The Chemist Prankster - Burn Those Bills

It's vacation time and my first trip abroad, so I'm pretty excited! For the days I'll be touring Sweden I've prepared a series of posts to keep you entertained. You are supposed to have fun by making fun of your friends, so I got a number of pranks for you to check out.

How would you like to flambe your banknotes in front of your friends surprised eyes without your money turning to ashes? Read on...

(Image source - author, Mike Poresky - license)

Supplies 

• Dollar bill
• Long twizzers
• Matches or lighter
• Salt 
• Solution of alcohol (95-100%) and water (1:1 ratio)

Steps

• Prepare the alcohol-water solution.
• Add some salt (for the flame to be visible).
• Now, find your victim and ask them for a 20$ (let's make it hurt a bit). Just tell them you need to show them something.
• Dip your dollar bill to the solution (make sure it's all soaked up).
• Remove the dollar bill using the tweezers and let it drain all the excessive liquid.
• Set the money on fire and watch the horror in your friend's eyes! Be careful as you hold the flaming bill, you don't want to burn your skin, hair or set your clothes on fire by accident.

Cautions

It is important to take care for everyone's safety if you decide to try this. It's advisable to do it in an open space, keep anything flammable away and even use special gloves or the tweezers to hold the banknote before lighting it. 

This is supposed to be fun, we don't want anyone to get hurt

And the science behind it:

This daredevil prank combines combustion, high flammability of alcohol and special texture of money paper.

Combustion? Unknown word here!

A combustion reaction, or simply burning, is a reaction of a hydrocarbon with oxygen (O2) where flame is not always necessarily present. The reaction is exothermic (meaning it releases heat) and it needs both a combustible material and an oxidizer. The products are carbon dioxide (CO2), water (H2O) and heat. The energy to initiate the reaction might be provided through fire, but the heat resulting from the reaction itself can make it self-sustaining.

Combustion reactions can be either complete/clean, meaning they produce only CO2 and water; or incomplete/dirty, meaning their products include carbon monoxide (CO) and carbon (soot).

Now that we got this sorted out let's move on:

The combution reaction between alcohol and oxygen (from the air) produces energy in the form of heat and light, CO2 and water.

C2H5OH + 4 O2 ? 2 CO2 + 3 H2O + energy

Bill paper is special and resembles fabric more than paper. The alcohol on the bill lies mainly on the outer parts of it. So, when we set the bill on fire it's the alcohol that burns and not the banknote. Since alcohol is highly flammable, it burns at a lower than water temperature so that the water cannot evaporate (the water here acts like a shield). When all the alcohol is burned out, we're left with a wet dollar bill and a friend on the verge of kicking our butts...

References

thoughtco.com-Burning_money_chemistry_demonstration
thoughtco.com-Combustion_reaction

Thank you for stopping by and giving this post a read. I hope you enjoyed it! If you please, feel free to pay a visit to my blog and check out my short stories along with plenty of educational posts and of course my bizarre natural phenomena series. 

Special thanks and mentions go to:

Until my next post,
Steem on and keep smiling, people!