fun with explosives
There’s a lot of stuff you buy from stores, or wholesalers, or specialists, or whathaveyou, instead of making yourself — for instance, I bet most people these days don’t really know what goes into making silver bullets (which is why I make a point of saying that our characters use silver with magic cast on it — otherwise nobody’s melting anything with a rinky-dink butane lighter).
This wasn’t always the case, obviously, and for a really fun game of “how can I shoehorn this neat thing into a book?”, check out the “receipt” (recipe) books from the Victorians and earlier. Middle-class Victorians, leaving aside their crazy “we must have a different chair for every possible activity we can think of” method of interior decoration, were all about the reusing and repurposing of materials, and never wanting to buy what they could possibly create in their own home. So when I look at the late Regency (heading into Victorian) book The New Family Receipt-Book: containing eight hundred truly valuable receipts In various Branches of Domestic Economy (1820), my heart kind of goes pitter-pat with the mischief I could get my characters into. For instance, on pg 224 we have:
Thunder Powder.
Take separately three parts of good dry saltpetre, two parts of dry salt of tartar, and pound them well together in a mortar; then add thereto one part, or rather more, of flower of brimstone, and take care to pound and mix the whole perfectly together: put this composition into a bottle with a glass stopper, for use.
Put about two drachms of this mixture in an iron spoon, over a moderate fire, but not in the flame; in a short time it will melt, and go off with an explosion like thunder or a loaded cannon.
“A bottle with a glass stopper, for use”? “Go off with an explosion”? I’m thinking of about five ways to abuse this recipe right now, and I don’t even fight demons for a living. Some research with a relevant dictionary of chemistry, a little updating to match your time period, and you’ve got a nifty trick to show the reader and a sly way of getting your characters past those werewolves on the corner. A win all the way around.
(Hey, if you have any neat ways of exploding things — or making an awesomely big noise — stick it in the comments. I love neat new info. Info with explosives.)
This is the kind of thing that gets you on watch lists. I’m just saying.
Ha. Which is why I didn’t mention the awesome new easy-to-make contact explosive I heard about the other day. What can I say, I am a MythBusters kind of girl.