The Lucky Kids of Norgate

I decided that I would make a rocket. I was about 13 years old and had no idea how to do it, but that never stopped me before. I found a spent co2 cartridge that looked perfect. Shiny, metal and it had a hole in one end for the rocket fuel to push out. Fuel. Now that was a problem. What to use? Aha!! I had some fire crackers that my father gave me for the 4th of July. They had rocket powder in them didn't they? No, they didn't. They had high explosive very fast burning flash powder in them. I didn't know the difference, so without delay set about to make my rocket.
Fire crackers in those days had interesting names: Black Cat; Dixie Boy; Gorilla and many others. In the 1950's most or all were made in Macau (sic) or Canton by rolling flash powder in Chinese newspaper strips with a paper fuse. Crimp the ends and Voila! a firecracker. The instructions, as if we needed them were: "Place on ground - light fuse - retire quickly". You could set them off in strings like you see in Chinese celebrations or one at a time. You could blow things up, throw them into the air by hand or with a slingshot - or - you could take them apart and harvest the talc-fine powder for other use.
I poured fine powder into the tiny hole in the end of the cartridge and put a Jetex fuse in the hole. This fuse was available to hobbyists for use in their Jetex rocket engines

(http://jetex.org/) used to power models and things. Yes, I had one of those and it worked fine, but I wanted to build my own. I didn't bother with the stick that you usually find on a rocket. I figured it would fly just fine by itself. But it needed a launcher, didn't it? I built one from a couple of boards nailed into a "V" shape and rested it on two bricks.

The day of the big launch arrived and I decided to get an audience together for the show. Five or six neighborhood kids, none older than me, gathered closely around the launcher. By closely I mean a foot or two. Right behind it. I carefully placed the "rocket" in the vee and lit the fuse. Excitement built as the fire crept towards the shiny cylinder that would soon fly high in the air. At the moment the flame from the fuse hit the hole in the cartridge there was a loud explosion. The launcher flew apart and shrapnel flew in all directions. We heard pieces whirring past our heads as the shiny rocket cylinder ripped itself apart. Stunned by the magnitude of the failure of the rocket to fly and by the loud explosion, it never occurred to me to see if anyone had been hit by flying shards of metal or wood. No one had. Some of you reading this will say "God protects fools" and others will say "amazing good luck that nobody was blinded, killed or maimed".

Years later in a physics class I learned why the thing exploded instead of flying. Something to do with the rapid rise in pressure from the extremely fast burning powder and the tiny hole available to vent the gasses.

Live and learn. Still, a few years later I was once again making things that went boom!, but this time on purpose. (There was one glass bottle bomb with a defective fuse that I put in a tree crotch and Max lit. It blew the second he touched the fuse, glass shards whizzing everywhere but neither of us was touched. At the time I felt that God was saving me for some higher purpose. Would have been easier for God to stay my hand.)

Firecracker photo: pzrservices.typepad.com/.../vintage_firecra.html

CO2 cartridge photo: pillsburystore.com