Mercury Thiocyanide

the rock was fun, but even more entertaining was the kids’ scripted acting at the end.

i lit about 10 thousand million of those when i was a kid in the 80s… does this mean an imminent death from mercury poisoning for me?????

Very cool – just a quick note though for those wondering: those little black snakes you lit up as a kid do not contain mercury and they are still available AFAIK. The ones you probably lit as kids depend on Sodium Bicarbonate and are harmless.

I’ve never seen a snake like the one in the video, but supposedly they used to be sold as the “Pharaoh’s Serpent” according to wikipedia.

Oh man, I remember snakes as a kid. They were my favorite “kiddie” firework! I would light dozens of them at once and watch them fill the driveway with long trails of ash. They’d stink like heck, too.

–TwoDragons

Wow. Total childhood flashback.
I remember that lighting one at a time started to get boring so of course we just lit the entire box.

I long for my own personal bottle of orange ammonium dichromate.

This shit we used to do 30 yrs back when were kids. this is really old stuff. Neatorama’s post quality is going down?

Nate–BWAAHAHA! We used to do that too! Then we got bored and started to experiment. We discovered that if you dumped out several boxes and stacked them into a huge pyramid, and then lit the top one, it would start a chain reaction that lit the rest down the line. You could keep the fun going for eternity with enough boxes!

Mom banished us to the road after we filled the entire yard with sooty curls. Did you know that stuff turns into a black paste when it gets wet, and makes awesome shoe-prints all over freshly-cleaned carpet…?

–TwoDragons

Yum! Poison!

I can totally see ancient witch-priests dazzling the poor town-folk with this.

But then Ali S. has a good point about the witch trials!