Light the lamp with a match. Fun chemistry experience at home

ENTERTAINING EXPERIENCES AT HOME
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Light the lamp with a match! Chemical experiments

Entertaining experiments in chemistry

Entertaining experiences at home / Chemistry experiments for children

For this experience, it is more convenient to take a table lamp. Disconnect one of its wires from the plug and lengthen, not forgetting good insulation.

Take a small narrow glass tube with thin walls (the easiest way is to use glass drawers with drawn ends). Insert electrodes into the tube from both ends - wires with a diameter of about 1 mm; secure them to the tube with electrical tape. The electrodes should not touch, the distance between them is 1-2 mm.

Connect the extended wire from the lamp to one of the electrodes, and connect the other electrode with a wire to the free socket of the plug and insulate. You will get a circuit that is open in one area - between the electrodes. Fix the glass tube in a horizontal position. This is quite easy to do if the wires are rigid, with plastic insulation: clamp the wire and the tube will hold on to it. Preparation for the experiment is over, you can turn on the plug in the network. The lamp, of course, will not burn.

Light the lamp with a match!

Bring a lit match to the tube into which the electrodes are inserted. If the tube is not made of refractory glass, then the glass will soften and the tube will sag a little. And then the lamp will light up, despite the fact that the circuit is still open. The fact is that the salts that make up the glass are ionized when heated, and the glass becomes a conductor.

If the experiment does not work because the tube is wide, then instead of a match, take a candle or spirit lamp. Lighting a lamp with a candle is also a spectacular experience.

And you can also light it with molten saltpeter. Fix a test tube vertically, on the bottom of which a little potassium or sodium nitrate (potassium or sodium nitrate) is poured, and lower two copper wires into it. To prevent the copper electrodes from touching, pass them through the cork. Connect the lamp to the electrodes in the same way as in the previous experiment. When you turn on the current, the lamp, of course, will not light up: solid nitrate does not conduct current.

Light the lamp with a match!

Heat the saltpeter to melting with the help of dry fuel tablets - the lamp will flash. The ions that made up the crystal lattice of the salt acquire mobility, and the circuit closes. The lamp will burn even after you remove the flame: the saltpeter melt has a high electrical resistance, and the heat that is released during the passage of current keeps the saltpeter in a molten state.

In a similar way, you can experiment not with a melt, but with a solution, for example, of common salt. In this case, it is better to take graphite electrodes. Immerse them first simply in a jar of water, and then add salt in small portions, and the lamp will flare up brighter and brighter.

By the way, it is convenient to check the electrical conductivity of solutions in this way. Check, for example, how solutions of soda, sugar and acetic acid of different concentrations conduct electricity.

And one more, not quite ordinary experience with an electric light bulb, but not with a big one, but with a flashlight. Fix it in a strip of tin, bent at a right angle, and insert the strip into a small beaker so that the glass bulb of the light bulb is inside the beaker and faces the bottom of the beaker. Connect the bulb to the battery: the protrusion on the base, connect its outermost section to the negative pole, and the tin strip to the positive. Please note: you cannot solder the conductors, because during the experiment the solder may melt. You need to come up with a mechanical contact or use a cartridge from an old flashlight.

Before starting the experiment, remove the lamp from the glass and pour sodium nitrate into it (potassium nitrate is not suitable in this case; why - it will become clear later). Place the glass on an asbestos mesh or metal plate and heat it on the flame of a gas burner or spirit lamp; dry alcohol is not very convenient, as it is difficult to control the temperature of the melt. Saltpeter melts at 309 °C, and at 390 °C it already decomposes; Here in such an interval and it is necessary to maintain the temperature. To do this, change either the size of the flame or the distance to the glass. Make sure that the melt does not solidify, even from the surface.

Light the lamp with a match!

Carefully lower the light bulb into the molten saltpeter. Most of the glass bottle should be immersed in the melt, but make sure that the upper part of the base, to which the conductor is soldered, does not come into contact with the saltpeter - a short circuit will occur. Hold the lighted bulb in saltpeter for about an hour, then turn off the current, turn off the burner and carefully deliver the bulb. When it cools, rinse it with water and you will see that the inside of the bulb is covered with a mirror layer!

We have already said that when heated, the charged particles in the glass acquire mobility (that is why the lamp was lit when the tube was heated with a match). The main actors are sodium ions: already at temperatures above 300 ° C, they become quite mobile. The glass itself remains completely solid.

When you immersed the switched on light bulb in the saltpeter melt, the glass from which the can was made turned out to be in an electric field: the spiral is the negative pole, the melt that is in contact with the tin strip is positive. Mobile sodium ions began to move in the glass towards the cathode, i.e., towards the spiral. In other words, they moved towards the inner wall of the balloon.

So, the mirror coating is sodium from the inside? Yes. But how did the ions turn into metal?

Hot metals (including those from which the spiral is made) emit electrons. From the spiral, they hit the inner surface of the glass and connected there with sodium ions. This is how sodium metal was formed.

But why is potassium nitrate not suitable for the experiment? After all, nitrate does not seem to be involved in the process ... No, it does. When the sodium ion became a neutral atom, a negatively charged ion hole remained in the glass. This is where sodium nitrate is needed: from its melt, under the influence of an electric field, sodium ions penetrate the glass and fill the holes. And potassium ions are about one and a half times larger than sodium ions, they will not be able to enter the glass. In potassium nitrate, the lamp will simply crack.

Such an unusual electrolysis through glass is sometimes used in practice to obtain a layer of very pure sodium, or, more strictly, spectrally pure.

Author: Olgin O.M.

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