Making my favorite liquid carcinogen

over the years have done a lot of different projects and have probably worked with and made hundreds of different chemicals out of all them though I think that I can say that there's just one that has always been my favorite it's a chromium based compound called chromel chloride and it's my favorite because I feel like it has almost all of the fun properties that a chemical can have for example it's toxic carcinogenic highly corrosive and potentially explosive it's also a highly volatile liquid so it fumes like crazy and it has a really nice color that's extremely close to blood from this description it might sound like one of the worst chemicals out there but it really isn't I mean it is pretty bad but on a scale of one to ten where one is table salt and 10 is sarin nerve gas I'd probably say it's around a five so it is dangerous and it definitely has to be treated with respect but it also doesn't make me constantly afraid of killing myself and everyone around me in general I've always found it exciting to work with the more dangerous chemicals and I just find that chromel chloride has a good balance between danger and fun the last time that I made it or handled it though was a few years ago and I've been really wanting to work with it again so just for fun I've decided to make a whole bunch of it to do this I first needed a source of chromium and the best thing to start with is something like potassium dichromate this is a relatively common and cheap chromium based compound and it was able to buy a bunch of it from eBay the second main ingredient that I needed was sodium chloride which is just table salt the salt in most grocery stores though has a bit of iodine in it which might interfere very slightly with the reaction I wanted to avoid this as much as I could so I tracked down some pickling salt which is basically just pure sodium chloride and it should be completely free of iodine and any other additives however the I dye stuff honestly probably would have been just fine and a doubt it would have really affected it very much now to get things started I added a hundred grams of the salt to a cup followed by a hundred and sixty grams of the potassium dichromate then with everything added I screwed on the lid and I put it into a magic bullet to blend it all together for this reaction the efficiency of it really depends on how well these two ingredients are mixed the last time I did this I tried just grinding it using a mortar and pestle but I really don't think that it was good enough this time though by using a blender it should give me an extremely fine and well mixed powder and I was hoping that it would make the reaction work better after several minutes I felt like it was good enough so I stopped it and I flipped over the cob and I capped it a few times to try to knock down some of the powder then I opened it up again and I was expecting a decent amount of dust to come flying out but it was surprisingly tame it was still important though to be really careful with it and to not breathe in any of the dust because potassium dichromate is both toxic and corrosive with this powder mixture ready I was able to move on to making the chromel chloride and I added it all to a large flask then after that I slowly put together the rest of the setup I started by adding an addition funnel on the left and I greased the joint using concentrated sulfuric acid to prevent any chromel chloride from leaking out using sulfuric acid like this is pretty common when working with highly reactive chemicals and have done it a few times before like when I was making pure nitric acid to the middle joint I added a three-way adapter and I just sealed the last one with a stopper I then added a thermometer and a condenser column and I used to clip to help keep it attached after that I put together the other side of the setup and I turned on the water recirculate er to pump water through the condenser column with everything now in place and pretty much good to go I then added the final ingredient for the reaction which was concentrated sulfuric acid all of this acid was made a long time ago when I distilled it from drain cleaner that I got from the hardware store I made a video on the whole process a few years ago and if you're interested there's a link in the description in my opinion though distilling sulfuric acid is still one of the most dangerous things that have ever done and I really don't recommend anyone else to try it I added as much as I could fit in the funnel which was probably around 150 mils also this acid was pre chilled in a freezer for about an hour to make sure that it was cold I think that it was probably somewhere around 0c but I didn't bother checking the exact temperature because it really wasn't very important I was now finally ready to actually get the reaction started so I slowly opened the funnel and added the sulphuric acid the reaction started the moment that it touched the powder and the beautiful red color of the chronal chloride peered almost instantly what was initially happening here were two separate reactions where the sulfuric acid was attacking the salt and the dichromate with the dichromate the main product was chromium trioxide and with the salt the major one was hydrogen chloride gas however neither of these existed for very long because the moment that they came into contact with each other they reacted to form the chromel chloride this was why it was important to mix them as well as possible the hydrogen chloride needs to come into contact with the chromium trioxide as soon as possible or else it will just boil off and escape as a gas to a certain extent though no matter how well things are mixed some HCl will always be able to escape so to compensate for this I made sure to include a bit of extra sodium chloride both of these reactions can be combined into one overall one and we can see here all of the side products that were being made so besides the chromel chloride this reaction was also producing potassium bisulfate sodium bisulfate and a bit of water in general all these reactions release a lot of heat and if ice cold acid isn't used it can sometimes get out of control it can also cause the chromo chloride to start boiling on its own which was something I really wanted to avoid after adding all the acid I let it sit for a couple minutes and it seemed to be pretty tame so I headed the rest of the cold sulfuric acid that I needed and I didn't bother doing it through an addition funnel I just dumped it all in directly and then I resealed it with a stopper this caused the reaction to start bubbling and I think it was mostly from HCl gas being released before moving on though I had to wait until the reaction settled down so I just let it sit there for a bit about 15 minutes later I felt like it looked like he was ready so I set it up with a heating mantle and I cranked up the temperature the goal here was to boil out the chromel chloride and to separate it from all of the side products the boiling point of chromel chloride is 117 C but everything here was probably already above a hundred C so I didn't actually have to heat it very much initially even when nothing was coming over the whole setup was still filled with a reddish yellow gas which was able to escape out of the vacuum adapter most of this was probably just HCl gas but by the color I knew that there was at least some chromel chloride in it this meant that the gas was both toxic and corrosive and it was really important to not breathe in any of it it isn't very clear from any of the shots but this was all done in a good fume hood to make sure that none of it made it into the room to reduce the amount of gas that got out I made an ice bath to try and condense some of the chromo chloride and at first this did seem to work but as the reaction flasks got hotter and hotter it started off gassing more and more HCl gas from the last time that I made it I knew that this would happen and I probably should have at least tried to set up some sort of trap for it but oh well when the chromo chloride got to its boiling point it started climbing the flask and eventually made it to the cold condenser this turned it's vapor back into being a liquid and what looked like blood started dripping over into the other flask the idea now was just keep it going at a steady rate like this and to wait until pretty much all the chromel chloride passed over at the peak of it the entire flask and most of this side of the setup became completely red but as it got closer to the end the color slowly faded eventually after about half an hour it looked like there was very little of it left and nothing was coming over on the other side even though it stopped there was still a bit left in the flask and to get it I could have cranked up the heat and put a bit of insulation around it however I just didn't really feel like it was worth the time or the effort I already had way more chromic lurid than I needed and I was ok with losing whatever was still there so to stop it I just took away the heating mantle and I waited about 30 minutes for it all to cool down after that I took off the flask with all the chromel chloride in it and I sealed it with a stopper that I'd pre coated with sulfuric acid then I took a closer look at it and I noticed that there were a lot of solid chunks stuck to the side of the flask I'm not exactly sure what this was from but I think it was from the chromel chloride reacting with moisture in the air to deal with this I found that a good way was to just let it sit overnight and to give it time for all the solid stuff to separate out then the next day I just had to filter it and I did this by pouring it through a funnel that was lightly plugged with a bit of glass wall the moment that I poured it it immediately started fuming like crazy and letting off a whole bunch of it's nasty vapor thankfully though it all passed through relatively quickly and I didn't have to leave it sitting in the open for too long when it was done the flask was again sealed with a stopper that was covered in sulfuric acid and I used to clip just to make sure that it stayed on tight the clip that I used here was the same metal one from before but I really should have switched it to a plastic one this is because even though the flask is sealed with a coated stopper some vapor is still able to leak out and to corrode the things around it especially metals but anyway now when I looked at the chromel chloride it was nice and clean and there was none of that solid junk floating around or sticking to the side I then weighed everything to figure out how much I had and my yield was a hundred and twelve grams based on the amount of dichromate that I started with this was a percent yield of 67% and it was way higher than I expected the last time I did this I got 52% and I think it was way lower because they tried mixing the starting chemicals just with a mortar and pestle the blender though was clearly a much better method and it made things almost 30% more efficient but anyway I didn't make all this criminal chloride just to look at it in this sealed flask and it was now time to have some fun with it to start off I just pulled out a small amount of it and I added it to a dish in the pipette it was so dark that it almost looked black but the color was completely different when it was spread out in the thin layer instead it was now this really nice and vibrant red which I think really does look like fresh blood however unlike most normal blood this was fuming like crazy and letting off a lot of toxic and corrosive vapor most of this vapor wasn't actually chromel chloride though because any chroma clora that was released quickly reacted with moisture in the air this led to the formation of hydrogen chloride gas which appeared white as well as chromic acid which was orange as I let it sit there for a few minutes they tried to slowly spread out more and to creep along the glass but I'm not exactly sure why this happened clearly though the chromo chloride has some sort of affinity for the glass and it likes sticking to it to clean it up I sucked up a bunch of it and I put it back in the flask then to the rest of it I added a solution of sodium sulfite which is a mild reducing agent this was able to quickly react with the chromo chloride and bring it down from its angry and red 6 plus oxidation state to its 3 plus oxidation state which is green and a lot safer at first glance chromel chloride can look really similar to bromine which is another nasty dark liquid and also one of my favorite elements while I was making the chromel chloride I posted some videos to my Instagram story and a lot of people thought it was bromine and I really don't blame them even looking at it now where I know for certain that it is chromel chloride it still does kind of look like bromine this all made me very curious though to see if there were some differences between them so I decided to do the same thing that I just did with the chromel chloride and to make a side-by-side comparison the clip on the left is just what we saw before and the one on the right is the bromine with the first few drops it was possible to see its red color which was much darker than the chromel chloride the color also didn't last for very long and it quickly turned black when just a bit more was added as it sat there it just stayed as a relatively clean circle which got smaller and smaller as the bromine evaporated it also didn't really stick to the glass very much and it didn't have that creeping effect that we saw with the chromel chloride some of the vapor that the bromine led off reacted with moisture in the air to make hydrogen bromide gas but most of it just stayed as brown bromine and in general bromine is quite dense so the vapor had a tendency to sink more and to move around a lot less the results from this actually kind of surprised because I always thought that these two chemicals were almost indistinguishable and while this might be true in some cases like if you're looking at it in the distillation setup this definitely isn't the case in general I think that now if I ever saw a video without any context I could probably tell the difference when I was done I took away most of the bromine and like before I added some sodium sulfite bro means also a strong oxidizer and it quickly reacts with it but it doesn't make a colored solution it all just ends up becoming sodium bromide which is a colorless salt similar to sodium chloride the next thing that I wanted to try was to just add the chromel chloride to some water the moment that it touched it it started reacting and it made an interesting effect that I hadn't really seen before after doing this for a bit I shot in the rest and this time it didn't get stuck on the surface and it all quickly sank to the bottom this again made an effect which I hadn't really seen before and I thought it was pretty cool chromo chloride is almost twice as dense as water so it wants to just sit at the bottom however it also reacts with the water to make HCl gas that wants to float to the surface I would have expected the bubbles to just escape and go on their own but for some reason they all stuck to the chroma chloride this caused a lot of them to just float to the surface but some of them instead took their time and danced around for a bit every drop also had a very thin tail coming off of it and it kind of looked like it was the thing that was propelling them that almost definitely wasn't the case though and as I said before it was the bubble that was providing the upward force in the intro I mentioned that chromel chloride was potentially explosive but it really isn't a huge risk on its own it's just a powerful oxidizer and for it to blow up it needs to come into contact with certain chemicals under the right conditions most of the time the worst thing that can happen is a fire but that shouldn't even happen if you know what you're doing and if you're being careful I wanted to test this all out myself though and I figured the first thing that I'd try was just burning it so very simply I just put some on a watch glass and then I blasted it with a torch this caused it to very quickly start decomposing into mostly chlorine and oxygen gas as well as some chromium 3 compounds when it was done there still some red color there which i think was from some partially degraded chromel chloride where the chromium was still in its six plus oxidize state now what I wanted to do next was to add it directly to a solvent and I decided to try it with ethanol so again I added some of it to a watch glass and then I dropped some of the chromel chloride on it as a very strong oxidizer I honestly thought the reaction was going to be really violent but it ended up being surprisingly tame I think he was just oxidizing the ethanol mostly to acetaldehyde and in doing so it was generating just enough heat for things to light on fire I then did it again and the result was pretty much the same when an oxidizer and a fuel are able to ignite spontaneously like this the mixture is referred to as hypergolic in the past I've covered a couple other oxidizers that are strong enough to do this like pure nitric acid and manganese heptoxide and every time I like to try it with something called aniline this is because aniline along with nitric acid was used in old hypergolic rockets I covered that reaction in an older video but since then I always like to compare the nitric acid with other strong oxidizers so to a new dish I loaded it up with Adaline and then I carefully added the chromo chloride the reaction ended up being even more tame than before and there was a much bigger delay before ignition the same thing also happened when I made manganese heptoxide which is another really strong oxidizer with the ethanol the reaction was really fast and gave a nice snap but the aniline one was a bit slower [Applause] compared to the ethanol run this one also made a lot more nasty dark fumes and I think this was just from all the aniline burning another fun and fiery thing to do with chroma chloride is to add it to some sulfur there was a slight delay but then it quickly reacted and caused most of the sulfur to light on fire there isn't too much more to say about this though besides that it was just fun to do now the last thing that I wanted to try was adding it directly to some toluene toluene is a common solvent often found in paint thinners and with chromel chloride it has a special reaction this reactions known as the a [ __ ] reaction with a Croma chloride first forms a dark brown black complex with the toluene I thought that this might generate enough heat to ignite it but it apparently wasn't able to I let it sit there for several minutes and then I added some sodium sulfite solution like earlier which destroyed the complex and any remaining chromel chloride in theory this result should have been a mild oxidation of the toluene where it was converted to something called benzaldehyde benzaldehyde in general is a useful chemical building block but what I think is more interesting is that it has a really nice cherry smell and it's commonly used as an artificial flavor or fragrance I tried smelling what I had here but I wasn't able to detect anything besides toluene however I think this was because I didn't let it react for long enough and I also didn't neutralize it with ice-cold sodium sulphite doing it on a dish like this also just isn't ideal and in the future I plan on doing a proper full-scale preparation I think the idea behind it's really cool where I can start with paint thinner and then use a nasty carcinogen that chromel chloride to turn it into cherry flavoring now the very last thing that I had to do was put the chromel chloride into storage however it unfortunately has the tendency to leak out of everything even if the container or bottle is really well sealed as far as I know the and only real way to prevent this is to seal it in something like an ampule to do this I had to first make the ampule myself using a large test tube and a blowtorch after heating it for probably around 30 seconds it really started to soften and I was able to stretch it out and to give it a thin neck I then put it somewhere for it to slowly cool back down to room temperature and that was basically it the next step was to fill it with the chromel chloride and to do this I just had to pour it in then after it was added I had to seal it by melting the glass and pulling away the top part doing this though can be a bit tricky to do and over the years I've messed it up more than a few times when it had cooled back down to room temperature I tipped it over to make sure that it didn't have any leaks sometimes there can still be a really small hole so it's important to check but this one seemed like it was fine then after that I just put it in the container for storage and that was about it but anyway this brings me to the end of my whole project with chromel chloride and I hope you guys liked it I was really happy that I was finally able to work with it again and eventually I will do the Attard reaction one major thing that I didn't cover in this video though was the cleanup and it was a pretty important part I just really didn't feel like it fit into this one so I went ahead and put together a second video which can be found in my other channel called Nile blue on that channel I'm trying to post all the things that I find don't really fit into this one and there's also a few other cleanup videos already there now there's just one final thing that I wanted to mention at the beginning of 2019 I decided to stop taking almost all sponsorships and to try and support the channel only from ad revenue and patreon the reason I did this was pretty simple and it's because I never really liked doing ads or including them in the videos I am still however ok with sponsorships that can offer me opportunities or chemicals that a normally wouldn't have access to ones like this though are gonna be few and far between and nothing that I can really rely on so to help stay independent and on the off chance that YouTube de monetizes me I've decided to start youtube memberships and there's now that join button on my channel the perks between here and patreon though are gonna be a bit different because patreon is on a per video basis and here it's monthly now besides the obvious financial reasons I also wanted to try and build a small and more personal community here on YouTube the small community aspect is something that I've always really liked about patreon but I know that some people don't really like that platform so I wanted to offer an alternative with that being said though nothing I offer on any of these platforms is gonna lock out the regular viewer and it's just some extra stuff on top if you're just a casual viewer and you don't really want to join some sort of community then don't just keep watching my videos and you won't notice any difference but anyway I think that's about it I hope you guys enjoyed the video and I'll see you on the next one as usual a big things goes out to all my supporters on patreon everyone who supports me can see my videos at least 24 hours before I post them to YouTube also everyone on patreon can directly message me and if you support me with $5 or more you'll get your name at the end like you see here [Music]

Channel: NileRed

Views: 2,713,894

Rating: 4.9452543 out of 5

Keywords: science, chemistry, nile, red, chromyl chloride, chromyl, chromium, carcginogen, favorite, chemical, education, chromate, dichromate, salt, nilered

Id: saANxD0cqy0

Length: 25min 37sec (1537 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 26 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Draygoes]

Video by NileRed.

[u/thebottomofawhale]

I kind of love how he uses exaclty the same tone when he’s talking about fairly mundane things as when he talked about more extreme things.

I didn’t measure the temperature at this point because it really didn’t matter.

I saw it was producing an orange gas, which would have been chromyl chloride, very toxic and carcinogenic gas.

[u/Jman095]

Love that channel

[u/CelticRockstar]

NileRed is a treasure to the scientific community

[u/_p1t4_]

Wonder if it will go in cupcakes