It's funny looking back. As a kid I remember a couple times thinking, "How did it come to this?" Case in point. My brother and I use to set a couple train sets together (one of them was a GI Joe train). We would set army men on them; two trains going around. The original object was to shoot army men off the other guys train train with spit wads. That graduated to slingshots with the snap-pops. Then on to firecrackers. When we almost set the garage on fire with tiny makeshift flamethrowers we went back to spit wads. By then, our trainset was considerably smaller.
Don’t see anything wrong with those toys. In the mid 60’s a friend and I strived hard to make black powder, and if I remember correctly the formula was 75% KN03, 15% powdered carbon, and 10% sulfur. It didn’t work as well as we had hoped, so I figured maybe we needed to add water and cook it on the stove to get it mixed up properly. Then of course we needed to get the water out, but that was no problem either - just cook it in the oven. It still didn’t work too well after that, and we never got a good result from multiple attempts. But experiments like that helped foster my curiosity, and I am sure that was the path intended for me to become a university professor with a reasonable amount of research to my credit.
Stayathomemom’s husgand.