When I read the paper by Eliason et al. (1) about the use of the sugar-potassium chlorate reaction as a demonstration, I recalled a passage in John Muir's memoir The Story of My Boyhood and Youth. The episode quoted here (2) took place when John Muir was attending the University of Wisconsin.

"The first morning after I had made this simple arrangement I invited the doubting farmer to watch the old squat schoolhouse from a window that overlooked it, to see if a good smoke did not rise from the stovepipe. Sure enough, on the minute, he saw a tall column curling gracefully up through the frosty air, but instead of congratulating me on my success he solemnly shook his head and said a hollow, lugubrious voice, 'Young man, you will be setting fire to the schoolhouse.' All winter long that faithful clock fire never failed, and by the time I got to the schoolhouse the stove was usually red-hot."

Muir later said that "Although I was four years at the University, I did not take the regular course of studies, but instead picked out what I thought would be most useful to me, particularly chemistry, which opened a new world, and mathematics and physics, a little Greek and Latin, botany, and geology."

Literature Cited

1. Eliason, R.; Lee, E. J.; Wakefield, D.; Bergren, A. J. Chem. Educ. 2000, 77, 1581-1583.
2. Muir, J. The Story of My Boyhood and Youth; Sierra Club Books: San Francisco, 1989; pp 154, 155.