jug after it had been evacuated. My friends accused me of just wanting to have a crazy contraption, but I insisted that it was necessary. With the jug evacuated I started the hydrochloric acid and magnesium reaction that would produce hydrogen gas, opened the correct valve and filled the jug with hydrogen. Tightly sealing the jug, I carried it down the hall to the metals shop, where a welder was available. I wanted a high current electric arc and I assumed a welder would work perfectly. There were no classes in the shop the last period of the day, so I was alone with my teacher, who paid little attention to what I was doing.
Behind the tinted curtain that surrounded the welding area, I connected the wires and turned on the welder. Nothing. I flipped the switch off and on again. Still Nothing. Maybe the electrodes aren’t close enough to form an arc, I thought. I grabbed a welding helmet and hit the jug with it…
BOOOOOM!
The jug exploded less than two feet from me. Not shaken at all, I cocked my head to the side, looking at the carbon rod support that was the only thing left on the table after the explosion and muttered, “Well, that wasn’t supposed to happen!” I poked my head out from behind the curtain. “Are you okay?” I asked.
Crawling out from under his desk, Mr. Gable looked at me with wide eyes, “Yeah. What happened? Are you okay?”
“Perfectly, but I think I cracked your welding helmet. Sorry”
Just then another teacher ran into the room wondering where the shotgun was. The room was completely covered with little shards of glass. It took me almost an hour to clean them all off the floor. What I hadn’t realized until after the explosion was that one of the vacuum pump’s fittings was not tightened all the way, leaking air into the jug and creating a near perfect explosive mix with the hydrogen. The welding helmet ended up protecting me from the flying shards of glass, and I think I used it because my sub-conscious was thinking of safety.
I didn’t get in trouble with anyone, but none of the science teachers would let me run experiments of any kind in their labs anymore, something about dangerous and safety. I hadn’t gotten any conclusive results with my project, and now my chemistry teacher was openly telling students that he didn’t think my project would work. I was determined to win the science fair; this little problem was not going to stop me.
I contacted a professor of a chemistry lab at a local college, and he graciously allowed me to work in his lab, which had a hydrogen supply and other useful equipment, including a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer (GCMS) – a device that can determine the molecular weight of the molecules in the gas, thus identifying very accurately what is present. After a few weeks more of research and construction, I had built myself a new reaction chamber sporting machined parts and a water displacement method for achieving a hydrogen atmosphere. I proceeded with my experiments at the college, using heavily modified computer monitor circuitry as a power supply. The new chamber performed wonderfully – which basically means it didn’t explode. I managed to extract samples of gas from the reactor and analyze them in the GCMS several times, and every time trace amounts of hydrocarbons were present that were not there before the reaction had taken place.
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As I walked up to the stage to receive my grand champion award, friends yelled funny things from the crowd. I had more trouble keeping a straight face than I did finding their smiling faces in the crowd through glaring stage lights. It was our senior year and the last one of these ceremonies we were going to attend, so we decided to have fun with it and be a bit rowdy. The awards were already decided anyway. Friends swapped places with each other as we thought the awards should have been given and a call of “I love you mom!” rang from the student section after a prompt from the moderator to be thankful to the help of our families, all while thousands of dollars rained down on students in the form of little white envelopes handed out on stage.
I was happy about a lot of things that year: Proving my science teacher wrong, handing the GCMS printout to him early one morning and leaving; walking down the hall after the awards ceremony, greeting familiar faces and familiar congratulations; hanging out with my friends after the fair, going to a late-night diner and celebrating; but most of all I was happy that I didn’t let the things that could have stopped me stop me. I could have given up after the second design exploded instead of working; I could have given up after all the science teachers agreed to kick me out of the high school labs, but I didn’t, and in the end I achieved what I had set out to, even if that was only to not achieve failure.