Name: The green flame
ISBN: 9780841218574

The green flame

The Greem Flame is a memoir by an industrial chemist about the secret project to develop jet fuels and rocket propellants from Boron chemicals. Most are flammable, toxic, violently-explosive and physically-dangerous: and none more so than pentaborane, which takes up half the book. If this sounds dull, remember: it's a book about working with a chemical that erupts in violent combustion with air, water, grease, fire-retardants, and laboratory chemists. Some of the book will be dull, even to chemistry geeks; but there is plenty of excitement.

What Hacker News says

nyankosenseiMay 2021

I also recommend ‘The Green Flame’ by Andrew Dequasie. It’s the fascinating personal story of a chemist embarking on a new career and ending up working with borane fuels.

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techdragonAug 2019

I’d like to throw out a mention for a book that takes one of the topics from Ignition! and covers it in depth. The Green Flame https://www.amazon.com/Green-Flame-Andrew-Dequasie-ebook/dp/... is a book about the Borane fuels project, which is covered briefly in the chapter of Ignition! on exotic fuels, and will probably be a worthwhile read for anyone who loves Ignition!.

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jloughryMar 2013

It happens in chemistry too. In his book The Green Flame, Dequasie told the following story:

"The salesman had been selling hydrochloric acid, sometimes known as muriatic acid. The industrial grade usually had a green tint caused by contamination with iron. The company that the salesman worked for improved its equipment at considerable expense and proudly began putting out water-white muriatic acid. The salesman immediately began getting complaints from customers who did not want that weak white stuff. They insisted that they wanted that strong green stuff that they used to get. So, for those customers, the salesman arranged to have a small nail dissolved in each jug shipped to them. Result: happiness."

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