Each month, Popular Science features one of Theodore Gray's DIY (if dangerous) experiments. See the whole list here.

2006

January

Making a Perfect Match

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Make Your Own Sparks

Cost: $270
Time: 20
Minutes
Safe | | | | |
Crazy

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Build a Battery

Cost: $20
Time: 3
Hours
Safe | | | | |
Crazy

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There are great things to come in the future, jet cars and all that. But the past held a few wonders too—for example, jars of mercury available at the corner apothecary. Just 50 years ago, people treated the shiny
liquid metal like a toy. Sadly, I’ll never experience the strange sensation of sticking my entire arm into a barrel of mercury, as kids once did during factory tours. Today mercury is considered a horrific poison, so bad that schools are evacuated for
a broken thermometer.

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Make Sinking Ice

Cost: $65
Time: 2
Hours
Safe | | | | |
Risky

Want a surefire bet for your next cocktail party? First, tell your guests
that aquatic life—at least in temperate
climates—depends largely on the fact
that ice floats. If it sank, lakes would freeze solid instead of forming an
insulating layer of ice on top, killing all the fish. Now bet that you can
magically make an ice cube sink. Grab one from a glass of special cubes

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Food contains an amazing amount of energy. If you don't believe it, feed candy to some kids and watch them bounce off the walls. Of course, tot-baiting is only one way to turn food energy into noise and destruction.

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What: A spacecraft that travels at faster-than-light speeds by distorting, or "warping," the fabric of spacetime. Instead of trying to move through space, the warp drive moves space itself. The ship sits inside a bubble of spacetime bound by a negative energy field that races across the cosmos.

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In 1938 the E.I. DuPont de Nemours Company, known at the time mainly as a maker of explosives, announced what was arguably the single most important invention in the history of legwear: nylon.

Nylon wasn’t discovered by accident or extracted from a natural source. It was one of the first materials engineered from scratch, based on an understanding of polymer chemistry and a desire to plug what was, apparently, a serious hole in the hosiery department.

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Plating at Home

Cost: $30
Easy | | | | | Hard

You may not want to rechrome a '57 Chevy, but you can coat small objects using kits designed for plating jewelry. This $30 plating pen (pmcsupply.com) uses electricity the same as the bumper factory does, just with a couple AA batteries instead of a car-size transformer.

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Dept.: Gray Matter
Element: Titanium
Project: Anodizing a titanium birdhouse
Cost: $75
Time: 2 hours
Dabbler | | | | | Master

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