We go through a lot of the "Purell" hand sanitizer at home, enough that it makes getting the gallon jug of it from Sam's Club worthwhile. This stuff is 67% ethanol plus some gelling agent. DW was going to throw out our latest empty bottle of the stuff when I noticed there was still about 1/2 inch of the goo in it. I was pretty sure the stuff would burn, so I wanted to try an experiment with it.

Namely, what happens if you drop a really big firecracker into a mostly empty bottle of hand sanitizer? <img src="/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Knowing ethanol burns with an almost invisible blue flame I waited until dark to try it. I expected a cool fireball and maybe some flaming globs of goo flying through the air.

In retrospect, I think my mistake was shaking the bottle before adding the firecracker. Even though the alcohol was gelled it apparently still had a high vapor pressure resulting in the bottle being filled with ethanol fumes. These fumes caught on fire as soon as the burning fuse approached the mouth of the bottle. Blue flame shot from the bottle like a jet's afterburner, it was a really impressive sight. The only problem was that the firecracker was still in my hand which was now ingulfed in flame (2nd degree burns across thumb and two fingers). Of course, this also changed the rate at which the fuse was burning.

I was able to drop the firecracker down into the bottle and get one step away before it blew up. The resulting explosion didn't produce a big blue fireball, which, considering my proximity to it was a good thing. The bursting firecracker actually snuffed the flame and instead just threw hot globs of sticky goo everywhere. Potentially useful, but not all that impressive.

Which leads me to the moral of the story: Always be sure to empty your pockets before putting your pants in the clothes hamper otherwise your wife will be very angry when she finds a lighter in the clothes drier! <img src="/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

-Blast