I've got a wonderful inorganic chemistry book from 1928 my father gave me years ago, which is full of perfectly relevant and utterly fascinating information, much of which is difficult to find in modern books since they're so safety conscious as to be emasculated. For example, there is an experiment showing the photochemical reaction of chlorine and hydrogen with revolves around blowing some thin glass bulbs, filling them with a stoichiometric mix of the two gases, and sealing them off with a bunsen burner in the dark.

It goes on to arrange one of these bulbs in a dark box, with a shutter on one side, so it can be opened to a source of UV light as a classroom demo. "A substantial explosion will result" is the comment, along with instructions to allow the (presumably surviving) students to do a writeup on the the experiment.

The one with Nitrogen Trichloride scares even me

I had some books, sadly now long vanished, which I seem to recall were a Time-Life set of popular science books that my mother bought for me in the 70s. I recently came across the one on space technology at a friends house, and was amused and impressed by a paragraph on the future of global communications using comm-sats. There was a bit along the lines of "For example, in the near future it is possible to imagine that one could contact, from your own phone, any one of the billions of people anywhere in the world at any time" using the miracle of geosynchronous satellites. It predicted the modern cell-phone network remarkable accurately, and this was in about 1971.

Not all old information is wrong...

pca