Watery question

[cni]

I sat in high school physics and watched Mr. Boyle remove and upend the test tubes, after an electrolysis demonstration, to a violent pop, so my question now is: The demonstration shown of HHO gas should involve flames in peoles faces as they look down into those boiling pots of various configurations of electrodes bubbling away. Why does this version of water need to be lit? Why don't the two gases react immediately? What is actually going on. I don't care about any other claims, I just want to know why the unseparated gases don't act like the stuff Mr. Boyle made.

Thank You to anyone who can clue me in.

cni

[thomamador]

I sat in high school physics and watched Mr. Boyle remove and upend the test tubes, after an electrolysis demonstration, to a violent pop, so my question now is: The demonstration shown of HHO gas should involve flames in peoles faces as they look down into those boiling pots of various configurations of electrodes bubbling away. Why does this version of water need to be lit? Why don't the two gases react immediately? What is actually going on. I don't care about any other claims, I just want to know why the unseparated gases don't act like the stuff Mr. Boyle made.

Thank You to anyone who can clue me in.

cni

My understanding of the electrolysis experiment is that when you pass and electric current through water or H20 you should get bubbles at both ends of the terminal where the electrodes are located (cathode = the one attached to the negative end of the battery or source of electricity, and anode = the one attached to the positive end). One set of bubbles trapped and collected in an inverted test tube should bear out a "pop" sound and then extinguish itself immediately when you put a flame from a match stick in it, and the other set of bubles should get brighter using the same flame test. The reason, of course, is that in one case, you got hydrogen gas which is explosive and you may also recall from history that it happened to the Hindenburgh in an accident in Lyndhurst, New Jersey. The other one is oxygen gas which brightens the flame because combustion reactions always love and need oxygen you know. Both elements hydrogen and oxygen form the chemical recipe in water. If you carry out the experiment to its logical conlusion, then, when all of the liquid water disapperars, you should be left with twice as much hydrogen gast in one test tube as in the other because of the ratio or proportion of hydrogen to oxygen in the chemical formula for water or H2O. Did I help out or answer you question or just avoid it altogether?

[AntonioLao]

As a gas hydrogen is extremely reactive chemically, it reacts with the oxygen in the atmosphere and recreated water molecules again as witnessed by the Hinderburg disaster in May 6, 1937 http://www.infoplease.com/spot/hindenburg1.html