April 20, 2005
Preliminary Flammability Results and Consequent Musings
As I was gathering my clothes from the dryer today, I went through my usual ritual of carefully scraping out the accumulation of lint before removing the clothes. As I did so, I happened to remember an experiment that I've wanted to try for quite some time. I've heard that lint is highly flammable, and I wished to put it to the test. Pleased with myself at remembering this point at the critical juncture when I could actually do something about it, I carefully harvested the lint and brought it home with me. I then sat on my porch and lit the ball of lint (I'd packed it pretty tightly) on fire. The results were far less spectacular than I'd hoped. The stuff certainly burns, approximately as well as paper, but not nearly so well as gasoline or some other highly flammable substance. What eventually remained resembled a charcoal briquette more than anything else. Of course, as the title of this post suggests, those are only the preliminary results --- clearly, more testing is in order.
I have certain latent pyromaniacal tendencies ... I think most males do (I hope so, anyway). One of my favorite discoveries of the flammable properties of substances occurred in Mongolia. During the long Communist rule of Mongolia, the Soviets saw fit to plant thousands and thousands of cottonwood trees in the capital city. They grow pretty well and don't seem to suffer much from the harsh climate. However, every spring it snows for about two weeks. I mean, the air is full of soft, downy cottonwood seeds that resemble nothing so much as snow. Getting them in your mouth is really annoying, because they don't melt. You can choke on them. However, Ulaanbaatar has no set scheme for getting rid of these seeds. Because of this, they form small drifts several inches thick at many places in the city, and will spread thinly across open, unattended lots (of which there are many).
The most important property of these cottonwood seeds, however, is the fact that they are as flammable as gasoline. Once I made this happy discovery, I procured a lighter for myself and amused myself for hours by prowling my section of the city, torching every drift of cottonwood seeds I could find. It was truly delightful - flick the lighter at a convenient pile and flames would flash down the entire length of seeds, consuming them in about a second or two, leaving the dry husks of seeds and a little black burnt residue behind. Fortunately for me, they burn so quickly and they're so insubstantial that there is virtually no risk of lighting anything else on fire, unlike gasoline. You could put a sheet of paper on top of the pile and all the seeds would burn away beneath it without even scorching the paper. My favorite discoveries were vacant lots where the seeds had accumulated over the ground - there's nothing quite like causing a fire to flash over an acre or two in a matter of moments. Ah, yes, the glorious days of youth ... :-). I'm sure that doing anything of the sort would be highly illegal in this country and would earn me a date with the fire department and probably the police. It's a shame, really ...
