He Dreamt Of Being A Big Noise

He’d show those doubters…

The model was sound! Although he’d never mixed the compound IRL, there was no doubt – no doubt at all – that the outcome would be spectacular, the yield phenomenal and that he was going to make a huge bang. A really, really big bang.

The red-painted barn glowed in the rising sun, which also threw bars of light through the big windows. He’d pulled another all-nighter, but he was so close – so close.

Simon Smeaton’s eyes glazed over as he visualised his favourite motivational fantasy. In his imagination, he was on the steps of the Nobel Institute in Stockholm. The King of Sweden was shaking his hand and effusively heaping praise on the head of this brilliant chemist.

There was a certain beautiful symmetry in that Nobel’s fortune – and the funds for the whole Nobel Institute and the prize fund – came from Alfred Nobel having patented Dynamite.

Simon’s dream ran on: Why could the Smeaton Institute not replace Nobel, taking the world to greater and greater achievements, all funded by the new, exponentially more powerful explosive, Smeatonite?

He’d written to the Nobel Institute: All he’d received was a polite, pre-printed brush off. Well, they’d learn.

He’d also written to Caroline Acme, the brilliant chemist who headed up Acme Explosives. Yes, he admitted, she’d made incremental improvements to other people’s discoveries – he was scathing about such people, who he saw as merely benefiting from others bold and brilliant discoveries – and yes, she was rich. Still, she did not recognise his brilliance. Acme Explosives and indeed the eponymous founder herself had ignored him for a while. In quick succession, Acme sent a Pro-forma letter politely dismissing him, rapidly followed by a ‘cease and desist’! In a fit of pique, he’d even sent the detailed description and explosion modelling that he was planning to get published in the New England Review; still, he’d heard nothing in the reply.

So now, he was making a batch – the first, actual, IRL batch of Smeatonite – and he was going to prove that the theory was sound and the product would work. And after this, academic journals would scramble to publish him; editors would beg to showcase his papers!

No matter – he’d show them all. He was going to be the biggest noise in chemistry.

Simon Smeaton gingerly poured the contents of the two flasks together and watched as they started to coalesce. The model showed this product would now crystalise and stabilise unless heated.

-0-

Sometimes, models are wrong

-0-

Reliable sources reported that folk could hear the explosion 30 miles away. The colossal blast blew windows out at a 7-mile radius, and all the birds inside a 3-mile area died. Charred but visibly red-painted fragments and splinters of barn were projected, as though from the barrel of a gun, and with such force that they embedded themselves in walls more than ½ mile from the site of the one-time structure. The nearest pre-existing structure, Smeaton’s farmhouse, was destroyed utterly, struck as though by a hurricane on steroids. Of the barn, there was nothing left but a cartoonish smoking hole, as deep as the barn had been high.

News commentators talked about pig farmer Smeaton and about the big noise he had undoubtedly become. The nearest neighbours to have survived had told news crews that Smeaton was known as an odd loner who dabbled with chemicals. The inquest would find him to have died from misadventure, and the forensic examination did not find enough of anything left in the hole to give a clear cause.

-0-

Seven months later and after the inquest and coroners report, Smeatonite was just so much hot air.

In her luxuriously appointed office on the 27th floor of Acme Tower, fortunately (for her) 200 miles away, Caroline Acme used the remote to turn off the television. She sat for a moment, pensive, before reaching forward once again to her laptop keyboard.

Simulation 273,396 had finished running on the in-house supercomputer, and she knew how to produce a stable product that could be shipped and handled.

Ms Acme struck a few more keys before finalising and dispatching the document to the Patent Office. The completed application to patent the new and hugely more powerful explosive compound flew through the ether. It would soon be time for the world to hear from Acme Explosive about this revolutionary new development – Acmeite was going to rock the world.