Transcription
I thought I'd show you a very quick demonstration, just before it disappears, of a historic and very vintage way of making sulfur chloride. As you can see here, they are generating chlorine in a Florence flask. And then here we can see a Wolf bottle and then a retort. Now, this took me quite some time to set up. A very, very similar setup; I've got a Wolf bottle here with, um, some concentrated sulfuric acid in it to dry the chlorine. And then we've got some potassium permanganate in the Florence flask here with an old thistle funnel. And then we're adding concentrated hydrochloric acid to it. What's happening is the concentrated hydrochloric acid reacting with the potassium permanganate; it's being oxidized and then it's filling this flask, this Wolf bottle, which actually has a safety tube on it, and obviously it's pointing away from me, just in case the pressure would be too much. You can see the yellow color of chlorine gas here. And then in this old-fashioned retort, we have some sulfur, which was just some flowers of sulfur which I ground up, and there's got a small flame onto it to melt it. And then as it slowly distills, we get sulfur monochloride. It's not the most efficient way, but I thought it would be a very interesting little experiment to set up. Just actually drilling the corks themselves with a cork borer and bending the glass took about maybe an hour, believe it or not, in and of itself. And you can see why, for instance, I'm going to use a much quicker setup using good old modern quick-fit glassware whenever I demonstrate that in the fume cupboard next time, whenever we do the same experiment. But I thought it'd be just fun to, to show you some antique equipment. This is a certainly 1920s Florence flask; we're using something a bit older here, which is a Wolf bottle with three necks. And also, um, we've got a very, very old-fashioned retort, the cork. And of course, sulfur chloride does attack cork, and rubber is also attacked by chlorine, so don't expect them to last too long. But we do have about, maybe about five or six milliliters, um, after running this experiment. Let me just add for us some concentrated hydrochloric acid; it will begin to bubble up. You can see why we don't use thistle funnels any longer, but we do get a good evolution of chlorine. I'll just stick the film head down. Years ago, this would have been expected to be done on an open laboratory in a school. I'm sure everyone was very nauseous and had their lungs well cleared out from the chlorine and sulfur monochloride after the end of the experiment. So we'll be repeating this same experiment, but using slightly more modern equipment, which I'm sure will be a lot more efficient, uh, and certainly won't uh, allow wastage of reagents by maybe bubbling them up or losing chlorine gas, as I'm sure we have through the corks, of which I've used a powerful wax also, just to make sure they're sealed in. So we'll maybe do a very quick experiment with that sulfur monochloride later on in the future.