Kuen Kao's Education and childhood interest in science

Colburn:
I was wondering if I could take you back through some of your early life and schooling and preparation, and what made you become interested in engineering to begin with.

Kao:
I don't know how to really answer the question because some of the things are intuitive things that may or may not be right. For example, when I was playing with chemistry, long before I was really old enough to really play with those things, so I got to know things like an understanding that if you put an oxidation agent and mix it with something that is easily inflammable, that if you mix the two, you are going to make a brighter spark, which I did. The actual things that I used were so lethal. I put red phosphorus powder and mixed it with potassium chlorate, which is an oxidation agent, and we'd touch it and it would go phooom and it explodes. A young boy to be playing with these things is really bad! I actually wrote about this. I made mud balls and put water in with those two ingredients and put it into the center of the mud ball and let it dry. and when you'd throw it, it explodes.

Colburn:
How old were you when you were doing this?

Kao:
Very young. So that's very dangerous. I was making chlorine all over the place. I nearly gassed myself, I suppose. So that's the uncontrolled environment that I was in which could have led to terrible things. However, I survived.

I think the most important point is that I mixed with lots of people that are curious, curiosity-driven people, and so we learned by reading, by experimenting. So that opened our minds in that more flexible way without the constraint of, “You must understand this book before you can move to that book,” because the parental control wasn't there, or they were not exactly understanding what we were trying to do.

http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Oral-History:Charles_Kao#Education_and_childhood_interest_in_science

Roger Y. Tsien

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2008

In 1960, RCA closed its vacuum tube division, presumably because semiconductors were replacing tubes, so Dad moved to Esso (later renamed Exxon) Research and Engineering. Esso provided much better projects and pay, so he stayed until his retirement in 1983. I believe some of the chemicals and glassware that enabled me to do the more interesting chemistry experiments were diverted from the company stockroom. Other supplies could be bought by mail order in those days with a parent's signature. Over the next 5 or 6 years I gradually did many of the classic experiments of inorganic chemistry in the basement of our house: preparing and burning H₂ gas, preparing O₂ and burning steel wool in it, preparing NH₃ in a flask and watching it suck water up as a fountain inside the flask. I distilled HF from CaF₂ + H₂SO₄ in plastic apparatus and was delighted to see its ability to etch glass. I electrolyzed molten NaOH using a step-down transformer and rectifier from a model train set, the nickel crucible as cathode, and a carbon rod salvaged from a dead flashlight battery as anode. I managed to get a few granules of very impure metallic sodium, which gave off a satisfying hiss when dropped into water. Pyrotechnics were naturally of great interest: I made and ignited gunpowder, ammonium dichromate volcanoes, and even a spectacular thermite reaction with powdered aluminum and chromium oxide. My most ambitious attempt was a multistep sequence aimed at synthesizing aspirin, for which I needed acetic anhydride, which had to be made from acetyl chloride, for which I needed phosphorus trichloride, for which I needed to burn red phosphorus in a stream of chlorine gas. I tried to do this reaction sequence in flasks with rubber stoppers (Figure 2), because I had no glassware with ground glass joints. The corrosive chemicals largely chewed up the rubber, so I did not get beyond acetyl chloride. Because I had no fume hood, I did the more dangerous experiments outdoors on a picnic table on the backyard patio. Looking back, I am appalled at how dangerous all this was for an unsupervised boy of 8 to 15, but it was also very good training in how to improvise equipment, plan and execute experiments, interpret confusing results, and decide how to do things better. These experiments made me confident enough that when I had to earn my first merit badge as a Boy Scout and was advised to pick something really easy, I chose Chemistry. Tougher merit badges like Hiking, with its requirement for a twenty-mile hike in one day, I got later.

Figure 2. Setup for preparing Cl2 and reacting it with red phosphorus, sometime in 1966– 1967, in our screened backyard patio. The leftmost flask contained KMnO4 to react with aqueous HCl added through the funnel controlled by a pinch clamp. The Cl2 was dried by passage through CaCl2 then directed onto P4 in the flask on the ring stand. Because no running water was available, the water to cool the PCl3 condenser was siphoned from the recycled milk jug and deposited into the waste can labeled "Hawaiian Punch". The receiver for PCl3 was immersed in ice in the thermos bottle. The alcohol lamp allowed auxiliary heating for the phosphorus. Note rubber stoppers everywhere.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2008/tsien-autobio.html

And this is Ian Huang's: