I was pretty good kid. My mom ws sick and my dad was barely keeping it together taking care of her and us. and the house mortgage and this job….
But! Waaaay back, waaay before the internet….. I used to get Popular Science magazine and read the ink off every page . There was an advertising section in the back (I think it was) called Science where all kinds of items were for sale. One place sold “100 Explosives and fireworks formulas” which I bought . It came in the mail and was a few pages of printed material in very small font. That told me how to do it but I needed supplies.
I told my parents I wanted to do an experiment I learned in school – how to make oxygen – and needed some adult to buy the chemicals. A friend of mine told his parent he was going to do an experiment and asked his his parent to buy the chemicals. When we got the stuff we both did the experiments as promised but only used about 1/10 of the materials. We then combined our remaining materials and supplies to make some truly spectacular things that, no doubt, showed up on some earthquake seismometer somewhere. (underground Russian testing?)
I became an engineer and my friend a nuclear physicist.