Alex - the Serial Bombmaker
Friday, October 26, 2018
 |
| Rusty & Alex, Mexico City, 1956 |
In 1956 when I was 14 I built bombs, big bombs.
My school
friend David Harris at the American School in Mexico City and I liked to make
large explosions. There was a drugstore on Avenida Madero, downtown, called el
Elefante where we bought kilos of potassium chlorate and sulphur. We began our
bomb making with potassium nitrate but quickly found that potassium chlorate
gave a bigger bang. At first we tried to mimic gunpowder and added ground coal
to our mixture.
The way we exploded our divices, was to use large tin cans
inside larger tin cans (packed with pebbles to make it tight) where we would insert a long electrical wire that at the end had
a strand of a steel wool filament. After burying the can in my mother’s rose
garden we connected the wire to a large 6 volt battery. The 6 volts were enough to make the filament glow.
That first explosion blew one of my mother’s rose bushes up
into the air. We had buried our can under the bush. I was given a whipping with a Filipino slipper called a chinela. But
a few weeks later when the rose (which my mother re-planted) bloomed nicely I
remember that she smiled at me.
But David Harris, who was smarter than I was in chemistry,
told me that there was a better formula for our explosive that simply combined
the potassioum chlorate with aluminum powder. Aluminum powder was sold in what
in Mexico are special hardware stores called tlapalerías. The aluminum powder
was usually mixed (we purchased it on its own) with a solvent (perhaps linseed
oil) and used to paint metal so that it would not rust.
We made a very large bomb with his combination of aluminum
powder and the potassium chlorate but moved our operations to a nearby empty
lot. The explosion was deafening and the crater about ten feet in diameter. Perhaps because we lived in a residential district (Lomas de Chapultepec) the police never showed up.
We were delighted and built a few more of these bombs until
we became bored.
Weeks later David Harris arrived with a vile in hand and
riding on roller skates.
Alex, “This is nitro-glycerine.” We were both disappointed when our aluminum bomb did not set off the vile. David told me that perhaps he had made a mistake in the combination of chemicals and that he would try it again.
A week later my mother and I moved to Nueva Rosita, Coahuila
and I lost contact with David Harris.
Through these many years I have been attempting to find him
but to no avail.
