Scyence: Chemistry, engineering, and pyrotechnics.

This is an extremely inaccurate recreation of a calcium carbide mining lamp, which would be used by miners as a headlamp or lantern. As you can see, my version doesn’t look very much like the images below. This is only prototype one, so it’s good enough for now to test the dripping function and the acetylene generation. Calcium carbide is a hard grey rock that behaves similarly to pure calcium metal, but instead of generating hydrogen gas and slaked lime on contact with water, it generates acetylene gas and slaked lime, which has a much higher tendency to suddenly become explosive when mixed with enough oxygen, but is generally a better fuel. If water is slowly dripped onto some calcium carbide while at the same time a flame is held above it, the steady flow of acetylene will form a strong flame. I wondered why they had to use such a fancy, and more importantly, confined way of making a calcium carbide lamp, so I made a version with the calcium carbide just out in the open. Now I realize that the confined space made thing safer instead of just providing an unnecessary explosive hazard: it prevented the acetylene from mixing with air!