klope3

Thanks. I needed that advice badly. I don't know anything about electrolysis, so it's good to have your input. I knew that, but medieval warring cultures weren't always known for their efficiency. Catapults could also be crazily inefficient; they were difficult to aim, took alot longer to load than the bow, and were basically just meant to smash anything in their paths (friendly soldiers and enemies alike). Cannons were another example. Sometimes, both of these siege machines would be built on-site just before a battle--the catapults would be constructed and the cannons forged with molten metal and a shaped mold. They were so difficult to mobilize that often they would just be left right where they stood after the battle. Okay, thanks for the advice. I'll have to think of some other crazy idea to pose to you all. I'm just glad I was stopped from doing this before I sort of made a fool of myself among scientific circles! P.S. And if you hadn't gotten to me, the Mythbusters surely would've.

Okay. So 12M HCl would be the best product for this situation. But would 12M HCl be produced under the conditions I'm suggesting? If 6M were produced, that really *would* be Fire Lake--but not in a good way! I'm thinking that if 12M HCl were produced, boaters could go out into the water just after the strike and collect as much sodium as possible. A risky mission, of course, with another lightning strike impending at any moment, but that would just add to the drama, which is a good thing.

What? The point is, that's what they're trying to do. Once they have the sodium, they'll be able to use it against enemies offensively and defensively. If you mean that the sodium would just explode in the water after it was separated from the chlorine, that problem would be solved if the entire lake was turned into the acid and a layer of sodium. I got this idea from a friend. In a chemistry class, a solution of salt water somehow got electrified (for a long or short duration, I do not know), and the result was HCl with a layer of Na on the bottom of the beaker. So based on those conditions, the Fire Lake concept should work if the entire lake were properly electrified all at once.

Extension of this thread: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=35756 I'm back with another concept. In this medieval world that I've made (you've got to read the other thread to understand), it would be somewhat difficult to find pure sodium naturally, unless I write in some sort of mine. So I'm working on a concept I like to call "Fire Lake." I wanted to validate it with all you good people to verify its viability. A warlike people with a fascination in what they call "earth magic" has invented a procedure for obtaining an extremely reactive material (pure sodium) for the purposes of explosives and incendiary battle tactics. Firstly, a small lake filled with salt water is found. The denser the concentration of salt, the better. Then a number of tall, solid iron spires are implanted in the lake bottom, possibly of varying heights. A thunderstorm with plenty of lighting should make this concept work. If these solid iron spires rise high enough above other things, it seems, they will be hit by lightning, right? When that electricity hits a spire and tries to go down into the ground, it would electrify the salt water--albeit instantaneously--and, theoretically, separate the lake water into sodium and hydrochloric acid. This separation would be caused by the introduction of electrical energy to NaCl. When the salt splits into Na and Cl, the chlorine bonds with the hydrogen. Oxygen is released, along with H (one H is released from the two in water to form the acid), and the desired sodium settles to the bottom of the lake to be later harvested. I believe the event would be demonstrated by the below chemical equation. (I haven't learned enough yet to know how to show the presence of electricity in a chemical equation, if that's valid at all, so bear with me.) H20 + NaCl + (electricity) --> HCl + Na + O + H Now, the questions I need to ask concerning this include: 1) How likely is it that these spires will be struck by lightning during a lightning storm? 2) In the instant the lightning hits, would it be possible for the entire lake to be electrified? 3) Would the desired separation happen in such a brief moment, or would a sustained exposure to electricity be required?

Ah yes, the alkali metals. I've seen video examples of those in water. Thanks for that advice. Is there any material (preferably black as I stated) that is a liquid at room temperature and would cause a similar reaction? To fit the conditions I've already set up, I need a black, watery liquid and a powder (the color of sodium works just fine for "off-white"). If there's no viable combination similar to this, I can change the conditions, but it would be nice if I could match these parameters (and the ones mentioned in my first post).

Hello. I'm new here, and unfortunately very inexperienced at chemistry at this point in my life. So, please don't laugh at me if I say something stupid. This is an unusual question, but hopefully it can be accepted here anyway. At first it sounds completely out of place, but it does concern chemistry in the end, so just bear with me as I progress. Or skip ahead to the emboldened text (my question) if you get bored with my obligatory intro. I'm writing a moderately fantasy-based series of short stories in which I have decided to introduce chemistry (a science for which I have recently discovered a great personal fascination). In the story, a certain race has made the discovery of chemical reactions which happen when certain natural materials are introduced to one another. Because this series is based approximately in the medieval era, so while the scientists of the race understand what happens in this reactions, they don't understand why; for this reason and for lack of a better term, they have given labeled the science "earth-magic" and studied it for at least a century. I'm building on a concept called the base five: the five basic chemicals which this scientific race has found react in very obvious ways when combined with one another. So here comes the question! Two materials of this base five collection include an off-white (probably slightly yellow), flour-like powder and a watery black liquid. I've just written a scene in which these two are combined on a pile of twigs and suddenly combust. Is it realistic for a solid and a liquid to react together and combust with this level of speed? In the very few chemical experiments I've carried out in my lifetime, I do recall at least one reaction between a solid and a liquid that have produced a small degree of heat--the reaction that occurs when combining CaCl with Phenol Red solution, the latter of which I do not know the the chemical makeup (but the reaction also produced some sort of odorous gas). But, I don't know what sorts of chemical reactions would produce amounts of heat great enough to ignite things like wood or fabric.