http://www.bytocom.com/vb/showthread.php?t=24273 The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments was a children's chemistry book written in the 1960s by Robert Brent and illustrated by Harry Lazarus. Many of the experiments contained in the book are now considered highly dangerous for unsupervised children, and would not appear in a modern children's chemistry book. OCLC lists only 126 copies of this book in libraries worldwide. It was said that the experiments and information contained herein were too dangerous for the general public. Have fun!
It appears to be in Arabic. Someone will have to translate. Anyway, all chemistry textbooks more than 20 years old have interesting stuff in them. One inorganic textbook I have gives you an outline of how to create industrial quantities of potassium nitrate. A still should be something that will have been explained to chemistry students anyway.
Further down the page is an unrared easy to get pdf of it. Its interesting, nothing that didn;t get demonstrated at school to us in the first few years of senior school, and therefore in fact would be pretty safe to do at home.
I came across this book a couple of years back. It was made famous in the Radioactive Boy Scout incident. The book is touted as dangerous and whatnot, but it seems relatively tame to me. I think the most irresponsible thing in the book is when it instructs you in how to make chlorine gas then advises that you waft a little over for a sniff...
WE used to use the pop test for hydrogen- thats where you put a splint into a test tube which hopefully has some H2 in it. If it goes "pop", you have hydrogen. And oxygen re-ignites a glowing splint.